Here it is, and it’s shorter than you’d think. As I neared the end of mapping out the science and mechanisms of Shimanishi’s mineral solution, I was forced to spend a disturbing amount of time in the agronomy, soil biology, and hydrogeology literature.

Disturbing because — what the heck is an ICU doc doing studying agriculture?

Easy. That’s where the science and data on Shimanishi’s minerals lived. There was no medical literature to read. So I had no choice but to develop real working expertise in soil structure, soil biology, and agriculture to understand how plants, soil, microbes, and minerals interact, and how water connects all of them.

I hereby confer upon myself an AI-Assisted Internet Degree in Agronomy, Soil Biology, and Geohydrology.

I stole that line from myself. For years, whenever a patient turned up having read deeply enough to propose a better option than the one I’d landed on — rare, but it happened — I’d say: “Which Internet School of Medicine did you go to? I’m impressed.” They loved it.

As it turned out, it also had an agronomy department.

Anyway, that is the whole story of the agronomy charts. There was no plan. I went where the evidence was, and the evidence was in the dirt.

Now let me tell you what getting there actually took.

A Trail I Never Could Have Imagined

Here is what made this year unlike anything I’ve ever done, and I have devoted enormous stretches of my life to researching narrow questions in medicine. The evidence behind this particular mineral extract was everywhere except a medical journal, a textbook, or a database.

It wasn’t in journals or anything peer-reviewed. The vast majority came from two Japanese agronomy technical volumes I had to have translated (by AI, of course). The rest were institutional agricultural studies or reports from a handful of countries — Mexico, Korea, China — unpublished and held in company or institutional archives. Then a handful of commissioned studies from distributors of Themarox-derived products, saved in Word files, or even relayed to me in an email with a couple of soil test reports. Oh, and let’s not forget the three Soviet-era research institute documents, which I also had to have translated from Russian, whose sophisticated in vivo and human studies remain unpublished and, in one case, didn’t even list the authors. Then the “Holy Grail,” a single, peer-reviewed, journal-published study on the effects of Themarox on the antioxidant activity of buckwheat sprouts.

It was the most bizarre evidence base I’d ever encountered.

As much as I want to hand this to an AI and get a slick graphic back to show you, I won’t. So here is the bulleted list of what I actually studied this year:

• The early mineral pioneers — Weston Price, Elmer Heinrich, Linus Pauling.

• The mystics of water — Viktor Schauberger’s vortices and the primordial sea of René Quinton.

• Mineral springs and healing waters — their history, their importance, and their recurrence across essentially every tradition and culture on Earth.

• Origin-of-life science — Lane, Russell, Hansma and others; deep-sea hydrothermal vents and layered silicate structures.

• A century and a half of mineral lock-up in our soils and the falling mineral content of our food, traceable back to the Broadbalk experiment of the 1860s.

• How the essential minerals were identified in the 1930s — largely by feeding rats single-mineral-deficient diets to see whether they’d collapse into illness. If they didn’t collapse, or if we couldn’t measure the element at the time: non-essential. That’s the standard. The rest of the soil’s mineral inventory has been almost entirely ignored by modern science ever since.

• The deep evidence bases for the importance of boron, lithium, and copper in treating and preventing numerous human diseases, while exactly none of them are routinely tested for or recommended for supplementation, despite a near-universal inability for human populations to hit even the falsely low daily allowances.

• Heavy metals, which I learned to divide into “industrial” versus “essential” (half our essential elements are heavy metals), including a deep dive into the non-toxicity and ubiquity of aluminum in our food and water.

• Many weeks spent inside Gerald Pollack, Gilbert Ling, and Franz Hofmeister’s work, plus critically evaluating their dissenting water chemistry papers, which were the most scientifically dense material I have ever tried to navigate.

• Modern water treatment — its goals, what’s in our water, what never gets tested or removed, and how much is still contaminated, untested, and poorly mineralized when it comes out of the tap.

• The cost of empty water - the proliferation of desalination plants, RO systems, and the little-known financial and physiological consequences of drinking demineralized water.

• The geological inheritance of water:

  

• Total immersion into the state of the world’s water, above ground and below: how its quality and chemistry have been degraded by industry and agriculture over the last hundred years, how rapidly it is being extracted and how it is beginning to actually run out in specific places, and what those places are now doing to keep people alive — and how almost none of it registers in the world’s media, because it is dwarfed and buried inside the larger, obsessive climate change story.

What It Cost

Over what became almost exactly a year, I lost a not insignificant number of subscribers (especially paid) to Medical Musings. Some left because the direction and scope of my research no longer interested them. One wrote, memorably, “I am not that into water.” Fair enough.

Others left for worse reasons. When the research for The Blueprint of Life took me into a small, discrete set of ancient Hermetic texts, some recoiled, convinced I was delving into the occult and practicing dark arts or some nonsense. Nothing, and I mean nothing, could have been further from the truth. I was following evidence about minerals and water back into antiquity, and into fewer than a handful of densely cryptic texts. When that path continued past those texts and into Scripture, it brought some of them back to the fold. But not enough. Oh well.

It isn’t that I didn’t care that I was hemorrhaging paid readers. I simply didn’t have a choice. Writers write about what captivates them. Yes, I had departed from the hard-charging, enraged-dissident health establishment attacks, interspersed with transformative research on the efficacy of repurposed and “alternative” therapeutics for COVID, cancer, and post-COVID vaccine syndrome — the work I’d become known for. But it was still a search for health. Just across physical, ecological, and eventually spiritual realms instead of only the first one.

Why I Couldn’t Keep Fighting

What really happened is that I could no longer keep up the daily intensity of fighting, uncovering, and exposing the fraud and lies we all lived through in COVID. Not because that work stopped mattering; I just couldn’t sustain interest in it any longer. I felt I had reached as many as I could reach, and further efforts were simply validating and satisfying those who already knew rather than continuing to enlighten the unenlightened. Plus, so many were still doing it so well.

How long can one man scream about the toxicity and lethality of the Covid (and all) vaccines, the efficacy of the innumerable repurposed drugs suppressed and distorted by mainstream media, medical journals, public health agencies, and universities, the corrupting practices of Fauci and the pharmaceutical companies, the devastation of illness I see all around me, and the horror and the unfairness of all of it?

The work I put into the first four years of Medical Musings effectively turned me into an expert on Disinformation tactics. But teaching the public about disinformation all the time just… stopped exciting or inspiring me as it once did.

I started to feel like “Johnny One-Note,” plucking the same sound on the same instrument over and over. As I started to realize this, I also saw my admiration soar for friends who could sustain that intensity and focus — like Steve Kirsch, bless his heart. Steve is the quintessential dog with a bone. Five-plus years now of daily, indefatigable effort, first exposing the COVID vaccine catastrophe, then the century-long vaccine myth, and finally, proving to the world that autism is, in the end, simply vaccine-induced encephalopathy. The world needs more guys like Steve.

Once I exposed how deeply the COVID fraud ran through so many of our institutions, some really interesting people started finding me—a cadre who had been awake far longer than I had, some reaching out directly, others simply appearing in my circles. That is when my education moved past disinformation tactics and into considerably darker territory.

It began with a documentary, From JFK to 9/11: A Rich Man’s Trick, and what I learned afterward—that some of the most consequential events in modern history were false flags: Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin, 9/11, and more.

So the history books are lying too? I remember thinking.

From there it ran into the long history of secret societies — the Illuminati, the Masons, the Rothschilds — and into what people born into that kind of power, or handed it, appear to turn to once fame and money stop doing anything for them. Pedophilia. Trafficking. Sacrifice.

Eye-opening, mind-boggling, world-perspective-changing. But then my interest in that waned too, and fast. Too depressing, too predictable, and ultimately too powerless to do anything about. I wasn’t learning anything that would help me live a better life or be a better person. Wiser and savvier, maybe. But nothing to build a life around.

So I got bored and exhausted with it all. Tired of the lies, the fraud, the corruption, and frankly, tired of learning about the pure evil in the world.

That doesn’t mean I’ll never drop the gloves to fight evil and fraud and lies again. I still will when it’s needed — like the post on our legal win over California Attorney General Rob “Bastard” Bonta, or the piece I wrote with attorney Aaron Siri about the insane suppression and misrepresentation of the two Texan Mennonite girls who did NOT die of measles. But those are going to be the exception now, instead of the norm they were for years.

Yeesh. When I look back over the first 350 essays I wrote here — man, do they bang that drum, louder and more powerfully and more accurately over time. I understand that is what a lot of you came to like me for. I just don’t like me doing it all the time anymore.

So if you don’t want to stay, I get it. There’s not enough time in the day to read everybody, especially if other things interest you more.

What Saved Me

The real reason I couldn’t do it anymore is that I got saved. Not in the way you’re thinking; it was more like being intellectually saved. It started with Shimanishi’s extract: fifteen solitary years of labor, finished in 1977. Soon after encountering it, I began watching its various applications produce responses across biological kingdoms.

Then I came across Russian researchers describing rats hydrated with Themarox-treated-water as becoming more active, with shinier, healthier fur than the rats given ordinary water. Then I received testimonials from colleagues of patients who reported things like increased energy, improved vision, thicker hair, and faster-growing toenails on concentrated dosing protocols.

So I found myself pulled deeper and deeper into a single question: what is this? How does it work? Why does it work? And what else can it do?

The Book I Thought I Was Writing

My first impression was simple: it worked by supplying minerals that biology had become deficient in. So I wrote a book about the history, the science, and the importance of minerals in health and life. I called it From Volcanoes to Vitality. I put it up for sale. And I was done — three intense months, start to finish. That was mid-October of 2025.

I still feel guilty about keeping those early purchasers waiting so long. I’ve sent progress updates and sincere apologies along the way, but I suspect more than a few of them concluded they’d been grifted.

Last week is the week I proved them wrong. Sort of - the printer just reported a two-week delay, ugh.

But here’s what happened. Every time the manuscript was being readied for the printer, another door opened. Another insight arose. Another inexplicable piece or set of data appeared. And back down the rabbit hole I went, accompanied by my research collaborator and mineral expert, Matt Bakos.

That happened over and over for the next year.

The Work

Eighteen-plus-hour days at my desk, in between seeing patients. Obsessively. For a year.

No other stretch of work in this admittedly highly productive ICU doctor’s career ever approached it. Building the FLCCC with Paul in the early years of COVID, then fending off the global media attacks while losing our careers and reputations, none of it came close because this was more solitary, more focused, more intense, with only a single collaborator at my side. Matt was indispensable, central even, but he also did not write a word of the books.

The scope of the work nearly buried me. There were weeks I spent down inside the electron transport chain, studying the way iron and sulfur hand electrons down the line, while Matt kept showing me yet another process that depended on yet another mineral: every organ, every enzyme, every receptor I looked at seemed to lead back to the same handful of elements, and the deeper I went, the more granular and unmanageable it became. I had a large story I was trying to tell, and I kept getting stuck in the weeds of mechanisms I couldn’t simplify or skip, and the frustration was constant.

It was harder still because I was doing it in the cracks of a busy working life. Until the final month, I carried my patient schedule, and the two could not both have me. Every time the writing finally caught fire, it was time to see a patient, and every time I was with patients, the book was pulling at the back of my mind. I felt divided in a way I could not resolve, and I gave neither side the whole of my attention as often as I wanted to.

Why I Stopped Seeing Patients

I should be open about why I stopped, because the timing was no coincidence. Two things were happening at once, and they pulled in the same direction.

The first was that my inspiration for tending to patients, which had carried me for decades, was quietly running down — not into bitterness, and not into any failure of care, but into a kind of completion, as though that particular well had given what it had to give.

The second was harder to admit, and I know how it sounds. The pull toward this work — toward the minerals, the research, and the task of carrying what Shimanishi achieved out into the world — had stopped feeling like just another in a series of research rabbit holes I had gone down since opening my practice, and started feeling like something I was simply meant to do. I am wary of men who believe they are called to the world, yet I cannot describe what happened to me over these months in simpler terms.

The honest version is that I was finished, spiritually and intellectually, with one kind of work, and overtaken by another. For a while I tried to carry both. A man doing that does neither well. So I stopped.

My only regret is that I did not do it sooner.

*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about, your support is greatly appreciated.

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The Life Around It

Somewhere in the middle of all of it, I also started a company — which turned out to be a full-time education in everything that no one teaches a physician.

How much warehouse space you need, and how much inventory to put in it. Where to find bottling and labeling equipment. How to hire a warehouse manager. What the FTC, the EPA, and the FDA each require on a label — three different answers to the same question. How to argue with UPS and USPS about a broken package, and who eats the cost of a return.

And how to build a customer service department, which in our case was initially very easy — Lisa K.

However, I have to say that Matt and his wife Lisa (“Lisa B”) made all of it considerably less painful than it should have been.

We also lived out of suitcases for a good stretch. Even though I have only a small circle of friends here in Sarasota, and my only leisure is the occasional meal out, home dinner invitation, or a round of golf — err, half a round of golf; who has time for eighteen holes? — I felt I needed complete solitude and disengagement.

So, despite the irony of being Swedish and famously intolerant of cold, Lisa agreed to be snowed into a cabin in Montana with me for two months, pregnant and far from her friends and her routines, while I wrote eighteen hours a day and lost all sense of time.

The Wild Looking Back

One memory I will always keep is that the cabin came with a bag of deer feed and permission to use it.

I put some out the second day and watched them come, and that was that. It became the thing I did, and something I had never done in my life. Every time I looked up from the desk and saw them on the slope, I was out of the chair before I had decided to be — Lisa can confirm this, and found it considerably funnier than I did.

There were a dozen or more deer in the area, but two of them, a mother and I presume a daughter, came alone, and most often by far. I named them Margie and Bambi. They would stop eating and look up, and we would hold each other’s gaze for a while, and I have no scientific word for what passed between us.

Over the weeks I set the feed closer and closer to the cabin, until they were eating a few feet from where I stood, shivering on the back deck in my slippers. I had never been so close, for so long, to such majestic animals. The energetic connection was intense.

I would then come back in, regaling Lisa with the closeness I felt, the intimacy, the joy, the beauty. It was weird, a former two-pack-a-day chain-smoking, drug addicted, foul-mouthed Long Islander pulmonologist going on and on about the relationship he was forming with two deer in Montana.

Soon after, I started coming back in swearing, all upset because a different, more dominant pair were muscling in and driving Margie and Bambi away. So I stopped putting food out until they let Margie and Bambi come back alone. Which they did. Often. The whole time I was there.

I will never forget the sadness and longing for them that I felt in the days after I left back to… Florida.

At one point during that time I actually asked an AI why deer make people feel like that. It gave me a long and serious answer. I read the whole thing. The short version was that a deer offers nothing but presence. It is vulnerable and entirely wild, and when it stops and looks at you, the usual chatter falls away. For a moment, life itself seems to be looking back. Some people call that wonder. Some call it God.

I chuckle, thinking back to the fact that I spent much of that time buried in electron transport chains and mineral deficiencies, but what I remember most about Montana were those two deer.

And then, at the end of the year, our son Lazlo arrived — the one deadline in all of this that was never going to move.

The Crisis I Wasn’t Looking For

Somewhere towards the end of that self-assigned dissertation, I stumbled onto a largely man-made global food and water crisis that has little to do with climate change. It began subtly around the year 2000. It is now accelerating rapidly. And the world’s leading scientists and policymakers barely discuss it.

The crisis began slowly, and almost imperceptibly, driven by the progressive degradation of the world’s water quality and chemistry, a result of decades of NPK fertilizer being laid down over nearly the entire world’s farmland, compounded by reckless corporate industrial pollution over the same decades.

The massive 2.4% annual agricultural yield gains produced by the Green Revolution, which helped support an unprecedented rise in the human population, started to slow. And slow. As they slowed, for the first time in decades, food prices started to rise. Something they are doing faster and faster of late.

That crisis is underway and being documented in the agronomy literature.

But then I stumbled onto the upcoming water bankruptcy crisis, documented in the hydrology literature, which will soon compound the unfolding food crisis. Water shortages are both increasingly projected and popping up across the world, arriving faster and larger, with each region and aquifer opening up more rabbit holes for me, like the slow-moving car crash that is the Colorado River Basin’s Lake Mead and Powell, and how Saudi Arabia effectively ran out of groundwater so they started borrowing (effectively stealing) Arizona’s.

But the Indus Basin is the one that keeps me up at night. Indian Punjab grows a tenth of India’s rice on water it does not have, and 72 percent of its irrigated land now runs on tubewells. As the table drops, shallow wells go dry, so farmers drill deeper and fit stronger pumps—each round pulling harder on the same shrinking reserve. It is a race to the bottom with a literal bottom. India’s Central Ground Water Board projects that, at current extraction rates, Punjab will exhaust its usable groundwater in the upper 300 meters by roughly 2039.

That is within the working life of a farmer planting there today.

Why There Are Two Books On the Crisis and Not One

That crisis is what Earth’s Living Water builds toward and explores in depth. But then I realized something uncomfortable: a message that urgent, affecting that much of the planet, was never going to travel fast or far as a 715-page, 70-chapter, 200,000-word book in an unwieldy 7×10 inch format.

Hence, The Silent Aquifer. Short. Fast. Hard-hitting. Built to be read in a couple of sittings and handed to someone else. Same emergency. Different weapon.

The Strangest Turn of All

And then there was the side excursion, if I can even call it that, given that it produced an entire book.

While chasing the mineral and water trail backward, Matt kept pointing to unimaginably cryptic descriptions in certain ancient texts that he had encountered in his own twenty-year journey, which, once deciphered, depicted three things at once with striking precision: the steps by which Shimanishi’s extract is produced, the properties it holds, and the kind of man capable of producing it. Discovering a 500-year-old Hermetic text that described Shimanishi's character to a T really spooked me. I still haven’t gotten over that one.

I never could have imagined writing a book on those subjects. I stopped posting most of that work here, because I knew my readers couldn’t hold a thread that I myself could barely hold.

And then the search moved past the texts. And to God.

I want to be careful about how I say this, because it is the largest claim I have ever made in public and it deserves more than one sentence.

What I found is that those ancient texts appear to record knowledge of the hydrogeologic cycles that a growing number of modern scientists now believe birthed and regenerated life on Earth: aluminosilicate architectures visited by iron and sulfur — none of it possible without water.

Those cycles, and water’s central role in them, are pointed to sometimes literally and sometimes metaphorically across a number of ancient texts, and above all in Scripture — written by people who should have had no way of knowing any of it.

Which is what brought me to the Blueprint‘s ultimate conclusion. Knowledge like that could only have come from the Architect of the thing described. I suddenly saw clearly that the world we live in was designed and governed by a physical architecture of remarkable order and elegance—and by a moral architecture running alongside it. Most importantly, I came to the understanding that the more closely we live in accordance with both, the better off we all are, individually and communally.

I still can’t quite believe I just wrote that paragraph. I am aware of how it reads. I made the argument carefully and at length in the book precisely because it cannot be made carelessly and in brief, and if you want to fight me on it, fight me on the pages where I actually built it.

The Return

If you’re still with me and haven’t left thinking this man is evincing such delusions of grandeur that you can’t stomach another word (I get it), but there’s one more thing.

The whole journey, with all of its stops and starts and reversals and wrong turns, had also delivered a way out. I call it the Return: a feasible, viable path to averting the same catastrophe I’d spent the year diagnosing.

Three things make it plausible at scale. Shimanishi’s mineral solution is extracted from biotite, which makes up roughly seven percent of the Earth’s crust. It can be produced by an unpatented process. And it is catalytic, which is what matters most here: tiny amounts condition enormous volumes of water. Whatever else turns out to be true, this is not a scarce answer, and it is not a proprietary one.

Now, where I think it would actually matter.

Agriculture runs on two kinds of water. Green water is rain, held in the soil, feeding crops where they stand. Blue water is what we pump — rivers, reservoirs, and the aquifers we are steadily emptying. The crisis in my books is, at bottom, a blue water crisis: for fifty years we have compensated for green water’s underperformance by pumping harder, and the pumps will soon be running out.

Which is why the largest opportunity, and the one the evidence supports best, is raising yields on rain-fed land. If green water can be made to produce substantially more, the demand on blue water falls — and the world can grow what it needs without draining the aquifers beneath it. That, more than anything else, is what I mean by the Return.

The second is reclaiming wastewater, which matters most in the blue-water regions under the heaviest stress.

The third is bringing sodic and saline ground back into production — land already farmed to death, in either kind of region.

The fourth is the broadest and the least defined: better yields generally, higher nutrient density, more productive aquaculture. More food per acre, more nutrition per calorie, and perhaps less land under the plow to begin with.

I want to be honest that this is where my certainty ends. I do not know how far any of it goes. What I believe is that if this material’s potential were fully explored and properly validated, the uses for repairing, restoring, and preserving what we have left would be innumerable, especially when focused on and plotted by far greater minds than I have.

One Conclusion

One year. Thousands of hours. The end of a twenty-five-year medical career, and the abandonment of very nearly every social and living habit I had built my adult life around. All of it produced a single conclusion. Just one. Here it is.

The living water that has sustained this Earth since its beginning has been altered. Not yet depleted, although that will soon come, but altered in its chemistry, and faster than the planet’s own systems can answer. And the way back is a rock. Shimanishi’s mineral solution, and the biotite it is drawn from — a mineral so ordinary it lies under nearly everyone reading this — is a pathway to restoration. I would use the word salvation, while also acknowledging how insane it sounds when used quickly or loosely.

Because the problem underneath the Earth’s fields and aquifers is, at bottom, the degradation of water chemistry. And that is precisely what these minerals restore: binding and removing the thousands of chemicals humans have manufactured into that water, while returning to it the redox-balancing, ion-exchanging, and hydrating properties it needs to fully support the biology living on top of it.

A problem in water chemistry. Answered by rock.

Which is, in the end, the oldest arrangement on Earth.

What A Year

Publishing three books feels like reaching the first peak. It isn’t the summit — I have a feeling there are more of those out there than I can see from here. But this one feels good.

That’s the story. A year of eighteen-hour days, one collaborator, three books, a company, a lot of suitcases, a baby, a lot of lost subscribers, and a research trail I could not have envisioned, imagined, or come close to anticipating — even after devoting immense stretches of my life to researching medicine.

It was also the year I ended my medical career. I retired my patient panel, set down the bedside, and gave the hours to soil and water instead. I did not see that coming. I don’t regret it.

To those of you who stayed through a year in which I published in incoherent spurts, disappearing down one rabbit hole and prematurely reappearing from another: thank you. You paid for this year. It’s yours as much as mine.

To those who bought From Volcanoes to Vitality back in October of 2025 and waited: it eventually grew into three books. I hope that’s a fair trade.

And to the reader who left because he wasn’t that into water — no hard feelings. I understand completely. But let me tell you what I’d tell him.

There is no such thing as not being into water.

You are about sixty percent water. Seventy percent of all the fresh water humanity withdraws goes to growing what you ate today. It is the only subject I have ever worked on that has no out-group — nothing it doesn’t touch, nobody it doesn’t reach, no one who gets to sit this one out.

I previously spent four years writing about a fight that came down, in the end, to a handful of drugs and the people who buried them. That work mattered. It still does, and it is still true.

This is bigger. This is the ground and the water beneath the food that is beneath everyone.

I’m going to keep following it, and I’m going to keep reporting it here — the aquifer crisis almost no one is covering, the evidence base I’m still uncovering, and whatever the next collapsed theory ends up teaching me. I opened the lid on this story. I’m not closing it.

So if it matters to you, stay. And if you know someone who drinks from a well, or farms, or who has simply wondered what is actually in the glass in front of them — send them this.

Onward.

— Pierre

*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about, your support is greatly appreciated.

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Labor Day Sale:

The Stone and Water Series

You can purchase the book series, in whole or in part, from my website ( where all books are personally stamped with my hanko) or from Amazon.

**If you want to skip today’s post and go straight to our Labor Day sale, check out our new website at Aurmina.com (which, across its pages, tells a similar story to what I will tell today). Use code LABORDAY25 to get 25% off the 8oz and 32oz Aurmina bottles as well as our new Korea Ceramic Gravity Filter.

The other day I promised you the story of how an ICU doctor ended up topping the new release agronomy charts, a ranking I am somehow still clinging to—ELW is the #1 new release in Agronomy, and TSA is #1 in Agriculture and Food Policy:

That post is coming Monday. Today I want to address something else first: admitting to a particular kind of embarrassment that is available only to people who start a company before they finish their homework.

Ten months ago, I formed Aurmina (“golden mineral essence”) for drinking water and later Primora Bio for watering plants and irrigating gardens and greenhouses, after coming across a body of Japanese mineral chemistry and becoming convinced it was immensely important. Not sorta convinced, but fully convinced. I have only gotten that feeling a couple of other times in my career, when the potential of something you come across is obvious long before you can confidently explain it or fully understand all its nuances.

What really pulled me in was not a testimonial. It was Asao Shimanishi — an old-school pharmacist, not a marketer, who spent close to fifteen years trying to get minerals out of rock, a feat he achieved in 1977, and whose subsequent exploits and achievements stayed almost entirely unknown outside his home country, and even there his work was largely obscure.

But I figured others would be able to see the value in it that I had, so, with the help of the North American importer, Lisa and I started a company to sell a finished product made from his raw material, which Shimanishi called Themarox, or “Rock Extract.”

I also want to say how strange that decision was. I had never sold anything in my life. I had never wanted to. In a career in medicine, I had recommended treatments, argued for them, and occasionally gone to war over them — but there was never a transaction with my name on the other side of it, and I liked it that way. Selling is not in my nature, and I was genuinely hesitant.

What overrode the hesitancy was simple: I believed this mattered, and no one outside Japan was going to encounter it unless somebody put it in front of them. That somebody turned out to be me, which is not a sentence I ever expected to write.

In my defense, and in retrospect, the alternative would have been to sit on it for a year while I researched and wrote. However, I have to say that Aurmina helped support the immense amount of time I devoted, especially after retiring my patient panel, but I also want to acknowledge what that process must have looked like from your side of the screen, because I think some of you noticed.

You watched me effectively “rebrand” my own product a half-dozen times.

If that was confusing, it’s because it was confusing. It was confusing for me. I was doing my research in public and asking you to buy from me in the middle of it, which is not a normal way to run a business, and I don’t especially recommend it.

Thinking it was a health supplement (which it is not), I tried to find evidence for it impacting human health, but I had almost no human data to work from. Beyond Dr. Nojima’s book, what I had was agricultural and biological: field trials showing dramatic yield shifts, premium Brix scores, increased photosynthesis, antioxidant improvements, all written down in Japanese technical manuals which also included impacts on aquaculture: eels raised in Themarox-conditioned water growing to harvest in half the time at 30% higher stocking density while producing unusually high-grade meat, soils showing increases in microbial biomass, pest and disease pressure falling away, earthworms returning to treated fields.

One standout finding was a study showing up to 85% (average 50%) less pesticide uptake in treated plants when the soil received Themarox-treated water.

For the first time in my career, I was looking at something reported to act across nearly every layer of biology at once, with no precedent I could name. No vitamin, antibiotic, immune modulator, cytotoxin, or metabolic therapy I had studied operated on bifidobacteria, basil, eels, and soils simultaneously. The only analogy I could even vaguely think of was aspirin, since salicylic acid participates in signaling in plants, but even that broke down quickly. No one treats a microbe with aspirin.

To understand what this mineral extract was doing, I had to leave medicine and enter microbiology, plant nutrition, soil biology, hydrology, irrigation science, mineral chemistry, and eventually the physical chemistry of water. I had crossed into animal literature many times in my career, but I had never crossed into agriculture, soil biology, or water chemistry. At first it felt absurd, almost like a category error, until I saw that the borders between those fields exist only in universities and journals. They do not exist in Nature.

From Mineral Depletion to Geodynamic Conditioning

Every theory I built around these observations eventually failed somewhere. That failure became instructive. Each collapsed theory redirected me: away from missing nutrients, single pathways, and therapeutic mechanisms, toward the primordial properties of water on Earth.

Although I am the named author of the books, the arguments they contain emerged through close collaboration with Matt Bakos, now a close friend and colleague. Intellectually, he is its co-author and, in some respects, its senior author. Matt has been the sole importer of Shimanishi’s Themarox in North America for more than two decades and has studied them with a depth and persistence that borders on obsession. My equally obsessive interest in the mineral solution, along with my writing skills and ability to perform systematic research, produced the books, but Matt’s knowledge guided almost every step along the way.

The other unexpected catalyst was artificial intelligence. With it, I could access and integrate PhD-level knowledge across disciplines that rarely speak to one another, and that I had never studied. Incessant questioning with artificial intelligence transformed the scale and speed at which synthesis became possible. It let me traverse fields that normally remain isolated behind academic boundaries and assemble mechanistic models with a coherence that would have taken several degrees and many years to construct alone.

But it also taught me something unsettling: coherence is not proof.

More than once, I arrived at models that appeared complete, internally consistent, and strongly supported by literature, only to watch them fail under deeper challenges. AI could align papers, connect mechanisms, and produce explanatory symmetry so persuasive it became easy to mistake coherence for truth. Every prior version of the main book had evidence to back it up. Every version could be defended with references. Every version reached a conclusion. Yet each eventually collapsed because of an observation it could not explain or an assumption I later realized was wrong. A seventy-chapter manuscript does not enjoy being rebuilt five times. Neither, for the record, does the person writing it (nor the person who pre-ordered it last November, yeesh)

The mineral repletion theory came first: Themarox appeared to restore what a century of falling nutrient density had stripped from our food. That was the theory I was selling under, and why the label read ionic sulfated minerals, and later deep earth minerals. That collapsed when I calculated the concentrations of the 29 elements we measured in the solution—all were minute, far too small to supplement anything. So I moved to the rock itself. Biotite, or black mica, carries one of the most diverse mineral inventories in the Earth's crust (industry experts have said it can contain up to 80 elements), so perhaps the extract was restoring the ultra-trace and rare-earth elements that nutritional science had largely ignored and that modern soils and bodies had lost, thus “awakening a dormant physiology.” I called the theory behind it Mineral Spectrum Collapse and held onto it the longest. Clever, heavily referenced, yet it failed to explain what it needed to.

Then agriculture shifted the problem from mineral absence to mineral access, and I named the lithobiome — the microbial fraction that weathers minerals out of rock — and wondered whether Themarox was stimulating it. But animals have no lithobiome, and the effects crossed plants, microbes, animals, soils, water, and people at once. So I expanded it into Carbon–Mineral Collapse: disrupted microbial carbon flow impairing weathering, ion mobility, water chemistry. The messiest of them, and the quickest to die.

The problem was that each theory kept requiring another theory. The explanations grew more enticing, but less constrained. AI could find threads of supporting data for almost anything, and what first looked like explanatory power was, in fact, gaps papered over. Coherence is not proof.

They had all failed for the same reason: none of them went deep enough. That is when I realized that everything alive requires three things — water, minerals, and carbon — and I had spent four theories on the last two. Water I kept treating as the backdrop.

Then I started seeing it as the layer connecting every relationship I was studying: minerals and microbes, microbes and plants, plants and animals, cells and tissues, organelles and cytoplasm, etc. And beneath all of those, every biological process: the signaling, the gradients, the exchanges, the transport, the electron and energy transfers. All of it happens in aqueous solutions.

It was only when I began studying how water and minerals become a functional biological medium that I exited the labyrinth.

The Structured Water Pivot

But I still didn’t get it right at first. Once I decided that the water that Shimanishi’s minerals produced was unique, my next theory, if I am being honest, was a structured-water theory, largely because a UV absorption test of Themarox-treated water revealed Pollack's characteristic peak of 270 nm, which he claimed was diagnostic of his Exclusion Zone (EZ) water, and which many began to call “structured water.”

But I eventually set that down for two reasons, after spending a difficult and immense amount of time within Gerald Pollack’s work. The first is that Pollack’s EZ water, with the same absorption peak — the fourth phase — contains no minerals, and minerals were the entire subject I was studying. The second is that “structured water” had become a swamp, both scientifically and commercially, undefined and overclaimed, and language that is compromised cannot carry a serious theory even if something real lies beneath it.

But I still couldn’t let the concept go. I shifted to “coherent” water, thinking I had found a related property in the work of Franz Hofmeister, who in the 1880s described how different ions change the ordering of water molecules and of the proteins dissolved in it, e.g., cosmotropic and chaotropic ions. Since Themarox contained one of, if not the strongest, cosmotropic mineral profiles I could find, at one point, our website said “cosmotropic mineral solution” or something like that. But eventually, I decided that coherent and cosmotropic water was just structured water under a more careful name. So it died the same death.

Rock, Water, and Time

What finally survived was “geodynamic” water, after discovering that geodynamics is an actual scientific discipline. Geodynamic processes produce water whose redox, ion-exchange, and hydration properties have been shaped by prolonged interaction with Earth’s active geological processes. I started to see that water is not a solvent that minerals happen to dissolve into, but the downstream expression of the planet’s own processes: the product of a long geological history.

Which is what Aurmina makes. It is what Shimanishi called Rock-Water — a phrase I had been repeating for months before I was finally able to understand it literally. Water brought back into contact with the geochemical history of rock.

And beneath all the dysfunction I had been chasing across plants, animals, soils, and people, I finally saw what they shared: a broken inheritance between rock, water, and life. Somewhere in there, the thing I’d been selling for ten months resolved into focus, and it turned out I had been describing it wrong the entire time.

It is not a supplement.

It is a water purifier and a water conditioner.

That’s it. That’s the whole correction, and it took me ten months and three books to arrive at a sentence I could have fit on a business card. But there was also something on the back of the card, which took me longer to see: it works by the same chemistry the Earth has used to make water since the beginning.

Nature Always Cleaned Its Own Water. We Just Gave It Too Much To Clean.

For nearly all of history, the Earth purified its own water — and what it had to purify was mostly organic. Rotting leaves, dead animals, microbes, sediment, the ordinary waste of living things. Stone, minerals, and time broke it down, bound it, and settled it out, while keeping the water biologically alive. Think of the springs of antiquity — waters people traveled to, wrote about, and built cities around, sought out for refreshment and for healing. Some cold and clear, some steaming out of the ground. What the waters had in common was that rock that had made them what they were- different rocks, different waters, but all were rock-conditioned water.

That was simply what water was.

I look at pictures like these with new eyes now:

Earth’s system still works. It is just that it was never built for what we started handing it.

There are now hundreds of thousands of chemicals in commerce — pesticides, solvents, pharmaceuticals, industrial byproducts — almost none of which existed a century ago, and nearly all of which end up in water. And there are eight billion of us, up from a tiny fraction of that two centuries ago, concentrating our waste into the same rivers, lakes and aquifers nature once kept clean for far fewer of us.

One major argument of my book (s) is that the world’s water quality has been degrading, not only in the aquifers but in surface waters too, and that this change — largely driven by the Green Revolution and modern industry — amounts to what I’ve termed a Geohydrological Shift. I then argue that this shift is driving annual agricultural yield gains below what is needed to feed the human population, threatening our very survival in the lifetime of those reading this post. Some of us, anyway.

But those are not the only forces changing our water. I also went deep into modern water treatment: what its goals are, what its goals are not, and what goals it can never achieve. Knowing those limitations, many people, particularly in wellness circles, have gone looking for purity, and what they found was reverse osmosis. RO is what’s under everyone’s sink now.

RO works by force

RO pushes water through a membrane at pressure and strips out essentially everything, contaminants and mineral content alike. That is the whole design. It does not distinguish between what you want gone and what you want kept, because it can’t.

It also means that the water it delivers is not neutral.

I hate being the one to tell you this, because I sell an alternative and you have every reason to hear that as marketing. So let me hand you the least excitable source available. Twenty years ago, after years of desalination plants and RO systems being used around the world to produce drinking water, the World Health Organization published a chapter titled Health Risks from Drinking Demineralized Water, and it is not equivocal.

Water below roughly 100 mg/L of total dissolved solids (TDS) increased diuresis by about twenty percent in human volunteers, raised serum sodium, and lowered serum potassium. It doesn’t just fail to deliver minerals; it pulls them. Cook with it, and you lose up to sixty percent of the magnesium and calcium in the food itself, and more of some trace elements — 66% of copper, 70% of manganese, 86% of cobalt. It is aggressive enough to dissolve metal out of the plumbing it passes through, and the chapter documents three infants lead-poisoned that way, one at 42 µg/dL.

WHO’s recommended minimums are 10 mg/L of magnesium and 20 mg/L of calcium, with optimums well above both. Reverse osmosis delivers a tiny fraction and distillation none. And municipal water often barely clears the bar itself:

There is also a fifty-year epidemiological literature associating soft, low-magnesium water with cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. I know: correlation, not causation. The WHO says so itself, and so must I.

“Fine — I’ll just put the minerals back”

That is the first thing anyone says when they hear this, and it is a reasonable thing to say. That is why remineralization cartridges exist and why they sell, although from the many discussions I have had with my patients about their RO systems, surprisingly few have either installed or maintained a remineralization filter.

Either way, I looked at how well they actually work and found that only two companies publish reasonably complete data on the water their filters produce. Here is that data:

I was shocked. What they add is a short list of minerals at concentrations that don't approach the optimums that the WHO recommends, let alone what water that has moved through rock actually carries—and the two companies willing to publish are, presumably, the two with the least to hide.

What It Costs the Homeowner and the Aquifer

RO recovers only 10–25% of the water it filters, which means three to nine glasses go down the drain for every glass you drink. The EPA’s own figure for a point-of-use system is about 5,320 gallons discarded a year to deliver roughly 940.

That is a strange thing to have discovered while writing a book about the world’s aquifers being depleted faster than they can recharge.

And it is expensive: $300 to $585 a year for a typical under-sink system, once you count the membrane, the filters, and the water on your utility bill. It needs energy. So you pay for the privilege, twice — once at the utility and once at the aquifer.

Clean Shouldn’t Have to Mean Empty

So empty is not a neutral condition. It is a deficit, and the body pays for the deficit.

With the rarest of exceptions, every water humans have drunk throughout our species’ history has been in contact with rock. A distinct geological mineral composition was the default condition of water on Earth.

Clean shouldn’t have to mean empty. That’s the argument, and I think it’s right.

A “Geological Shortcut”

Here is the part that took me three books to see.

Nature’s chemistry works better than the membrane does. But it is slow, too slow for the modern load. Historically, the Earth had weeks, seasons, sometimes years to do this work, but it has never had to keep pace with the flood of novel compounds and the amount of human refuse we now pour in faster than it can break down.

What Shimanishi did (I believe, without intending to) was take Nature’s purification process out of rock and make it portable. Themarox concentrates the same mineral chemistry the Earth uses to clean water, but it does so in twenty-four to forty-eight hours, in a container, on your counter.

That’s the whole idea. It is a geological shortcut — a way to make water the way the Earth makes it, without waiting on the Earth’s schedule.

The Price of Purity

Ultimately, anything done to treat your drinking water has to achieve two goals. The first goal is to remove as much of the modern burden as you can. The second is to leave behind the mineral composition that supports its biological properties.

The problem is that every current approach trades some or all of one for some or all of the other. None does both.

Reverse osmosis wins the first and completely loses the second. It strips contaminants more effectively than the mineral approach does, and I’ll admit that plainly: on removal alone, RO takes out more. But it takes out everything else along with them, and hands back water the body then has to repair at its own expense.

Municipal treatment doesn’t come close to achieving either one. Start with the first goal, because legal isn’t clean. Water can pass every limit on the books and still carry a long list of things you’d rather not drink. Many federal limits haven’t been revisited in a generation while the number of chemicals in circulation keeps climbing. Standards are shaped largely by what utilities can afford to remove. And whole categories — hundreds of individual contaminants — simply aren’t on the list anyone tests or treats for. What is never measured never counts as a problem. As for the second goal, you saw the numbers above: municipal water often barely clears WHO’s minimums, and frequently doesn’t.

Which brings me to the third option, and why I spent a year on it.

Themarox doesn’t work to a legal limit. It takes the burden down to where the lab can barely find it. Testing was done on three separate finished products, all identical 10% dilutions of Themarox, and you can find the full inventory of lab reports for each on the Open Science Framework: Purinize, Adya Clarity, and Aurmina. In summary:

• 245+ contaminants removed or greatly reduced

• 147 driven below the limit of detection entirely

• 100 more reduced, most by better than ninety percent

• All four trihalomethanes to non-detect

• All 36 pharmaceuticals tested were reduced >99.5%; glyphosate 98.9%; arsenic 99.1%; lead 98.7%

• Eight estrogens reduced 74–97%, measured in parts per trillion

That’s the purifier part. That’s the claim. That’s the whole claim, and it’s the one I can stand behind in a room full of people who want to argue with me.

And then there’s the geochemical conditioning part. Removing the contaminants is only half of what happens in that pitcher or container. Dozens of minerals, aside from the ones that did the removing, stay in solution, and they change what the water is at a fundamental level. Redox balance is restored — the water’s electron potential returns to where naturally mineralized water has always sat. And the capacity for ion exchange returns, so the water can trade ions with the surfaces it meets rather than stripping them.

Reverse osmosis and distillation produce the opposite: water that is demineralized, chemically aggressive, and with nothing left to trade. Clean by one measure, impoverished by another. Themarox doesn’t just help filter your water clean; it also conditions it — the same chemistry stone and water run underground, compressed into a teaspoon.

What Aurmina is Not

One more thing I should remind you, because I’ve just spent a long section on WHO’s mineral minimums: Aurmina is not a mineral supplement. It contains some calcium and magnesium, but nowhere near the levels WHO recommends, and at the dose you use it will not appreciably change the calcium or magnesium concentration of your tap water in either direction.

So if you are starting from RO or distilled water, you still want a remineralization filter, and Aurmina is not a substitute for one. If you are starting from tap water, you keep what your tap water already has.

I am curious as to what the optimal major and trace mineral content of drinking water is, as no-one has yet researched it. It is near the top of what I want to study next.

What I’m Not Claiming

This is the part where a person in my position usually gets carried away, so let me be precise.

It would be false to tell you there is no evidence in human health. There is. There are randomized, albeit unpublished, trials run by Soviet-era research institutes, a long series of clinical observations from my own practice, and a metal excretion study we hope to see published shortly. Some of you will encounter all of it in Earth’s Living Water, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

What I will not do is offer any of it to you as a reason to buy a Themarox-derived product.

The reasons aren’t bureaucratic. The trials are unpublished, the clinical observations are uncontrolled — I saw what I saw, in patients I was treating several ways at once, with no comparison group and every opportunity to fool myself. And nearly all of it involves Themarox at concentrated doses, which is neither the product I sell nor the way I am telling you to use it. Two teaspoons of a diluted product in a gallon of drinking water is a different proposition from what produced those observations.

So: evidence, yes. Proof, no. And evidence about a chemistry is not evidence about this bottle, at this dilution, for that purpose. I am not claiming, and you should not infer, that Aurmina does anything for your health. It cleans and conditions your water, and it leaves the minerals in. That’s it.

The new website

This is the first version of Aurmina’s website that is accurate on the front page and across all the pages. A few pages of them may be worth your time, although today’s post already crystallized them well.

If you want the coagulation, redox, and ion-exchange steps laid out properly, that’s the Science page.

If you want the more detailed comparison to RO, that’s the Compare To R.O. page — the argument above, laid out side by side, including annual cost.

How to use it: How To Use

What to filter it through and how to filter it: Filtration

Shimanishi’s story: The Whole Story

Labor Day Sale

Use code LABORDAY25 to get 25% off 8oz and 32oz Aurmina bottles or our new Korea Ceramic Filter.

One 32 oz. bottle is a year’s supply for one person, or about six months for a couple. The 3-pack and 6-pack are already discounted 22% and 33% off, and the sale doesn’t stack on top of that — if you’re buying in volume, those are still the better deal.

If you’ve been reading me and you’ve come away worried about your water — and I’ve given you plenty of reason to be — this is what I’d put in your hands. It took me ten months and three books to say that clearly. Thank you for your patience while I was figuring it all out.

*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about, your support is greatly appreciated.

Subscribe now

If the above piqued your interest and you want to learn more from the rabbit holes I have lived in over the past year, you can purchase the book series, in whole or in part, from my website here ( where all books are personally stamped with my hanko) or from Amazon here.

In my defense, I was only supposed to write one book on minerals.

I was finishing my book The War on Chlorine Dioxide last August when a colleague named Kacper Postawski (now on Substack), who, in 2016, made Quantum Leap, the first major documentary on chlorine dioxide, began telling me about a unique aqueous mineral solution he had encountered, extracted from volcanic rock. He thought I might be interested in studying it, given my work on chlorine dioxide.

He also attached a number of health claims to it, which I quickly filed under the category of yet another promising, unstudied therapeutic—a category I was somewhat, though not completely, getting tired of.

I mean, heck, at that point, my partner Scott Marsland and I at the Leading Edge Clinic had already spent almost four years going down at least 30 research rabbit holes trying to identify therapies for our chronic Covid and Covid vaccine-destroyed patients: hyperbaric oxygen therapy, stem cells and exosomes, IV methylene blue, near-infrared saunas, pulsed electromagnetic field therapy mats, brain retraining, peptides, vagal nerve stimulators, qEEG neurofeedback, ozone therapy, EBOO, IVIG, plasmapheresis, ultraviolet blood irradiation, DMSO, chlorine dioxide, plus the pill boxes and/or IV drips filled with varying flavors of vitamins and nutraceuticals.

The list was dizzying. They all worked, to one degree or another, but only a few were consistent, durable, and affordable enough—all at once—to become foundational to our clinic’s approach or, more specifically, to lead me to write about them here on Medical Musings (and I have only written about a few; Scott has written way more on his Substack).

Basically, I found that each one fell under the maxim: “Everything works in someone, but nothing works in everyone.” I suppose you could say that about every therapeutic, but along that continuum, I was drawn to—and constantly trying to identify—the therapies that came much closer to working in everyone while remaining safe, inexpensive, and widely available. The really expensive, occasionally more potent clinic-based treatments were often hit-or-miss propositions. When you recommended one, and it hit, great; when it was a miss, the patient paid for it, both literally and metaphorically.

Kacper told me just enough about the aqueous mineral solution to make me curious—and no more than he needed to, I think, because he understood that the curiosity the mineral story would trigger would carry me the rest of the way.

At the time, I was also deep into the early chapters of a book on daily low-dose sublingual ketamine—a treatment that regrows nerves, rebuilds synapses, and reverses diseases that neurology and psychiatry have never been able to reverse, yet almost nobody in medicine is using correctly. That book was going well, but the minerals pulled harder.

What began as a question about one unusual extract from a Japanese volcanic rock became, eleven months later, three books—a trilogy built around a single subject: water, minerals, and the cyclic architecture that connects them. Towards the end, the investigation led me to Japan and to a dinner hosted in my honor by a Nobel laureate. I still can’t believe I just wrote that sentence.

That evening is not only the finest moment of my chaotic life since Covid; it is one of the finest moments of my entire life. His gift of a calligraphy he had made for me in Japanese characters of his favorite phrase, “There are no chance encounters. Everything happens for a reason,” is one I will cherish forever, and if you have read The Blueprint of Life, you will know it carried more meaning than he will ever know. Anyway, I cannot wait to share the story of the afternoon and evening that my wife Lisa and I spent with Professor Omura and his team. Now that I am finally emerging from underneath these books, it will come soon, I promise.

Into Freer Air

Above all, I am seriously giddy about something I have never gotten to experience as a book author: these books are the first in my career that I do not expect to be targeted by the censors.

My first book, The War on Ivermectin, was not picked up by a single library or book store (“we don’t carry those kinds of books”), and only attracted a few scattered hit-job reviews in Pharma-funded industry rags like MedPage Today, with the subtitle “Infuriating to see misinformation mongers being taken seriously”:

My second, The War on Chlorine Dioxide, I knew not to even bother listing on Amazon. Senator Ron Johnson, however, did manage to earn a hit piece from the book, simply because he wrote the blurb on the cover, which I thought was an awesome one: “A gripping tale of corruption and courage that will open eyes and prompt serious questions.” Fun fact: I have sent Ron three of my books, and each time, he read them within a day or two of receipt, and then called me to discuss them. Beyond impressive.

For that kindness, he was repaid with this:

Of course, Ron didn’t “claim” anything, but don’t let the truth get in the way, Ms. Megan O’Matz. My co-writer then wrote two hilarious Substack posts on the ordeal: the first titled “Pre-Written Narratives and Premature Outrage: ProPublica’s Plan to Review Our Upcoming Book,” and the follow-up, “ProPublica’s Chlorine Dioxide Panic, Explained.”

That ordeal was kinda fun—for us, anyway. Probably less so for Ron.

And if you haven’t yet subscribed to Jenna’s Side (get it?), remedy that. She writes the funniest and hardest-hitting near-daily commentary on politics and current events anywhere. If you need a laugh in your day while being kept fully apprised of the folly of the world we live in, that’s the Substack to read.

Anyway, now, after two books devoted to suppressed medical therapies, I cannot adequately describe how strange, liberating, and genuinely joyful it feels to release three books about minerals and water and to expect that, this time, the argument will be about the ideas and the evidence rather than whether the books should be allowed to exist. I am enormously proud of these books, thrilled that they are finally entering the world, and frankly, delighted by the prospect that people might actually be permitted to discover and discuss them without first passing through the usual machinery of censorship, suppression, and reputational attack.

Most importantly for today’s post, know that, right near the end, as the final book was being readied for the printer, some data came to me that transformed its penultimate chapter.

First, let me tell you about the books. Then I will share that chapter with you.

The Stone and Water Series

The Stone and Water Series explores the hidden architecture that sustains life on Earth: the exchange between stone, water, and minerals that living systems have depended on since they began. It follows that architecture across geology, hydrology, soil science, origin-of-life research, agriculture, medicine, and history. It began with a single volcanic mineral extract and widened to the long scientific history of stone and water, the oldest questions about how life began, and ultimately, to the planet’s most urgent crisis.

A note on timing for the books below. Amazon will have a copy to you in roughly two weeks. Ordering directly from me arrives in three weeks, but every copy I sell is signed and stamped with my hanko, the Japanese personal seal I had carved after Professor Satoshi Ōmura prompted me.

Earth’s Living Water: Its History, Its Ruin, and the Way Back is the complete investigation and authoritative reference text, over 700 pages comprising 70 chapters, over 200,000 words, and including over 650 citations (i.e., an encyclopedia). It traces the mineral-charged water beneath the living world through its whole arc: how that water was understood across centuries, how modern science came to overlook it, how a hundred years of agriculture, industry, and modern water treatment practices have degraded it, and how it might be restored. Fully documented and broad in scope, it is the definitive work at the foundation of the series. Available on my website or from Amazon.

The Silent Aquifer: Humanity’s Accelerating Food and Water Crisis is about the global emergency that I stumbled across during the research and writing of Earth’s Living Water, but presented at its sharpest. Focused, fast, and evidence-driven, it uncovers a synchronized planetary change in the chemistry of the water beneath the world’s farmland, beginning around the turn of the century, a change I named The Geohydrological Shift. Beginning with the Green Revolution and compounded by the world's industrial activity, this shift is quietly moving civilization toward being unable to feed and water itself, while the world’s alarm stays fixed on carbon and climate. It is a warning in the tradition of the great environmental reckonings, and, unlike most of them, it carries a practical, evidence-based map of the way back. For readers of Silent Spring, Cadillac Desert, and Dirt. Available on my website or from Amazon.

The Blueprint of Life: Earth’s Hidden Architecture Powering Life and Health looks downward, at what that same foundation reveals about life itself. It moves through origin-of-life research and the symbolic language of ancient texts, sets out the Rock-Water Circuit Theory and what I believe is the first internally consistent cosmological interpretation of the Emerald Tablet. It then asks whether nature's ordering architecture is better explained by accident, necessity, or design. Part scientific investigation, part history of science and theology, and part memoir, it traces one physician’s path from intensive care and the controversies of COVID-19 to a reexamination of order, creation, and God. Available on my website or from Amazon.

The first book spans the history, science, and the modern state of the relationship between minerals, water, and life on Earth. The second focuses on diagnosing and treating a crisis that almost no one is watching. The third explores why life is possible at all. Together they follow the same hidden system, from the first spark of life in ancient water to the aquifer failing beneath the world’s agriculture fields.

These books do not ask you to choose between science and faith, ancient wisdom and modern knowledge, or observation and meaning. They ask only that you follow the evidence wherever it leads.

And the ketamine book — The Quiet Revolution in Neurology and Psychiatry: How Daily Low-Dose Ketamine Can Cure Diseases Medicine Never Has — is the one sitting in the drawer and the one still growing out of our Leading Edge Clinic experiences. It is coming. When it does, you will be the first to know. But I gotta take a break first, or my wife and newborn baby son Lazlo will never forgive me (photos of baby Lazlo at end of post :).

I now present the penultimate chapter of The Silent Aquifer. Reluctant as I am to invite comparison with Rachel Carson and her landmark Silent Spring, I raise it only to mark a difference. Where Carson sounded an alarm, The Silent Aquifer tries to go a step further — detailing this century's equally quiet crisis while offering what I believe is a distinct, viable path toward a solution, or at minimum, a deferral of its worst consequences.

* Excerpted from The Silent Aquifer:

Chapter 11 — The Arithmetic of 2050, 2040, and Now

How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly. —Ernest Hemingway

Climate change arrived with a single galvanizing number, a single villain, and a global calendar of summits and reports to keep it in the news. I have my own doubts about how settled or scientifically accurate that story is, but they are not this book’s business, so I will set them aside. My concern is separate from that issue, and far more urgent. Climate has become the perspective through which the whole world now reads every environmental problem, and as a result, the crisis in this book has gone almost unmentioned, not because it is small, but because it is not, at its root, a climate problem at all. The most pressing threat to the world’s food and water is being buried inside a story that barely explains it.

A Word I Had Never Heard

The epigraph at the head of this chapter, Hemingway’s two ways of going bankrupt, gradually and then suddenly, I chose months before I understood how literal it would prove. I meant it as a figure for tempo: the way a slow loss hides itself until the instant it can no longer be hidden. I did not yet know that the people who study this most closely had seized on the same word and meant it without metaphor at all.

I found that out within days of sending this book to the printer. My collaborator Matt Bakos, scanning a feed he follows, caught a thread he didn’t recognize, clicked it, and opened onto a stack of recent releases I had somehow never seen, from the FAO and the United Nations, carrying a phrase I had not encountered once in eleven months of writing about this exact subject: water bankruptcy.^{540 541} Not a columnist’s metaphor but a formal term, newly defined in a scientific paper and taken up in a UN report because the old words—stress, scarcity, crisis—had stopped being big enough for what the numbers were doing.⁴¹⁴

When the people who watch a system most closely have to borrow the language of insolvency to name it, the system is not just in trouble. It has failed.

I read those releases in something close to disbelief, not only at what they said, but because what they said was the most alarming data I had seen; the aquifers and the salt and the sinking ground all worse and faster than the figures I’d been working from. What stopped me was that I had come within days of printing a book on this subject without knowing the term for it existed. I hear “climate change” or “global warming” most mornings, in headlines I never go looking for. “Water bankruptcy” had to be handed to me by a colleague, by accident, at the eleventh hour. It is the argument of this chapter, proved at my own expense: a crisis so quiet it nearly slipped past the person writing the book about it.

The chapter title still carries the mark of that reckoning. For the months I spent on it, I called these pages simply “The Arithmetic of 2050.” The newest figures made that date sound like optimism; the failures I had filed under midcentury were already arriving, and some, like the crest of the Ogallala aquifer, were already behind us. So the chapter title changed to the current one. The arithmetic never agreed to wait for 2050; it had already become the arithmetic of now. The epigraph, though, I kept exactly as I chose it, because I could not improve it further. But I had invoked bankruptcy as an image while the field, as it turns out, had settled on it as a fact.

Before asking why this happened, it is worth considering a simple measure of public attention. Altmetric scores measure the attention a scientific paper receives across news media, government reports, policy documents, blogs, and social media, rather than simply counting academic citations. Nine months after it was issued, the FAO water report has barely made a sound.

Figure 46.1. The near absence of public attention to the world’s rapidly developing water bankruptcy.

A Number I Once Sat On Top Of

I have measured that gap in attention from the inside. Altmetric is not a measure of whether a paper is right. It measures how many people are looking.

In 2021, I was the lead author of a review on the evidence for ivermectin in COVID-19, and my paper reached an Altmetric score of 6,300 within weeks, close to what the 2024 Climate Report is at now. But it kept climbing. Its final score is 15,356, placing it sixty-sixth among the almost 28 million research outputs that Altmetric has ever tracked—one of the hundred most-discussed pieces of research, in any field, in the service’s history.

I watched my number climb in real time, and then I watched what happened to the paper beneath it. It was recast from urgent to dangerous; the journal appended an expression of concern after a barrage of pharma-shill critiques were sent to me by the editor, which I refused to devote the immense amount of fruitless time it would have required to respond to. This led to the work being buried under an organized campaign of disinformation that I documented at length in The War on Ivermectin. I am not relitigating any of that here. I raise it for one reason. I have stood at the very top of this scale, and I know exactly what it registers. It registers attention. Nothing else.

Which is what makes the other end of the scale worth looking at.

On the seventeenth of December, 2025, the FAO released its most recent, and the most devastating, global water report in history.⁴¹⁴ It generated five posts on X. Over the following month, that number rose to fifteen, and then stopped. Since its release, not one independent news outlet has covered it. Only one policy document has relied on it, and that was published by the FAO itself. Only five papers have cited it; one of which was focused on optimizing irrigation for cherry tomatoes. I guess this book will be the 6th.

A single review of a repurposed generic drug drew almost 600 times more attention in its first fortnight than the world’s food and water supply crisis has drawn in almost a year.

News Cycles and the Climate Frame

One reason the coming crisis remains quiet is that it lacks the elements a story needs to command attention in modern news cycles. Climate change, by contrast, has all of them. It offers not one alarming number but several: carbon in the air, the rising sea, and above all the temperature, which television has learned to render as spectacle, with the map of the country washed in deepening reds, the hurricane wheeling across the ocean as a vast white spiral, the same furious palette returning night after night because it works. It has a villain, a variety of metrics and images, and, most of all, fear.

And much of the coverage the food and water crisis does get is filed under climate—“climate-driven drought,” “climate threats to harvests”—so that the story survives but loses its own identity. That does the reader a real disservice, because much of this crisis is not climate-driven at all. Aquifer depletion is fundamentally an extraction-rate problem: we are pumping groundwater faster than it can be replenished, and that would be true even on a perfectly stable planet. Soil degradation, nutrient mismanagement, and irrigation policy would be problems with or without a changing climate. The water crisis and the climate crisis are entangled, but they are not the same crisis, and treating one as a subplot of the other has let the quieter one grow in the dark.

There is also the problem of speed. A hurricane makes landfall in an afternoon; a wildfire crowns a ridge in minutes; a heat record breaks in a single blistering week: each one perfectly fit for a news cycle. Meanwhile, an aquifer falling half a meter a year, or a soil losing its fertility over decades, might generate a serious news article once a year, and not always on the front page. Human attention, and the media built to hold it, is tuned to events, not to gradual baselines, and a catastrophe with no single dramatic moment is chronically under-covered, for the same reason topsoil loss and antibiotic resistance are. A crisis can be enormous and still move slowly enough that most people do not pay attention to it.

The clearest proof is the industry the whole world is currently watching. Artificial intelligence is scrutinized more closely than almost any technology in history, and when people worry about what it consumes, they worry mostly about electricity—the power-hungry data center, the strained grid, the plants firing back up to feed it. It is also among the thirstiest industries ever built, planting much of that thirst directly over aquifers that are already failing, as the last chapter described; and that half of the story arrives, when it arrives at all, as the subordinate clause.

If the water can be sorted into silence there, with the facts in plain view, it can be sorted into silence anywhere. And it has been, quietly, beneath the world’s food for twenty-five years. I know that silence from the inside—it is the one that nearly swallowed this book, the one I opened this chapter with.

Before diving into the individual numbers, it is worth stepping back and looking at the larger picture. The studies listed in the figure on the next page come from different disciplines and different institutions, yet they point in the same direction. Crop yields are slowing, water demand is rising, freshwater resources are under increasing strain, water quality is deteriorating, and even the international organizations tracking these trends have concluded that the traditional language of “scarcity” no longer captures what is unfolding. Read separately, each study is concerning. Read together, they describe a single converging crisis.

(Note for the figure: MAF= million acre-feet)

The Food Gap

Let’s start with food. Projections of the food required by 2050 vary sharply with the baseline, the unit being measured, and the assumptions built into the model. One influential trend analysis projected that global demand for crops could rise by 100 to 110 percent between 2005 and 2050 as population and income increased.⁵⁰¹ The FAO’s 2012 analysis was more moderate, projecting that total agricultural production in 2050 would be about 60 percent above its 2005–2007 level.⁵⁴¹ A later meta-analysis of fifty-seven global projections placed the likely increase in total food demand between 35 and 56 percent from 2010 to 2050,⁵⁴³ while the World Resources Institute’s widely quoted 56-percent figure refers specifically to the gap between crop calories produced in 2010 and those projected to be required in 2050.⁵⁴⁴ I have no quarrel with the lower numbers.

But let’s start with the highest number, since that’s easiest, and then move to the lower numbers. Doubling the food supply by 2050 would require yields to rise about 2.4 percent a year.⁵⁰⁰ That figure has a date on it. Scientists set it in 2013 and, in effect, fired a starting gun: from that year on, the world had to achieve 2.4 percent gains in yield each year to cross the line by 2050.

It has not.

Chapter 43 gave the rates measured when the starting gun was fired: 1.6, 1.0, 0.9, and 1.3 percent gains a year for maize, rice, wheat, and soybean. Every one falls short of the mark.⁵⁰⁰ Carried to 2050, they deliver something like 67, 42, 38, and 55 percent — not the 100 percent the doubling projections call for.

Now consider that the numbers above were from 2008. To understand where we are now, I went back to the raw United Nations yield figures they used and applied the same method to data from 2024, the most recent year on record, for the four crops that supply close to two-thirds of the calories humanity eats.

Figure 46.3. Method Footnote: 2024 updated world average yields for maize, rice, wheat, and soybean from FAOSTAT, as compiled by Our World in Data, fit to a log-linear trend over 1989–2008 and 2009–2024.

Now let’s set the demand at its lowest plausible level and ask whether current yield increases can meet it. Even the gentlest projections, the ones asking for barely half as much food, again, still need the major staples to keep gaining better than a percent a year, every year, without pause.

Yet, three of the four major crops have slowed. Maize dropped by more than 40 percent, from about a 1.8 percent annual rise to 1.0 percent. Soybeans slowed from 1.3 to 1.1. And rice, the grain that feeds more people directly than any other, fell by 37 percent from 1.0 percent a year to 0.63 percent, less than half of what even the most modest 2050 estimate requires. Only wheat has risen, from 1.0 to 1.35 percent. One staple out of four is gaining ground. The other three are giving it back.

Return to the starting gun. It fired in 2013, and thirteen years on, the pace has drifted the wrong way on three of the four staples. In a race against a deadline, falling short compounds: the gap widens with every season the runner fails to close it. Line the rates against the target, and the doubling is not within sight, and neither, on three of these crops, is even the most optimistic target.

The doubling narrative has been contested by researchers who argue that hunger reflects access, poverty, distribution, waste, and the diversion of crops to livestock and fuel as much as an absolute shortage of production.⁵⁴⁵ I agree that about a fifth of the food available to people is wasted, about a third of the world’s cereals are fed to animals, and a rising share is burned as fuel rather than eaten.^{546 547} But that argument rests on multiple failed assumptions. The first is that food waste will somehow be recovered, but no data support that. The share of food lost between harvest and market has not fallen since the world began tracking it in 2015; it has drifted upward.⁵⁴⁸ Meat demand is projected to keep climbing rather than level off, and the grain diverted to biofuels is rising rather than shrinking.⁵⁴⁷

Every argument the optimists make is moving the wrong way. And beneath all of them sits the biggest assumption of all: that food is a single global pool, so hunger is only a delivery problem. Grow the surplus where you can, ship it to where you cannot, and no one goes without. It sounds reasonable, which is why the coming shortfall is so easy not to be alarmed about.

Two facts shatter that argument. The first is that we already grow enough to feed everyone alive, yet hundreds of millions still go hungry because food does not reach the poor, the remote, or the politically inconvenient. If today’s abundance has not reached them, tomorrow’s smaller harvest will not either.

The second is the one this whole book has been building toward. Shipping surplus assumes there will always be a surplus somewhere to ship. But surplus exists only where the water still works, and the water is now failing in exactly those places, for the same reasons it failed everywhere else. The great breadbaskets are not exempt. The Ogallala beneath the American plains, the aquifers beneath the North China Plain and the Punjab: the chemistry has changed, and the volume is falling. The first is already in the yield numbers. The second is the hammer still coming down. The models miss this because they treat water, and the chemistry it carries, as a fixed backdrop that will keep doing its part. This book has spent its chapters showing it will not.

When Ray and his colleagues last mapped it, using 2008 data, yields had stopped improving across somewhere between 24 to 39 percent of the harvested area for the four great staples.⁴⁹⁷ Almost twenty years later, that map has never been redrawn. The most recent global study of the same ground, published in 2024, still runs on data ending in 2010, and it finds the pressure has only built: on roughly 84 percent of the world’s rice land and 56 percent of its wheat land, yields now sit close to their attainable ceiling, the narrowing zone from which Ray’s stalled cropland was drawn.⁵⁴⁹ No one has measured, with data from the years since, how much of that ceiling-bound land has already gone flat. But the direction is not in question. The rate at which rice yields have climbed has fallen by more than a third since that decade, on the crop with the least room left to grow.

The Number to Watch Is the Price

Everyone watches the hunger count, and by that count things are improving — three straight years of decline — with about 673 million people, roughly 8.2 percent of the world, still short of food in 2024.³⁸⁶ But the hunger count is the wrong number to watch. Hunger moves late, propped up by reserves opening, aid arriving, and families trading down to cheaper, thinner food, all of which can hold the official number flat while a household’s diet quietly gets worse. It is also a once-a-year survey published well after the fact.

The number that moves first is the price. The world grows food with little to spare, stocks are thin, and people have to eat whatever it costs, so when the world grows even slightly less than it needs, the shelves do not empty. Instead, prices rise sharply because a small shortfall pushes against demand that will not bend. Price is also what turns a shortage into hunger: the food does not vanish from the market; the poorest are simply priced off the shelf before they are ever counted as hungry. You can already see the two numbers starting to split apart. The cost of a healthy diet has climbed year after year since around 2000, and about 2.69 billion people, a third of humanity, now cannot afford one, even as the hunger count slips.³⁸⁶ The world’s flagship hunger report now turns on that very figure, a sign that the agencies built to count the hungry have begun to watch the price instead.

The “Canary in the Field” chapter showed that this has already happened: after decades of dropping prices, prices began rising around the turn of the century, in the same window as the dip in yield gains. I will admit that sharper jumps in prices come from shocks like wars, droughts, and spikes in oil prices that drive fertilizer and freight costs, but those pass. What does not pass is the slower rise beneath them, the plain cost of coaxing a ton of food from tired ground and degraded water. When each acre yields a little less, the farmer spends more to grow the same crop, and that cost lands in the price. A slow erosion of yields, the kind this book lays at the door of the water chemistry and the soil, would not arrive a mass famine. It would arrive first as food that costs a little more every year, and water chemistry is one of the forces lifting that price, the one variable no one is watching.

The Wells Still Draw

Before water-supply accounting begins, one fact about timing needs to be considered. The yield slowdown just laid out isn’t from the water running out. It has been occurring while the water is still here. Across most of the world’s irrigated cropland, the wells still draw, and the fields still drink, and the harvest is already slowing. If depletion were the only mechanism to decrease yields, the only slowdown would be ahead of us, on the day when the wells fail. That day has not yet come, but the slowdown has been going on for twenty-five years. The blow doing the damage now is not the quantity of water but the slow alteration of the water still present — its chemistry, not its absence.

The depletion analysis that follows describes a second blow, separate from the first. The first is already on the field. The second, when it arrives, will not land on a healthy system that can absorb it. It will land on a system already weakened by the quiet one.

The Water Gap

Now set the water next to the food, because they are connected. Irrigation for agriculture accounts for roughly 70 percent of global freshwater withdrawals. Yet rising food production does not translate into an equal rise in irrigation.⁴⁴³ In the FAO’s projections, agricultural output would grow about 60 percent between 2005 and 2050, while modeled irrigation withdrawals would rise only about 11 percent, from roughly 2,620 to 2,906 cubic kilometers a year.⁵⁴¹ The gap assumes the added agricultural output would come from higher yields on land already in production, but the water figure credits irrigation with becoming more efficient than it is today.

But even that modest global rise would fall unevenly, placing the greatest demand on regions where water is already scarce and aquifers are already falling. In some of those regions, the future the projection warns of has already arrived.

The measure is straightforward: what a region withdraws each year, set against what its rain, rivers and aquifers can renew — minus what has to stay in place for those rivers to survive. Below 25 percent, the FAO calls a region unstressed. Above 75 percent, it is in high stress. Above 100 percent, it is no longer living on what returns each year; it is spending reserves that took millennia to fill.

By the FAO’s 2022 accounting, North Africa’s withdrawals had reached about 121 percent, drawing down ancient groundwater to cover the gap, while Southern Asia stood near 77 percent and Central Asia near 70 percent.⁵⁴² The 2050 demand curve is not a forecast in those places. It is the meter reading.

An American reader may be tempted to file those numbers under other people’s problems. The national accounting invites it: the United States as a whole sits comfortably inside the FAO’s unstressed band.

That average is one of the most misleading numbers in this book. A country does not eat its average. It eats what grows in particular places, watered by particular aquifers, and those keep their own meters. The Ogallala is indifferent to how much rain falls on Michigan.

When researchers modeled the year each High Plains state would drain its groundwater fastest — peak depletion, the last year of maximum water — the dates were not ahead of us. Texas crested in 1999. New Mexico in 2002. Kansas in 2010. Oklahoma in 2012. Colorado in 2023.

** Part of the mission of The Silent Aquifer — and part, only part of Medical Musings going forward — is to help the scientists behind that devastating FAO report, along with the many researchers whose work they drew on, actually get their message heard. Because according to Altmetric, no one — and I mean no one — is listening. Please help support that effort:

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Day Zero Events

The deadlines in this chapter generally, and arbitrarily, focus on 2050, largely because several influential papers in the field used that target for projections starting twenty years ago. But several cities have already arrived there.

The phrase is Day Zero—the day a city stops delivering water to people’s homes, and people are then forced to fetch it. Cape Town created the term in 2018, and what is usually misunderstood is that Day Zero is not actually a date. It is a water supply threshold: when thirteen and a half percent of combined dam storage remains, it would force the city to shut the reticulation and send four million people to roughly two hundred collection points. The projected threshold was avoided from April to June, and was finally suspended in late June. But the city got there only by cutting consumption close to sixty percent, from something over eleven hundred million liters a day to about five hundred.

Others have followed. Chennai’s four reservoirs were down to eighteen million cubic feet at the end of June 2019, in basins built to hold more than eleven billion — a sixth of one percent.^551b São Paulo literally went beneath the bottom. The pipes that draw from the Cantareira reservoirs sit well above the reservoir floor; thus, the water below them had never been counted as part of the city’s supply, because there was no way to get it out. In 2014, the utility installed pumps and took it — twice.^551c Through that year and the next, households across the city found the taps weak or dry at night while the state maintained that no rationing was underway.

But the more important thing about Day Zero is how a city avoids it. Cape Town’s dams are above seventy-five percent again. That is not the same as the city having recovered.

The city asked its residents to conserve, and they did — close to sixty percent. Selling less water collapsed the utility’s revenue, and the city made that revenue back from the people who had the least of it. Universal free basic water, the allocation that exists so that being poor does not mean being thirsty, was withdrawn. The lowest tariff bracket rose six hundred percent in a single month.⁵⁵¹ Devices that throttle a household’s flow to a trickle once its quota is spent were installed by the thousands, and sixty-four percent of them went into poor communities.⁵⁵² The wealthiest tenth of the city was using roughly half of Cape Town’s water throughout, and absorbed almost none of the enforcement.⁵⁵³ Shocker.

The city was saved by the households that used the least, and the bill was sent to them.

What ended in Cape Town was the deadline. The rationing became permanent, moved off the front page, and was redistributed onto the people least able to argue with it.

I searched the scientific literature for an inventory of Day Zero events and found only one: the same 2023 paper cited above, whose caption concedes that its cities were assembled “as reported from several media outlets” and whose sources for that figure are the BBC, Reuters, and the Guardian.⁵⁵³ The one count in circulation—more than eighty cities—comes from a study measuring something else entirely. So the category exists at the discretion of coverage.

Two researchers who studied the Cape Town campaign concluded that Day Zero was “a purposefully designed narrative in political communication,” and that its “unfeasibly precise prediction of water ‘running out’… obscured scientific uncertainties.”

Worse, Cape Town, which named the term and is the only city people think of when hearing it, never actually reached Day Zero because storage bottomed at 21.2 percent against a 13.5 percent threshold, the date moved four times, and the reticulation was never shut.

Then I discovered that Bogotá cut its taps on a rotating schedule for three hundred and sixty-six days, Curitiba for six hundred and forty-nine, and Monterrey’s main reservoir ran dry, yet none of the three appears on anyone’s list, because no list exists. The event is defined by whether a camera arrived.

Figure 46.4. Global food demand projections for 2050 compared with our current trajectory and groundwater dependence.

Looking at either trend by itself reveals a serious problem. Look at them together, and they are something worse, because they are not independent; they multiply. We must grow far more food, on yields climbing too slowly or not at all, using more water, at the exact moment the water is degrading and running short. As the previous chapter detailing the Geohydrological Shift showed, we will also have to do so with different, more hostile water chemistry. The food crisis and the water crisis are not two problems. This book argues they are two consequences of one disturbance: the quality of the water beneath the food.

Aquifer Depletion Dates by Region

Numbers like these stay abstract until they have a place and a date attached. Here are a few, and they are not far off. One thing to keep in mind as you read them: an aquifer almost never runs to literal zero. A region’s wells fail when the water becomes too deep, too costly, or too salty to lift economically; so the crisis arrives not as a sudden empty tap but as abandoned fields and hollowed-out rural economies, quietly, one farm at a time. “Depletion,” in what follows, often means that economic wall rather than a dry hole in the rock.

Consider the Indian Punjab, one of the subcontinent’s breadbaskets, which grows a tenth of India’s rice on water it lacks. Punjab now depends on tubewells for roughly 72 percent of its irrigated area, with canals supplying most of the remainder.⁵⁵⁴ And the tubewell is why the decline feeds on itself. As the water table falls at those rates, year after year, the shallow tubewells go dry, so farmers drill deeper ones and fit stronger pumps to chase the water down. Each round of deeper wells pulls harder on the same shrinking reserve. It is a race to the bottom with a literal bottom: in time, the water sits too deep to reach affordably, or it is simply gone.

In the Central Ground Water Board’s 2020 assessment, 117 of the state’s 150 groundwater-assessment blocks—78 percent—were classified as over-exploited, meaning that extraction exceeded the annually extractable resource.^{555 556}

The most alarming projection is from a widely reported CGWB assessment finding that, if extraction continued at the prevailing rate, Punjab could exhaust its usable groundwater resources within the upper 300 meters by approximately 2039.⁵⁵⁶ The 300-meter figure was treated as a practical limit because groundwater at greater depths may be poorer in quality and prohibitively expensive for many farmers to extract.

That is within the working life of a farmer planting there today.

It is not one story but several, staggered across the plains. “Peak depletion” is the year an aquifer is drained fastest, the top of the pumping curve, the groundwater version of peak oil. After that year, the rate of loss begins to fall. That can sound like relief, but it is the opposite. The rate falls because the water is running out: as pumping thins the saturated layer, wells yield less, some run dry, and land drops out of irrigation, so exhaustion itself forces extraction down. Peak depletion is the last year of maximum water, the moment a place crosses from draining hard into a decline it cannot pump its way out of.

A 2016 modeling study reconstructed and/or projected peak depletion rates occurring in Texas in 1999, New Mexico in 2002, Kansas in 2010, Oklahoma in 2012, and Colorado in 2023, while Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wyoming were not projected to reach peak depletion before 2110.⁵⁵⁷ The Colorado date should therefore be understood as a model projection made in 2016, not as a subsequently verified observation.⁵⁵⁸ The deepest losses are concentrated in the central and southern aquifer, where decades of pumping have removed much of the accessible saturated thickness. In much of it, recharge replaces only a small fraction of what is pumped, so even if extraction stopped tomorrow, a full refill would take centuries.

The scale of it shows in two Kansas numbers. Close to a third of the High Plains groundwater there has already been pumped, and at the pace of recent years about seventy percent of it would be gone within fifty years—with the region’s farm output, which lags the pumping peak, projected to crest around 2040 and slide after that. The wells do not fail together. They fail county by county, on the schedule the water sets.^{559 560}

These findings and projections repeat across the world’s most important farmland. The Indus Basin, feeding a region whose crops sustain well over a billion people, is among the most stressed aquifer systems on Earth.⁵⁶¹ In the North China Plain, which grows a large share of China’s grain, the deep aquifer has fallen so far that the country built a continental-scale project to pipe water north: sustaining the breadbasket by moving water across the country rather than by any natural recharge.⁵⁶³ And across much of the Middle East and North Africa, the water being pumped is fossil water, laid down in wetter ages tens of thousands of years ago, that effectively does not refill at all.⁵⁶⁴

^{The Folly of the Relationship Between Saudi Arabia… and Arizona}

Every region in the preceding section is a clock still running. Now let’s look at one that has already stopped, because it shows two things at once: what running out looks like, and what a nation does the morning after.

Saudi Arabia used ancient, nonrenewable fossil groundwater to pursue wheat self-sufficiency, then began phasing out domestic wheat production in 2008 as concern grew over depletion of its water reserves; the program ended in 2016.⁵⁶⁵ By the time that program ended, experts estimated that about four-fifths of the country’s fossil water was already gone, spent in little more than a single generation of pumping.⁵⁶⁵ The same water demand later reappeared overseas. Fondomonte, a subsidiary of the Saudi dairy company Almarai, has used groundwater in western Arizona to grow alfalfa for livestock in Saudi Arabia, and in 2026 it remained a major groundwater user in the state.^{566 567} It is an unusually literal example of “virtual water”: instead of pumping scarce water at home, a company draws water abroad, embeds it in a crop, and ships the crop back.

That maneuver is worth looking at closely, because it is the first move any country makes when its own water fails, and because it cannot work for very many of them. It depends on somewhere else having water to spare and a government willing to let it leave. Saudi Arabia could take it because it went first, while most of the world’s aquifers were still full. The country that runs dry last will find every well already spoken for. This is the wall this chapter keeps arriving at: you cannot redistribute your way out of a shortage that is draining the very places the surplus would have come from. So Saudi Arabia is the first country to reach 2050 ahead of schedule. It found a way out. The countries that arrive after it will not.

Figure 46.5. Regional trajectories of major groundwater-dependent agricultural systems

Linear Yield Gains, Falling Percentages

Return to the silence, because the numbers now explain it. When people imagine a yield failure, they imagine a collapse, a harvest that does not come in. A slope that is only flattening does not alarm anyone.

The deeper reason the shortfall stays invisible is in how a harvest gets reported. Yields grow in a straight line — the same tonnage added each year — and that tonnage reliably sets new records, so headlines announce progress while the growth rate quietly falls. Nobody reads about declining rates. Everybody reads about record crops. The mathematics launders a crisis into a success story.

What the numbers actually show is simpler: wheat is adding grain at roughly a third of the annual rate needed to reach 2050. Rice at about forty percent. Maize and soybean closer to two-thirds, but still short. These are not optical illusions — the target was set in tonnes to begin with. We are hitting between a third and two-thirds of it, depending on the crop, and the gap grows every year we celebrate the record without noticing what it falls short of.

Recall from Figure 46.3 above that annual rice yield increases were the lowest of the four staples, now rising at only 0.63% a year. Rice is the thirstiest staple we grow, the one crop that spends much of its life standing in water. If the disturbance beneath modern agriculture is a slow degradation of the water itself, this is the fingerprint it would leave: the crop that relies most on water is growing the least. One pattern does not prove a mechanism. But this is the pattern the mechanism predicts, and it is the one the data shows.

Where the arithmetic might have forced its way into view, a set of buffers has absorbed it. A short harvest in one country is covered by exports from another. Governments draw down reserves. Farmers irrigate harder, spread more fertilizer, and break new ground. Each move keeps the shelves stocked, and for fifty years each one kept the price falling too, while quietly billing the difference to something that never appears on the receipt: the aquifer and the soil. Then the price stopped falling. It is the one place the buffers have visibly failed, and it failed first, before a single major aquifer had given out. The buffers do not solve the yield problem. They convert it into a slower, larger debt, drawn against the very resources this book has spent its chapters watching drain away. That is Hemingway’s bankruptcy in a sentence. Gradually, while the reserves hold. Then suddenly, when they do not. The price is where the “gradually” ran out.

China’s Food Security Law

If this danger were imaginary, the government with the most people to feed and the least room to fail would be the calmest of all. China is the opposite. Its population has stopped growing and begun to fall, by more than three million in 2025 alone, yet its cropland is limited, its northern aquifers are stressed, and it leans on imported soybeans and feed grain to hold the balance.⁵⁶⁹ On its own farmland, the plateau is already evident: by 2010, yields had stopped improving across half of China’s rice area and more than half of its maize.⁵⁷⁰ Beijing’s own word for its food balance is “tight,” and it expects it to stay that way for a long time.⁵⁷¹ So China has done what an alarmed state does. In 2024, it brought a national food security law into force. It draws legal redlines around farmland that cannot be paved, it is building high-standard cropland across hundreds of grain counties, and it has ordered its farms to add more than fifty million tonnes of annual production capacity by 2030.⁵⁷² The country standing closest to the arithmetic is treating it as an emergency, while the countries with the most slack treat it as no story at all.

In other areas, pressures are building the hardest where the buffers are weakest. Across a set of representative sub-Saharan countries, cereal demand is projected to roughly triple by 2050, and even if yield gains double the historical rate and much of the gap to the ceiling is closed, they would still need more land, more water, and more imports.⁵⁷³ Where the wealthy world sees a smooth global average, a farmer in the Sahel meets the arithmetic head on.

Not a Climate Story

So is this just climate change by another name? The answer is no. Whatever one concludes about the climate debate, the forces driving this crisis are not carbon in the air. They are water pumped from the ground faster than it returns, soil worked past its power to recover, minerals stripped from the medium that feeds the crop, and a water chemistry turning against the plants it once sustained. None of these depend on the climate argument to be true, and none of them would relent if that argument were settled tomorrow. Our obsession with climate has obscured this crisis by reducing every environmental problem to a single problem with a single cause.

There is a term for what I am describing, and I did not have it when I wrote this chapter.

Hydrologists have begun using anthropogenic drought to name a deficit that is produced, or greatly deepened, by what people do to a water system rather than by what the sky withholds. The category is meant to contain the things that do not fit inside a rainfall record: over-allocation, groundwater drawn down past recovery, land cleared and evapotranspiration disrupted, irrigation expanded, rivers diverted, surface storage lost. Together these can turn a dry spell that a basin once absorbed into a shortage that does not lift when the rain returns.⁵⁷⁴

The framework’s own authors are careful about how far it can be pushed, and I want to be equally careful. This is a reframing, not a measurement. They say so: the feedbacks between climate, withdrawal and land use compound in ways that make the drivers difficult to disaggregate quantitatively. The concept establishes that a drought’s severity is partly authored by decisions. It does not yet let anyone say, in most places, by how much.

That limit does not weaken this chapter’s argument. It is the argument. A crisis that can be photographed and dated gets a name; one that has to be separated out of a tangle of human decisions does not, and so it goes on being filed under weather.

And it is the same paper that gave this chapter its title. Water bankruptcy is defined there as the state in which water shortage exists even during wet years.⁵⁷⁴ The term I found days before the printer turns out to have been sitting inside the literature on drought caused by us.

The convergence of slow changes in our water, soil, yields, and chemistry has many causes and a single victim. It has no stage, and no number dramatic enough to fit on a placard. But every one of those changes, the pumping that empties the aquifer, the soil worked past recovery, the minerals stripped from the medium, the chemistry souring against the crop, comes to rest in the end on the same place: the water beneath it all, the medium the whole living system depends on. A crisis with many causes still has one name, and that name is on the cover of this book. The loudest dangers are not always the largest. This one has kept its silence because it is arithmetic, not an event, adding a little more to the tally each year until the debt those small sums have run finally comes due.

The Books Do Not Balance

These failures will not arrive all at once. Punjab will run down on one clock, the southern Ogallala on another, the fossil aquifers on a timer that will never reset. That fragmentation is precisely why the crisis remains difficult to see. Each decline appears local, each shortage temporary, each emergency isolated. Yet together they describe a single global pattern.

Set aside every contested projection and every debate over dates. What remains is remarkably simple. Across much of the world’s most productive farmland, yield growth is slowing or has begun to flatten even as demand continues to rise. At the same time, an increasing share of global food production depends on groundwater being withdrawn faster than nature can replace it. We are balancing today’s harvest against tomorrow’s water. A meaningful portion of the world’s apparent agricultural success is being financed by drawing down a finite natural inheritance. The books do not balance.

This is why the central argument of this chapter is not about 2050. The trajectory is already visible. Some aquifers have passed their peak. Others are declining within the working lifetime of farmers planting crops today. The instruments that revealed these changes were not built just so researchers could write frightening papers; they were built to measure reality. Their collective message is neither political nor speculative. They are simply saying that the margin between the water we depend upon and the water we are replacing is steadily narrowing.

I do not raise this to despair. I raise it because the only thing that can convince a world to try to bend a curve is to look straight at where it goes if you do not.

I then lay out a path toward bending those curves in the remainder of the book. Cliffhanger, I know.

You can purchase the series, in whole or in part, from my website here or from Amazon here.

Fun fact before I close: for a brief stretch after release, Earth’s Living Water was the #1 New Release in Agronomy, and The Silent Aquifer was the #1 New Release in Regenerative Agriculture.

Who woulda thunk it? An ICU doctor. Topping the agronomy charts. I’ll explain how that happened in my next post and it’s a stranger story than you think.

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From the Shameless Commercialism Department:

I write about minerals and water. Midway through the writing of these books, I started a company that sells an aqueous mineral solution of the two.

Aurmina is the provable, superior, and less expensive alternative to reverse osmosis for purifying drinking water. It binds and removes over 245 modern contaminants—and unlike RO, it balances minerals, builds hydration shells, restores redox activity, and increases ion-exchange capacity in your water—the exact opposite of stripping it empty and calling it clean. Labor Day sale starts today; use code LABORDAY25.

Primora Bio relies on the same mineral chemistry for the water that supports the things we grow and love: plants, gardens, fish, and pets.

And finally… a few pictures of baby Lazlo, or “Latzee” as we call him; the first is a passport photo attempt:

PK: I know you’ve been buried, so thanks for making the time. A lot of people need to hear this. Also, congrats on the Tucker Carlson plug. He called you “kind of a genius and a very decent person” and put your work in front of his massive audience. When I first started helping you a few years ago because I loved the newsletter, I had a sense you’d add something real. I just never expected it to go this far. How has it been?

AMD: That was very kind of Tucker. Before I saw that, I always wondered if he read this newsletter, because after I put together an extensive case for the evidence that SSRI antidepressants can contribute to mass shootings (something I did because it seemed like the one viable way to draw real attention to the broader, more common debilitating harms of SSRIs), it went viral, and he then aired a Fox segment on the topic that to the best of my knowledge was the first time major media had seriously touched the issue in decades. Afterward, the Overton window opened; the serious dangers of SSRIs stopped being taboo, and people also began discussing the far more frequent side effects that have ruined a lot of lives. Now federal policies are being enacted that are causing the psychiatric profession to begrudgingly move toward (safely) deprescribing SSRIs. I appreciate the endorsement, but I appreciate even more that he was willing to take the risk of raising the subject when it still carried real cost.

PK: Tell me about that Obi-Wan line we talked about the other night, “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.”

AMD: When you told me that, it jumped out at me because it seemed to touch on the mental rigidity I see everywhere, which has always bothered me and, I feel, is the root cause of many problems that come up. I looked up the context behind the quote that I put into the tweet you saw, and found out that what it essentially means is that as people’s minds harden and they “go to the dark side,” they begin seeing everything in black and white, so that anyone who is not fully with them must be against them. ED: Obi-Wan said the line to a student he deeply cared about who had begun taking Obi-Wan’s disagreements with his actions as proof Obi-Wan was his enemy.

On a broad level, this is the societal shift which typically precedes democracies hardening into totalitarian states, like with Bush’s post 9/11 “You’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists.” Yet, on an individual level, it frequently sends people like Obi-Wan’s student down a chain of distorted, dichotomous logic that makes them rigidly adopt positions at odds with the values they originally held. Interestingly, the statement itself is an absolute, which is useful because it shows how easily even people who criticize black-and-white thinking can slip into it.

PK: I see that constantly, and also have to admit that in some areas, although I believe there are not many of them, I too can slip into that posture as well. Where does it come from?

AMD: What I found the most interesting about the quote was learning that it touched upon why the Sith (ED: “evil Jedi”) worldview was so tempting in the first place. The appeal was never simply power for its own sake; it was that power and domination offered a way to eliminate uncertainty, which is something many people, including Obi-Wan’s student, simply cannot tolerate.

PK: Have you researched that aspect of cognition?

AMD: Actually, I did and found a substantial body of research on “intolerance of uncertainty” that describes essentially the same pattern and shows it frequently underlies emotional disorders like anxiety. The rigidity we notice is usually the visible surface; underneath it, there is often an intolerance of uncertainty that feeds the drive for control and is, in turn, reinforced by it—until the whole stance hardens into dogmatism.

PK: Man, you just hit on something I thought about for years running an ICU as Director and Chief of 17 intensivists. When I compared my practice to my colleagues, I felt strongly that what separated us in the ICU wasn't intelligence, knowledge, or experience; it was our tolerance of risk, but also what I started to call "comfort with the unknowable," or, as you put it, comfort with uncertainty. That's because we were constantly in situations where you had to make decisions based on incomplete or unobtainable data.

AMD: To that point, I’ve always been drawn to puzzles predicated on incomplete or unknown information because of the type of branching and expansive thinking that is required for them. That’s also why I try to write the way older texts often did—using careful ambiguity to create a kind of holographic depth you can’t attain otherwise.

PK: That tracks with how I’ve always approached incomplete information clinically. I remember one day a nurse pointed out to me that I ordered far fewer tests and consults than any of my partners, and she was right. It sent me down a detailed 18-month analysis using multiple databases, which let me detail the actions of every intensivist on my service and compare how much each one tested and treated against how their patients actually did, using observed versus expected ICU mortality derived from ICU APACHE scores. The bottom line: no correlation. Heavy testers searching for certainty landed all over the performance (err, survival) rankings, and I was the outlier — second from the top in patient survival while ordering by far the fewest tests. (I explore why in the full analysis here.)

AMD: That parallels my longstanding experience that the best integrative physicians I’ve worked with ordered far less labs than their colleagues.

But the deeper point is yours: the testing reflected each doctor's discomfort with uncertainty, and like any other human characteristic, fell along a bell curve, with very few able to tolerate uncertainty very much (except moi, of course, sorry not sorry).

AMD: It also describes doctors' dogmatic behavior and their tendency to distill complex topics into simple declarations that ignore much of what’s going on with each patient. On a deeper level, though, I think it’s the same dynamic underlying many of the ways our society has gone astray, as our entire mode of science and medicine revolves around dominating and rigidly defining nature rather than working in harmony with it, which effectively is an exercise in futility to force certainty onto a world that can never yield any more than the illusion of it from within an artificial model.

PK: That’s one of my favorite points. Everything runs on protocols and algorithms, but every patient is different. Each week that I would take over the ICU, I would give my team which consisted of 1 fellow 6 residents, 2 students, a rundown of what to expect from me, and what I told them was: “This week, when I ask you a question, if you don’t know the answer, you can get out of it by saying, “It depends.” The problem is you will then have to tell me what variables it depends on, why that variable matters, and what the consequences are of doing or not doing that intervention in that situation. They actually loved doing that exercise at the bedside TBH. Man, you bring back memories of my teaching days.

AMD: That’s wonderful; I would have enjoyed rounding on your team when I was in training. One of the things that has always alienated me is that I find certainty “boring,” and a big part of what drew me into becoming a doctor was knowing the sheer complexity of the body guaranteed I was signing up for a lifetime of uncertainty, challenges, and discoveries with each patient. So in my style of medicine, while there are certain principles I prioritize for restoring health, how I approach patients, even those with similar ailments, often varies immensely.

PK: How do you reconcile that with you having to send the same email to hundreds of thousands of people at once?

AMD: It’s one of the biggest challenges I face, as nothing exists that works for everyone or that can be applied and dosed in the same way. At the same time, I have the opportunity to help a lot of people, so I need to do something, and I’ve hence adopted the position of minimally discussing the therapies I use that are too variable while simultaneously trying to provide as pertinent detail as possible for the ones that are less specific to the individual.

PK: Like DMSO?

AMD: Yes—although it’s not the only one. The huge upside to DMSO is that it works for a very wide range of conditions, and while some knowledge and creativity is needed for its applications to address certain diseases, since it spreads through the body, even if it’s applied in a suboptimal way, it often still works. More importantly, it costs almost nothing so if it doesn’t work, it’s no real loss, and its toxicity is minimal, so while reactions do happen, most are either manageable or easily avoidable. However, even with that and my exhaustive efforts to supply the correct information on how to use it, people have issues from using it incorrectly, it still doesn’t work for everyone (e.g., readers have reported a 40-50% tinnitus improvement, 80-85% with pain, and likely over 90% with burns) and the less than satisfactory outcomes they share constantly weigh on me.

PK: Don’t be too hard on yourself. The results I’ve seen are beyond what I would have thought possible for any therapy a few years ago. That’s why I’ve promoted it and why at our Leading Edge Clinic, we are running a tinnitus trial that now has some encouraging early signals.

AMD: Tinnitus also illustrates a broader limitation in the usual model. To facilitate scalability, it revolves around diagnosing ailments by describing symptoms in Latin and then giving agents that counteract those symptoms. One issue is that different diseases with shared symptoms are treated as the same entity, so a treatment that addresses only a subset of causes becomes the standard of care and doesn’t help the remaining cases. Using tinnitus as an example, it has many different causes (which somewhat correlate with the different sounds people hear), and systems that successfully treat it typically consider multiple potential root causes rather than a single approach. Likewise, while DMSO addresses the root causes of some types of tinnitus, it either can’t address others, or it only works if a protocol is tailored to the specific condition present.

PK: That matches what we’re seeing. Safety, range, and cost like this are rare. Not that I don’t know the answer, but I will ask the obvious question anyway: “Why hasn’t DMSO been pushed harder?

AMD: Originally, it was because the FDA and other parts of the medical industry went to great lengths to blacklist the therapy, like when they intimidated scientists researching it. Once they lost the power to do that due to a 1994 law removing the FDA’s jurisdiction over natural supplements, the health climate changed and increasingly revolved around marketing supplements. The major challenge with DMSO is that since a single bottle of it costs virtually nothing and lasts for months if not longer, no one has any incentive to market it and it got crowded out by everything else being promoted (resulting in it just being a therapy whose discussion was restricted to smaller alternative health communities where users were collaborating to find the best solutions to their ailments). The thing I found the most amazing about the whole thing is that while I knew buried DMSO research existed, I had no idea much was out there virtually no one knows about that addressed a wide range of challenging diseases no good options exist for currently.

PK: Following your work as closely as I have, that was one of the most amazing things I learned, which was the insane amount of published research, not only in English, but in other languages as well; it was mind-boggling. So, tell me, how much published research on DMSO exists?

AMD: I spent about five months going day in and day out to try to collect every medically relevant DMSO paper that existed, and while I tried to be thorough, I’m sure I missed some of it. When I ran it through AI for a count, I had about 15,000 pertinent papers. I’m currently doing the medical ozone project, and I know there are thousands, but I do not expect to reach the 15,000 mark.

PK: That’s a massive undertaking. How are you managing it?

AMD: I’ve long been a pragmatist because I’ve had too many bad experiences sinking a lot of time into things I cared about that just couldn’t go anywhere. At the same time, I draw a clear delineation between “difficult” and “impossible,” and when I started this specific project, what needed to be done looked incredibly daunting, but didn’t feel “impossible,” so I just had faith I’d somehow figure out how to do it along the way. That happened, and the ozone project, which I thought would be much harder than DMSO because there are even more studies, is actually going much faster; in hindsight, I wish I’d known a lot of what I know now when I did the DMSO search. For example, recently when facing a really time-consuming research task, I queried a few AIs to see if a better option existed, and after the initial approaches failed, eventually found out a custom Python program was the ideal solution (which I then revised a few times). Before that moment, I had no knowledge of programming, but since I have a good enough grasp of logic, I can get AIs to write and debug Python programs for me, which makes so many of the tasks I had to do much simpler. So if you’d asked me a year ago, I never would have agreed I’d need to “learn to code,” but now that I somewhat have, it’s completely changed my life.

PK: I actually don’t think I can give an insightful answer to this question in regards to my own pace and commitment to work because I seemingly do it without planning or forethought, so I will ask you: What keeps you putting in this level of effort?

AMD: Helping others has always been one of the core values I navigate the world through, but I kept running into this: once I got involved in something my heart was called to, I often became entangled in something that ate up a lot of my time and didn’t feel like it helped people. A big part of wanting to be a doctor was just that I knew I could spend a lot less time to make a much bigger impact on a lot of people’s lives than people I’d tried to help in the past. However, I never dreamed I’d get the chance to help as many people as I do now, and while this newsletter is a lot of work, if you instead look at it as the ratio of how much effort I put in to the impact it makes for each person, it’s incomparable to everything I did before and something I never could have even conceived was possible. The entire reason I put so much effort into it is that I want the results that actually help people, and we currently have a window to reach many people who were never open to these issues before, so I feel I need to help create the stable non-polarized foundation that can actually shift how they see things.

I also had a long period where I was immersed in the alternative media (and the attached communities), and while I found it enlightening, I gradually became more and more frustrated with the fact that a lot of the people there wanted to point out how bad things were, but never would offer productive solutions to make things better. On one hand, I get the helplessness, because it does really feel like the world is against you, like when you have a vaccine injury, but that helpless stance wasn’t acceptable to me, and now that I have a real opportunity to make things better, I feel I have to take it.

PK: What do you think drives the black-pilled stance? ED: To those not in the know, black-pilled means having become deeply pessimistic or fatalistic—convinced that a problem is so entrenched that meaningful improvement is unlikely or impossible.

AMD: It’s often thought to function as a way to eliminate uncertainty; if everything is already as bad as it can be, you cannot be disappointed later. Sometimes it is mixed with pride: the person who sees the full bleakness can believe they are clearer-eyed than those who are naive enough to still hope, and is also relieved of any responsibility to try to fix anything. While I see cases where either is at play, like when I feel it’s largely an ego thing when people get very aggressive with pressuring you to validate their bleak world view, when I encountered this within the communities I’ve belonged to, a large share of it felt like a trauma response. When you attempt to interrupt something profitable and harmful, the system will go to great lengths to resist the racket being interrupted. It’s hence inevitable that those trying to make things right will be marginalized and again and again sabotaged, so as time goes on, that just becomes their default, which in many cases is a valid way of interpreting what they subsequently see transpire, as once your hopes have been dashed too many times, it’s hard to have faith something good could happen.

PK: I have to admit that on some issues, I believe I have developed a black-pilled stance and no longer work on them, but, at the same time, I do not let it color my entire worldview; I just pivot to areas I think will be more fruitful. How have you avoided sliding into it yourself?

AMD: I’d definitely had some pretty big letdowns, but I never expected this to be easy, and I know if we want anything to shift, we’ll have to work a lot for it—but even with that I’m very judicious with what I’ll take on as I know many things I care deeply about are effectively a lost cause to do anything about right now.

On one hand, studying history helps me keep everything in context, as while things often seem “bad,” there are numerous periods I can cite throughout history both where things were worse and where eerily similar things to what we’re seeing now happened, but in time, they all eventually faded away and resolved themselves. On the other hand, when I was younger, because of who I was, I was put into numerous situations where I was completely powerless, and some of those experiences left a deep imprint on me. So above all else, no matter how tempting it is to give in to despair, I hate surrendering my agency and always try to find a way to help myself or others. When you talk to people at the end of their lives, one of the most common regrets they share was that they allowed themselves to be pulled into what was fed to them rather than doing what they really wanted, so especially as I get older, I try to gravitate towards the things that give me meaning even if it’s difficult to do and I have to go against the tide I’m currently in.

With medicine, one of my core aims going in was to do something to help the people medicine had hurt and possibly find a way to shift medicine’s direction toward something that supported health. However, despite those aspirations, I had to quickly come to terms with the fact that the system had too much inertia to change, and the best I could hope for was to help the patients on the periphery who found their way to me. So, when I realized the political window was there to actually make a much larger impact, I felt I needed to take it, but at the same time, the pace I’ve been going at is not sustainable, so I will probably change what I do once this window closes, and it’s no longer as critical to do something with the once-in-a-lifetime opportunities we have now.

PK: I understand the weight. I never expected to be in the role I’m in either. Before I knew it, it just happened.

AMD: Same. One of the things that motivates me to work as hard as I do is the fear that I'll do something that negatively impacts others, which is part of why I try so hard to make the articles accurate and applicable to all the contingencies I can see coming up. However, while that fear makes me genuinely hesitant to publish anything and makes writing a lot less fun as I have to constantly vet and verify things, at the same time, I also know the fear of making a mistake can’t be an excuse to do nothing, because it’s even worse to squander the generational opportunity we have to make things better now. I spent decades complaining about the way things were, so I’m obligated to do something about them now that I can.

PK: Having followed your work, I have a few thoughts on which issues you have covered that then seemed to impact either policy or discussion around certain issues, but I want to ask you, looking back, what do you see as the most meaningful thing you’ve done so far—or the biggest win?

AMD: Helping with RFK’s confirmation. Once Trump won, I knew a major coordinated effort would be made to block him, so in November I started testing messages on 𝕏 that might counter the narratives being built against him in preparation for a future confirmation hearing. Later, immediately after the first day of his hearing, I put out a post framing much of the opposition in terms of pharmaceutical incentives. It reached about 33 million people; some of those points were raised on the second day of the hearing, and afterward I saw reporting that the corruption framing had influenced the remaining undecided votes. Since so many people were working behind the scenes to facilitate the confirmation, it’s impossible to know if what I did tipped the needle, and I’m just grateful we did the impossible and got RFK confirmed.

PK: After your recent piece on the childhood vaccine schedule, the executive order came out incorporating several of the specific things you’d suggested, including splitting the MMR. What was the thinking behind what you did?

AMD: Essentially, with vaccines there are three schools of thought: that vaccines are safe and effective no matter what, that vaccines have risks but their benefits outweigh them, and that vaccines are extremely dangerous and should be banned. Since the industry is very greedy (e.g., they will always take a mile if you give an inch), the “safe and effective” school of thought has dominated, so more and more vaccines and the cumulative toxicity they entail have entered the market, and increasingly aggressive censorship methods have been deployed to sweep up the continually increasing harm they create under the rug. However, the mistake the industry made is that because of how much harm is being created, especially post-COVID, it’s no longer possible to sweep all the injuries under the rug or end the conversation by declaring any criticism of vaccination is blasphemy and akin to murdering children).

Because of this, an unexpected window has been created to shift the dialog to the middle ground option: that real risks exist to vaccination and they need to be judiciously weighed against their potential benefits, rather than the old position that vaccine injuries were “one in a million” and hence not worth worrying about. I feel that’s important, in part because it’s a middle-ground position that can appeal to far more people and because the entire conversation becomes very different once it shifts from clashing ideologies to simple concrete facts that can be objectively brought into the discussion and highlight that the existing paradigm on vaccination is absurd.

PK: That middle-ground approach makes sense. How did you arrive at it?

AMD: For me, this started because I’ve long believed it’s more important to be “accurate” than “right,” so when I debate another party, I try to fairly represent, that is to say, steelman their position, rather than play games, straw-man them to win, and achieve a hollow victory.

PK: I agree. It’s definitely backfired on our movement when influencers took studies that supported our message, then exaggerated their findings to far beyond what was in it and made apocalyptic predictions that never bore out.

AMD: If the truth is on your side, the last thing you want to do is give the other side a straw-man they can use to dismiss all the other valid points you are raising.

So, here, I wanted to see if one could make the case that any of the vaccines on the schedule were providing a real social benefit alongside the harms they created. From that, I realized the justifications for many of the vaccines were much worse than I had originally thought, and often just a result of lobbying or historical precedent, like with the fact that every child receives diphtheria despite there having been less than one case per year in the USA for decades, yet everyone still gets it because it’s bundled with tetanus.

So, given that the harm of vaccines is cumulative and some are more harmful than others (Ed: best shown by all the sudden infant death data), if you could achieve a policy move that cut down the vaccine schedule by removing the worst offenders, while it would not prevent all the injuries they caused, it still would be an immense blessing as it would massively reduce the harm being caused.

My own read on the vaccine situation was that the absurd justifications for many of the vaccines on the schedule were one of the least emphasized points in our movement. So, if attention was brought to that, it could reach people in the middle who have doubts about vaccines but view them as necessary and hence tip the needle towards a safer vaccine policy that returns us to where the (ever-increasing) chronic illness rates were a decade or two ago. Likewise with the MMR vaccine, the entire push for the vaccine has revolved around making people terrified of measles, so most people who get the vaccine don’t give a second thought to its other poorly justified components, which is a shame as the vaccine safety movement for decades has pointed out that the harm of the measles vaccine would be significantly reduced if it was not given concurrently with mumps and rubella—and as such, the industry protected their market by making it impossible to ever get measles without the other two.

PK: If simple harm-reduction options are available, why have they been resisted so hard?

AMD: A few explanations exist for this. For instance, it has long been established that spacing vaccines out, rather than giving them all at the same time, decreases injury rates. So, spacing them out would seem like the rational option for the industry, as they would still get their sales but face less public pushback from the injuries they’ve created. However, rather than do this, each time someone proposes it, the medical industry goes after them and, in some cases, gets their medical licenses. Depending on who you ask, three things explain that behavior.

First, spacing vaccines out to reduce injuries is tantamount to an admission vaccines are not completely safe, so to prevent that, they would rather deny the injuries occur and allow them to continue than reduce them, which is in line with the industry and government’s longstanding position that nothing that creates doubt about vaccines can ever be allowed to exist. This is why, again and again, like just recently when Ron Johnson proved it with COVID-19, you see drug regulators hide vaccine injury data to prevent “vaccine hesitancy”.

Second, economically, it’s harder to sell a massive number of vaccines if children have to separate them, as at this point, prior to RFK cutting things back, they got roughly 50 total vaccines along with annual COVID and Flu shots. If a separate visit was needed for each of those, beyond it adding significantly less reimbursement onto each visit, making it potentially non-viable for pediatricians, it is unlikely most parents would even take their children in that many times. A parallel to this is that the original HPV vaccine trials showed girls who already had one of the targeted HPV infections at the time of vaccination were more likely to get cervical cancer, something that has happened to people I know, indicating the rational policy would be to test each vaccine recipient for HPV beforehand. However, as this would reduce vaccine sales, the decision instead was made to lower the age of vaccination in the hope everyone would be vaccinated before a potential sexual exposure to HPV.

Third, if you ascribe to the school of thought the vaccination program is intentionally being conducted to harm the population, which a case can be made for, any attempt to reduce vaccine harms would be opposed. However, my own experience in dealing with these types of people is it’s not so much that they want to hurt others as they just don’t care at all about the consequences of their actions. So, since there is no liability for a vaccine injuring someone, and at least till recently, no potential loss of sales from public outrage over the injuries, incentives aligned for them to keep pushing as many vaccines as possible.

PK: I’ve been going through Trump and RFK’s vaccine executive order. While more could still be done, what they actually enacted is pretty phenomenal, they eliminated roughly half of the required vaccines, including many of the worst ones, splitting the MMR, moving toward non-aluminum adjuvants, protecting exemptions at the state level, improving the injury surveillance system, which as you know, has always been deliberately opaque, and finally advancing the safety studies that were promised back in 1986. I honestly thought any of those were impossible. Watching so many vaccine proponents completely lose their minds over the last few days has been something else.

AMD: It’s understandable; they have a lot to lose once the racket they’ve put so much work into starts to unravel.

PK: What bothers me is how much of the loudest opposition is coming from people on our own side who arrived only recently. Why?

AMD: It’s definitely irked a lot of people, particularly those who are toiling day in and day out to fix things, and most of them have told me they think it’s because these people are working for the pharmaceutical industry to sabotage things. While that’s possible, since a lot is on the line for the vaccine industry, I hold a different opinion. I’ve seen something similar to this happen in many different movements I’ve belonged to, so rather than be surprised by it, I was expecting it, don’t take it personally, and have just been trying to steer the blackpill sentiment in a positive direction.

PK: Seriously?

AMD: Yes, here, ask AI right now.

What the AI returned: When a reform movement begins to achieve real, measurable progress after years or decades of struggle, a recurring pattern often appears. A vocal contingent that had previously campaigned for reforms treats concrete wins as insufficient, suspect, or even a deliberate distraction. They label the people who delivered those results as saboteurs, dismiss the advances as trivial, and insist that only maximalist, all-or-nothing outcomes count as legitimate success, thereby maintaining their relevance. Versions of this have appeared across history and the political spectrum:

• In labor and socialist movements, once social-democratic parties and unions won shorter workweeks, workplace safety laws, public healthcare, or stronger bargaining rights, hardline factions frequently denounced the reformers as sellouts or agents of the bourgeoisie and insisted anything short of full socialization was worthless.

• In the civil-rights struggle, after the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, more radical voices cast the moderates who secured those laws as too accommodating, arguing legal equality without deeper economic and structural change was incomplete.

• In environmental politics, measurable gains in emissions standards, renewable deployment, and phase-outs of the dirtiest fuels have often been called “greenwashing” or corporate co-optation by maximalists who demand total systemic overhaul and the abolition of fossil fuels.

• In anti-war movements, troop withdrawals, arms-control deals, or limits on war powers have been dismissed as cosmetic by uncompromising factions who accuse the negotiators of being controlled opposition.

• On the right, policy deliveries on taxes, judges, borders, or cultural issues have routinely been branded theater or proof of “RINO”/“Uniparty” betrayal.

In the early stages, these absolutist voices often serve a vital function. They keep relentless pressure on institutions, prevent the powerful from defining the limits of reform too narrowly, and expand what eventually becomes politically possible. Without that intensity, many important changes would never gain traction. Once mainstream adoption becomes feasible and tangible institutional results start to appear, the same absolutism frequently turns counterproductive. Energy shifts from consolidating gains or taking the next practical step to tearing down the people who moved the needle. Genuine but incomplete victories are framed as proof of betrayal, and the movement fractures into purity tests rather than strategy as many who initially joined the movement excel at fighting rather than building coalitions to enact policy. The result is slower progress and demoralization of those producing results. The healthiest stance is to hold both halves of the pattern: early pressure is useful and sometimes necessary; treating real wins as inherently fraudulent hinders the cause.

PK: Wow. That reminds me of how so many people were disavowing and denouncing RFK for keeping the COVID-19 vaccine on the CDC schedule for pregnant women and children. They treated it as their red line, something not even Bobby could be forgiven for. Then not long after, when he finally got it off the schedule, they immediately forgot about it and moved on to attacking him for the next thing he hadn’t done yet.

AMD: Yes. One segment, like many movements in the past, treats any step toward vaccine harm reduction as a distraction from total abolition, like when they yell that “safer vaccines is a psyop.” Others judge that, for the foreseeable future, the realistic path is reducing damage, protecting the right to refuse, and continuing to shift public opinion, because policy ultimately follows voters, which I favor because I’d rather reduce vaccine injuries than accomplish nothing right now. I am also highly doubtful any president besides Trump, due to both his personality and personal experience with vaccine injury, would have ever cut back the vaccine schedule to even a fraction of the degree he has. Yet, even Trump, who has received a lot of blowback for his childhood vaccine decisions, along with many of the people in MAHA I’ve spoken to, have been very clear they will never ban vaccines as it is simply not politically tenable, which is why the compromise position they created on the new CDC vaccine schedule was to make many of the previously recommended vaccines optional or restricted to limited groups rather than taking them off entirely.

PK: There is a time when you need rigidity to fight, but there is also a time when you need the flexibility to take the wins that have been given to you.

AMD: The other thing a lot of people who haven’t been in the thick of this don’t see is how many people had to work their tails off, were never really recognized or widely thanked for it so that we could get to the point we were at, or just how much pushback there has been from the pharmaceutical companies across the board and just how many different coordinated attempts have been made to sabotage these reforms.

For example, over the last six months, one of my projects was to derail the pharmaceutical industry’s successful attempt to stop all vaccine reform. Briefly, they conducted a doctored poll that said the public was overwhelmingly opposed to vaccine safety reform, so if Trump or RFK pushed it, the Republicans would lose the midterms. Given this information, White House staff made the largely rational response to ban all discussions of vaccine safety until after the midterms. Not long after, a contact working on enacting those reforms said unless something could be done to shift that, before long it would become ingrained as a policy, and likely kill their generational attempts to make a safer vaccine schedule, so they asked if I could help shift that. Since give or take every other poll showed the exact opposite and that the public strongly supported vaccine safety reform, I thought there was an actual chance that narrative could be overturned, and a big focus of what I did with the limited time I had was to do that, which seems to have succeeded. However, I feel in comparison to a lot of the other people who have been working day in and day out, my contribution was minimal, it’s just that it’s hard to see or appreciate a lot of what vaccine safety reformers have to deal with in Washington unless you are in the thick of it.

In regards to the specific MMR policy decision, I did not have advanced knowledge of it, so I’m not sure if what I did tipped the needle there, I just put this message out because I suddenly had an intuition it was the right time to do it, and I tend to act on those as they’ve frequently put me in the right spot at the right time to make a tangible impact (which is why I am likewise grateful to all the critics who amplified that post and inadvertently allowed it to be seen by the right people).

PK: I’m grateful a real team came together around this. The institutional resistance is fierce.

AMD: Turning values into durable institutional change is harder than it looks from the outside. I’ve tried more times than I can count to do that and failed on things far, far easier than anything RFK is trying to do.

PK: What are you focused on now?

AMD: I have long believed that continually attacking or trying to destroy something is rarely a successful way to approach things, whereas cultivating a positive thing which displaces the existing issue is typically more effective and has a much more lasting impact. Unfortunately, this often puts me in opposition to the existing paradigm because so much of our society revolved around feeding the human need to use force and domination to simplify reality and eliminate uncertainty.

For example, philosophically, modern medicine (allopathy) originated from the idea that you needed to reverse the currently existing symptoms by shifting it to the opposite state, like when aspirin is given for fever; so many of the early interventions used increasingly forceful methods to achieve that shift, leading to it being called “heroic medicine.” Since creating those forceful shifts often required extreme, heroic measures, side effects inevitably followed, but the medical system’s solution was simply to deny the side effects or rationalize their necessity.

PK: That basically describes every vaccine-injured patient I’ve worked with. I will never forget the widely pervasive and deeply cruel extent of the gaslighting my Covid vaccine patients endured, particularly from 2021 to 2023; in fact, I remember that the first half of my typically hour+ long visits was listening to them recount the gaslighting they had endured. It lessened somewhat after that, but gaslighting is especially infuriating when there’s a clear neurological problem sitting right there, tightly and temporally associated with the jab, and the specialists still insist it’s psychosomatic or dress it up with something like “functional neurological disorder.”

AMD: One of the most interesting things I learned about gaslighting is that after mercury started being widely used in medicine and caused a variety of neurological disorders, the resulting symptoms, particularly in women, were often diagnosed as “hysteria,” which, especially in Freudian theory, was then attributed to unresolved sexual conflicts. In turn, multiple authors have made the case that some of Freud’s original famous cases, along with many other “hysterical” patients, were actually neurologically suffering from mercury poisoning.^1,2 I’ve thus suspected the reason why Freud’s ideas caught on so quickly was because it gave the doctors a way to absolve themselves from injuring their patients.

PK: Just like how people who vaccinate and then get sick are allowed to blame it on the fact other people aren’t vaccinating.

AMD: I’m still amazed that line has been able to remain a viable sales pitch for vaccines, but that’s the power of propaganda.

PK: I largely agree with the allopathy framing you laid out, but I do have to push back on one point. In some situations you absolutely have to force the body into a different state—especially when you’re dealing with a critically ill patient who’s actively dying.

AMD: Completely agree, and that touches upon why modern medicine excels at treating acute conditions rather than chronic ones. Once again, it’s important not to fall into an absolutist stance. There are things conventional medicine handles effectively that should not be rejected simply because they come from a system rife with issues. At the same time, it is often difficult to accept the useful part without also being pushed by medical providers toward many other standard practices that are unnecessary or harmful, and it’s anything but easy to hold both of those realities in your mind simultaneously as you navigate the medical system.”

PK: And once you’re inside that system, the default response when something doesn’t work is often just to escalate.

AMD: Yes. The other key issue with this paradigm is that since it focuses on dominating the body to achieve a desired outcome, once that fails, the most common (human) response will be to double-down and use more aggressive measures to try to achieve that goal, which in many cases leave the patient far worse than they were. The best example of this is probably high-dose chemotherapy, which came into vogue in the 1980s and 1990s especially for breast cancer, but was eventually pulled back for that use after randomized trials showed it did not improve overall survival and carried much higher toxicity. Because there was so much inertia and money behind it, it was difficult to speak out against it at the time, by the way, you should check out a Wikipedia article that gives a good overview, but even after it was phased out for breast cancer, many in oncology continued to hold the core dose-intensity belief and remained willing to accept higher doses and side effects in the hope of better cancer control when it might work.

PK: I definitely agree on the overdosing issue. I’m surprised how often the patients we see report having been given doses they simply cannot tolerate. What’s particularly striking is that once my work with vaccine-injured people brought me into contact with so many of the “sensitive patients” you talk about, it became obvious that a lot of doctors just don’t grasp they often need to use lower doses.

AMD: I think that’s a result of three things. First, as mentioned earlier, when something doesn’t work, the human tendency is to do more, and then rationalize after the fact why it was the right choice. Second, because our medical system revolves around standardized protocols that doctors can rapidly scale and deploy to drive drug sales, there is no room for the nuance of an individual patient’s needs or the time it takes to figure out the appropriate dose for them. Lastly, in both the conventional and alternative medical system, our cultural belief “if something is good, more is better” seeps in, so even when you warn doctors or patients, they will often overdo whatever was helping and cross the threshold into something counterproductive.

PK: Totally agree, but there is some nuance there as I have worked with a number of theapeutics that have pretty impressive dose-response curves, but they are a minority, although I agree most docs tend to think they all do. Life would be so much easier if people stopped doing that.

AMD: The same principle I use in medicine, “cultivate health rather than relentlessly attack disease,” also applies to how I try to engage the larger culture. A lot of the persistent bad practices inside the medical system are simply reflections of the broader culture that produces the conditions for them, so a good deal of my focus goes into how we can shift the underlying mentality. Among other things, this means moving from polarized black-and-white discourse toward something more nuanced that can tolerate ideas we don’t fully agree with as long as they actually move things forward from where we are now. With medicine specifically, while I think it’s important to expose what’s wrong, relentlessly attacking the system is not a workable strategy on its own. People still need medical care and will end up going back to the conventional system even when they have serious doubts about it.

PK: So what’s the solution?

AMD: I settled on providing better alternatives to the existing paradigm, and on empowering people to figure out for themselves how to use them. On one hand, this frees people from being subject to the medical system and to practices they disagree with, such as care being made conditional on COVID vaccination. On the other, it creates the one thing that can motivate the medical system to do a better job, which is genuine competition. Competition forces them either to provide the results patients want or to lose a great deal of money. I believe that is the only reason the loss of trust in science and medicine after COVID is even being allowed to be openly discussed now. They need to regain that trust for the business model to work.

More importantly, it catalyzes a shift in consciousness, both by making people have a tangible realization that the suffering they went through didn’t have to happen, which moves skepticism of the system from an abstract idea to a lived experience, but also because simple remedies being able to affect so many different diseases shifts the societal perspective on how the body works from the sterile reductionist model our society revolves around to a much more vibrant and connected one.

PK: That may be one of the reasons I gave more than a year of my life to alert the public to the wonders and broad applicability of chlorine dioxide, but I have been reluctant to put my book on Amazon where it could reach a much wider audience. So how do you actually do it at scale?

AMD: While I’ve been able to do that for many individual patients I’ve worked with, it’s obviously unrealistic I could do that at scale and shift the culture. However, I’ve long believed that the shifts towards “cultural health” always have a building stage, where for years, if not centuries, some people are aware of the idea, and try desperately against all odds to have it catch on (often becoming extremely bitter and frustrated those around them simply don’t want what would radically improve their lives), but then at some point, the cultural conditions suddenly shift, and all the work that had been done previously is positioned to ignite and shift the whole culture. The fall of the Berlin wall is the most commonly cited example of this, but consider what’s happened with the vaccine issue.

Since the days of the smallpox vaccine over 200 years ago, people from all walks of life have done all they can to fight against and protest vaccination. Despite that, as the years went on, the vaccine industry only became more powerful, and each coordinated opposition to it was largely erased from memory. Yet the industry grew so overconfident and greedy that during COVID it did things so far out of line that public distrust of COVID vaccination sprouted like wildfire. That distrust spread across a recently "freed" internet, in a highly polarized political climate where one side had shortsightedly chosen to zealously endorse vaccines. Before long, doubt about the COVID vaccine and resentment toward the left turned into something else, and people began listening to the parents of vaccine-injured children whom they had previously written off. So now there is not only far more distrust of vaccines than I ever expected to see in my lifetime, but RFK is enacting policy after policy that, as you said before, people in the vaccine safety movement dreamed of for decades.

PK: I’m with ya on that, I never ever would have imagined it could have moved that fast.

AMD: Another way to think about it was that the reason people like you wanted to get involved was ultimately due to the fact we’d reached the point where a rapid shift was possible.

Anyways, due to some odd coincidences, I’ve periodically felt like I was put where I was because there was a role I was supposed to serve. For instance, I had some very odd experiences right before COVID that made me feel I was supposed to become entangled in it, and due to a series of improbable events, I eventually ended up in the position I am in now. Similarly, when I was younger, I noticed that a lot of the incredible medical discoveries people had made were gradually disappearing and getting harder and harder to find, so for some reason, I felt compelled to preserve them in the hopes I could pass them onto someone in the next generation and keep their fire alive for the time far into the future when they were ready to emerge and then somehow was repeatedly connected with their reclusive custodians.

However, when that pursuit started, I never expected something like the internet would emerge, let alone that when it reached the point where information could rapidly disseminate across the culture, I’d be in the position to disseminate it. So, all the paths lead to a simple conclusion; my role is to provide information that people can use to both positively transform the medical system and opt out of it, and I want to do that by leaving detailed summaries and records of exactly how people can do that so they have the best shot of igniting when the time is right. Because of the unusual sequence of events that led here, I treat it as something I’m directly accountable for getting right. My focus hence stays on the results rather than recognition, as the former is my priority, which is one reason anonymity helps.

That’s basically why I’ve put so much work into trying to create a comprehensive foundation for DMSO rather than letting it follow the course of a typical health fad and I did it under a very tight timeline. It is also why I’m doing the same thing with a few other therapies like ozone as that’s the best I could come up with to create a positive shift.

PK: A lot of that sounds like Carl Jung’s “Sage-Steward” Archetype. On that note, I have to thank you for the piece you put out last week on the war against chlorine dioxide and for highlighting how my book’s story folds into a broader pattern of monopolistic suppression. After you called out the absurdity of their position, a few days ago, the FDA quietly pulled the pages that had been calling CDS “toxic bleach” for years and blocking CDS research globally.

AMD: That gives me hope that with enough work it may at last be possible to overturn the FDA’s position that ozone is a toxic gas with no medical value whatsoever.

PK: Exactly. It’s another reminder that putting the evidence in one place, cleanly, does matter.

AMD: That’s it essentially. Because of all the eerie coincidences that made what I’m doing now possible, I feel I have a deep obligation to do the task I was entrusted with well. Once the foundation is solid I want others to carry it forward so it isn’t dependent on me and I am becoming increasingly hopeful that the current conditions will allow things that previously looked impossible, provided the groundwork is done carefully.

PK: Any advice for others trying to shift the conversation?

AMD: One of the more eye-opening things for me has been what the internal metrics show: the loudest, most black-pilled voices you see on social media are a clear minority. The much larger and quieter share of people are the ones who deeply value this and provide the kind of sustainable support that actually gets these messages out, in many cases precisely because the sea of outrage and AI-generated content that social media rewards feels emptier the more time you spend in it. So for anyone caught up in the daily struggle to be seen online, the same lesson applies as with the black pill itself: as tempting as it is, it rarely leads somewhere good.

PK: That’s a good way to look at it. Is there anything people can do to support the work?

AMD: The support I’ve received up to this time has been incredible and has been the thing that’s made a lot of what I’ve done possible. Some of the things I want to do are only possible if the newsletter and its support grows, but I have faith that it will happen eventually and I deeply appreciate everyone who helps make that possible. For the time being, I just want people to share the material, incorporate the ideas I put forward they agree with into their own frameworks, and if they have time, to leave a comment about experiences they’ve had with DMSO here as I’m now approaching my impossible goal of 10,000 reader DMSO testimonials.

Beyond that, there are also a lot of people doing critical work on the vaccine safety I’d like to draw attention to. A team of researchers I trust are conducting a study comparing the health of vaccinated and unvaccinated children, so if you’d like to consider filling out a brief survey, you can do so here. Furthermore, the government is about to finalize a historic autism plan, so if you can lend your voice right now (Ed: the instructions are here), especially if you had a child who was vaccine injured, please consider doing so.

PK: I’m glad I decided to support you early on. Any final thoughts?

AMD: Everyone is born with the chance to create a deep meaning from their life. They just have to set their sights on what they know in their heart they are meant to do rather than getting caught up in the endless distractions and aimlessness society feeds us. Time is limited, but I started the journey I’ve been on for decades because I knew it was vital I found the things which could provide that purpose to my life. A lot of what I’m doing now is quite arduous, but the fact that real results are possible has been more than enough for me to invest as much as I have into it. Despite my optimistic nature, for most of my life, because of how entrenched the vested interests are that exploit and harm everyone for profit, I’ve been a pessimist that things could ever change. Now that one thing after another is coming to fruition in the blink of an eye, it quite frankly feels surreal. Just a few years ago I would have said my life felt complete if even one of the things I discussed here had happened. Since I tend to focus on how things will unfold far into the future, my aim has always been to lay foundations for results that would matter years down the road, so I never imagined I’d see some of those aspirations occur so quickly.

PK: Look, I just want to say I really appreciate what you’ve done to help move things forward.

AMD: I feel the same way about you, but I don’t even know who we can even give the credit to at this point. Much of what I’m doing is only possible because so many people are helping me, and more importantly if there had not been a critical mass of people like you, Robert Malone, Senator Johnson and many more, who stepped up and stuck their necks out to try to fix this mess nothing could have happened. If my read of history is correct, this is all part of a much larger cycle, and we all just were happened to be the ones around at the time where this was meant to happen.

PK: Or as the old line goes—it’s amazing what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.

If you’d like to follow AMD’s prolific work on Substack, you can do so here and subscribe below:

Lastly, if you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about, your support for my work is greatly appreciated.

The Shameless Commercialism Department:

I write about minerals and water. I also sell them.

Aurmina is simply the provable, superior, and less expensive alternative to reverse osmosis for purifying drinking water. It binds and removes over 245 modern contaminants — and unlike RO, it leaves the minerals, redox activity, and ion-exchange capability restored, rather than stripping water empty and calling that clean.

Primora Bio is the same chemistry for the water that grows things: irrigation and foliar, for soil, crops, and livestock.

Both came out of a year spent on one forgotten Japanese mineral extraction that produced three books (The Stone and Water Series) and led to the retirement of my patient panel, though not from Leading Edge Clinic.

From Research to Practice - Links Below Image

Earth’s Living Water- Its History, Its Ruin, and the Way Back

The Silent Aquifer - Humanity’s Unfolding Food and Water Crisis

The War on Chlorine Dioxide - The Medicine That Could End Medicine

Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water

Primora Bio - Bringing Life Back To Soil

Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States

The War on Ivermectin- The Medicine That Could have Ended the Pandemic

The Blueprint of Life - The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health

Medical Musings - A View From the Inside Of Modern Medicine

This week, my friend and colleague A Midwestern Doctor (AMD) published the brilliant new article above, part of whose subject was my book called The War on Chlorine Dioxide (written with my co-author Jenna McCarthy, who is one of the funniest and smartest writers on Substack, so if you’re not already following her, you should remedy that immediately).

After detailing medicine’s nefarious history of building monopolies, burying inexpensive treatments, and branding inconvenient therapies as dangerous quackery, AMD gets to the book — which, if I may shamelessly brag for a second, they call “one of the most well documented example[s] of how the medical system colluded to suppress a therapy that threatened multiple franchises.” They highlight everything from chlorine dioxide’s accidental discovery as a therapeutic, to malaria outbreaks that disappeared after the drinking water was treated, to the surgeon who reported a 99.6% success rate treating 3,000 COVID patients with chlorine dioxide—only to have their hospital’s COVID unit shut down, to why the phrase “toxic bleach” may have been one of the most effective PR campaigns in modern medical history — right after “horse de-wormer” at least.

The book itself covers chlorine dioxide’s history, its pioneers, persecutions, and proponents, the science and safety behind it, and so much more. Senator Ron Johnson calls The War on Chlorine Dioxide “a gripping tale of corruption and courage that will open eyes and prompt serious questions.” I’ll take that.

If you’ve been wondering what I spent two years obsessively researching and writing about, you’ll get a pretty good taste. And if you’re ready to get your hands on a copy (it’s available in paperback and eBook in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, so spread the word), you can do that right here.

A Word About AMD

I have known AMD for years now, and somewhere along the way we realized that the missions of our Substacks were largely aligned, with one caveat: theirs is more focused and consistent and far better written, while mine often strays into more contentious areas of our Substack writers category, a category whose somewhat oxymoronic name still makes me laugh, “Health Politics,” where AMD now sits in the #1 spot, such that it has triggered envy amongst the other amazing ranked writers they overtook, some of whom have now started calling AMD a “Pharma plant.” Hilarious. Or, at least it would be if it weren’t so sad.

Anyway, the category name reminds me of a meme I came across a few years ago, making fun of the political divides that arose around scientific topics like ivermectin’s efficacy in Covid: “Who believes in penicillin more, Republicans or Democrats?”

Anyway, we were two people who stumbled into similar missions and have admired each other’s work ever since. They do theirs almost full-time; I only get to do it part-time, squeezed around a mountain of other responsibilities, like running the Leading Edge Clinic and writing books. And what they do with that time is extraordinary. They just spent over a year and a half — a year and a half — meticulously documenting the story of DMSO, one of the most important and most deliberately buried therapies in all of medicine. Nobody working today matches their combination of writing skill, rigor, breadth, and thoroughness.

I had AI put together a little graphic listing the various branches of medicine and therapeutics that “the medical establishment” has suppressed over the past century and more, as detailed by AMD in their article:

The list above brings to mind my essay, “The Kory Scale,” in which I proposed a method for assessing the effectiveness of an “alternative” therapy, particularly when it is safe, inexpensive, and widely accessible (the trifecta that threatens medicine’s economic model).

The method is simple: you assign points to every suppression and persecution tactic deployed by the institutions of society against the therapy, and the more points, the more effective (i.e., threatening) it is. I proposed different scores for media attacks, negative high impact journal editorials, FDA denials of research, universities and journals publishing trials of the treatments that are designed to fail, doctors who advocate for them losing their specialty certifications, licenses, or jobs (ahem), and, in a number of the cases above, assassinations or assassination attempts on the innovators of such treatments (as I detail in my book around chlorine dioxide and earlier oxidative therapies)

If more people in our society understood this history, and how it is still occurring, one of two things could happen. One, the system could change (not). Or two, people could seek out reliable information they could use to protect their own and their families' health, rather than relying on the high priests and priestesses of the medical religion, with their often terrible and very narrow therapeutic armamentarium. I ain’t holding my breath for the first. So, alongside AMD, I work toward the second.

From early on in Covid, I had one goal: that every cupboard in America hold ivermectin, for the whole family. Dreaming like that hasn’t changed, only the compounds have. Now my goal is for every cupboard to hold both chlorine dioxide and DMSO (mine does), two “umbrella therapies,” meaning each has numerous mechanisms of action and can treat a broad range of diseases, can be purchased online, and people can (and must) educate themselves to use, I believe safely, and far safer than most pharmaceuticals. DMSO has more mechanisms of action than chlorine dioxide; but several of those of chlorine dioxide, particularly against infectious illness, are far more potent.

There’s a more personal reason I care about this, too. For reasons I won’t get into here, I’ve come to see our medical system as an institution in serious decline, but now declining the way so many other institutions of society are declining right now, and, in the years since Covid, the hospital system has hardened into something even more rigid, protocolized, and unthinking than what I trained in. As my readers know, I now suffer from nosocomophobia, the fear of hospitals (a real and documented condition). Since Covid and my excommunication from “the system,” a daily, unspoken goal of my life is to avoid the hospital at nearly all costs. I’ve told my wife that the only way I’m going is if I’m unconscious, so she would have to call the ambulance herself.

I’m not telling you to draw the line exactly where I draw it; you should set your own criteria, and there absolutely may come a day when you have to go, and on that day you should go. The point isn’t recklessness; it’s the opposite. It’s being equipped well enough to make that call wisely, to handle at home what can be handled there safely, and to know the difference. I wrote about that last winter, when I treated a sudden, severe illness myself rather than walk into an ER: “Why and How I Purposefully Avoided the Hospital After Developing an Acute, Severe Illness This Week.” Consider it a case study in both what I do and, in more than a few moments, what not to do, but also remember that I am an experienced ICU specialist, so what I can pull off at home is unlikely to be an option for most.

That’s the mission, and AMD’s article is one more piece of the case for it. I’m grateful they wrote it.

Read their work. Then, if you want the fuller story, The War on Chlorine Dioxide is available at waronchlorinedioxide.com — again, it’s not on Amazon for all the reasons detailed in AMD’s article, so that’s the only place to get it.

*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about, your support is greatly appreciated.

Subscribe now

Note to readers:

One discovery consumed my last year: a volcanic mineral extract made by the Japanese scientist Shimanishi fifty years ago — the “Golden Elixir” of the old traditions, made real. It led me to write two three books, retire from my patient panel (but not from Leading Edge Clinic), and start a company with one mission: to carry this forgotten chemistry off the page. Aurmina for the water we drink, and Primora Bio for the water our soil, crops, and animals crave.

From Research to Practice - Links Below Image

Earth’s Living Water- Its History, Its Ruin, and the Way Back

The Silent Aquifer - Humanity’s Unfolding Food and Water Crisis

The War on Chlorine Dioxide - The Medicine That Could End Medicine

Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water

Primora Bio - Bringing Life Back To Soil

Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States

The War on Ivermectin- The Medicine That Could have Ended the Pandemic

The Blueprint of Life - The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health

Medical Musings - A View From the Inside Of Modern Medicine

The chapters of this book argue from data, mechanism, and pattern. The images that follow argue from something simpler: what happened when people tried it themselves. These are not controlled experiments, and they are not presented as proof. They are visual records, from gardens, fields, kitchens, and backyards, of the kind of signal that arrives before formal evidence does. The reader can see what the observers saw and decide what to make of it.

Appendix 1: Potato Experiment: Two Glasses, Two Fates

In one glass, a potato rotted. In the other, it grew.

The experiment, submitted by my colleague Kacper Postawski, was simple. Two potatoes were placed in identical glasses. One glass contained ordinary tap water. The other contained water treated with a Themarox-derived mineral solution. There was no soil, no fertilizer, no added nutrient program, and no biological system beyond the potato itself. The glasses were then left undisturbed for weeks.

In ordinary tap water, the result followed the expected path: clouding, foul odor, tissue softening, structural breakdown, and decay. In the treated water, the system behaved differently. The water remained clearer. The potato retained its form. Roots developed into a dense mesh, and a green shoot emerged upward.

Two potatoes, the same carbon in each, and only the water deciding whether it slid toward rot or held together as something alive

Appendix 2: The Accidental Lilac

An accidental experiment cannot be staged. That is what makes it worth recording.

My partner, Scott Marsland, noticed the difference in blooming of his two side-by-side lilac bushes, and realized that when he had performed the foliar sprays with treated water, due to the angle at which he was spraying, the bush on the right received much more of the treated water than the bush on the left. This accidental experiment suggested a dose-response relationship between the water and the bushes’ flowering: the one on the right in full bloom, the one on the left in sparser bloom.

Then, a few weeks later, when the bushes were no longer in bloom, he noticed a marked difference in the color and vigor of the bushes: on the left, the tips of the leaves were yellow and curled, while those on the right were deep green and straight.

Scott has lived in that house over twenty years, and in all of them neither bush had ever come close to blooming like the one on the right, and the two had never come in differently. Same corner, same soil, same light, same two plants, over twenty springs running, and the only new thing this year was Rock-Water. Nature set the experiment up: two bushes alike in everything but one, how much treated water reached each, and the bloom tracked the water. More water, more flower. Less water, less. That is a dose-response, and it is the oldest evidence there is.

Appendix 3: The Basil Plant Race

These photographs were taken eighteen days apart. Nothing changed between them except the water.

Submitted by my colleague Jeff, producer and director of The Universal Antidote documentary and author of the Curious Outlier Substack, the first case involved two established basil plants grown side by side under matched conditions: same soil, same light, same fertilizer, and the same watering volume and schedule.

The sole intentional variable was the water.

One basil plant received filtered well water. The other received the same water treated with a 10% Themarox-derived solution. No meaningful amount of mineral nutrient was added beyond what both plants already received from the soil and Miracle-Gro fertilizer.

Dec 6, 2025, start of the race:

Dec 24, 2025:

Yet the plants diverged.

The basil receiving treated water showed accelerated growth, deeper coloration, increased leaf density, and greater structural rigidity. It looked like improved access: as if minerals already present in the soil became more biologically available, and carbon already available to the plant could be fixed more efficiently into living structure rather than dissipated through stress, inefficiency, or weak growth.

As a side-by-side observation, it again fits the larger geohydrological return framework. The treated plant grew faster, greener, denser, and stiffer, as if the minerals already in the soil had simply become easier to reach.

Appendix 4: A Lawn Blasts Off

She did not design an experiment. She planted a lawn and watched what happened.

A home gardener decided to seed her lawn with grass. In the photos below, you can see a completely grassless lawn in March, and she seeded the lawn in sections starting on April 29th and finishing May 2nd. She sprayed the grass twice in the first few days, and then again at about a week.

She reported that every morning she would get up, have a coffee, and “watch the lawn grow.”

As you can see below, within eight days, the seeded area was completely covered in green grass, whereas the instructions on the seed bag stated that it would take between 14 and 21 days, a growth speed which matches many of the studies reported by Shimanishi and other agronomists.

Appendix 5: A Cactus Sleeps For 50 Years

This observation was submitted by Brent Hanson, a patient of my partner Scott, who has been experimenting with Themarox-conditioned water in his home. He sent it because the plant in question had a history.

My name is Brent Hanson, and I have been experimenting with water treated with Scott Marsland’s mineral technology in different areas of my life. Recently, I decided to try it with a very special plant in our home: a Christmas cactus that once belonged to my grandmother. Our family believes this cactus has been with us for roughly forty to fifty years, and in all that time none of us can remember seeing it bloom.

After I began consistently watering it with diluted Themarox-treated water, something remarkable happened. For the first time in decades, the old family Christmas cactus produced a healthy, vibrant bloom.

It was a small flower, but a big moment for our family, because this plant is one of the last living connections we have to my grandmother.

I can’t claim this proves cause and effect, but the timing was striking. After decades of silence, the plant responded soon after I started using this kind of treated water. For me, that first blossom is more than just a flower on an old cactus; it feels like a symbol of hope and renewal in my own healing journey. It reminded me that even when change seems impossible, life can surprise us in gentle, unexpected ways.

Brent Hanson

Appendix 6: Seven Doves Visit in the Middle of Winter

Recently, my partner Scott Marsland sent me a uniquely fascinating visual anecdote. His wife, Kerrie, filled a water bowl with Themarox-treated water and placed it on the front porch side rail of their home in Ithaca, New York.

Two days later, in the middle of January, they saw seven doves congregating around the bowl and drinking from it. That alone made the scene striking. What made it memorable was the context: they had maintained a bird water bowl for more than twenty years and had heated it during winter for the previous three years, yet they had never seen this event before.

It belongs here because it is the kind of small, unexpected field signal that prompts deeper questions. And it was not the only one. A reader wrote to my colleague Matt Bakos with a similar account about her housecat: when she filled the upstairs bowl with treated water, the cat stopped drinking from its usual bowl in the basement. When she switched the bowls, moving the treated water down to the basement, the cat abandoned the upstairs bowl and followed it down. Neither the doves nor the cat proves anything. What both raise is whether living systems can sometimes register differences in water, in redox or hydration, before our instruments are brought to bear. It is hard to forget: seven doves, in the middle of winter, gathering around a bowl of treated water where none had gathered before.

Appendix 7: A Field That Had Given Up

When Patrick Rascon started this trial, there were no earthworms. By the end of the season, there were.

Temecula, California, is a semi-arid transition zone that looks favorable on paper and proves difficult in practice: low seasonal rainfall, hot desiccating summers, and old, calcium-rich, carbonate-heavy soils with little organic matter and fragile microbial life. It is not a low-mineral environment. It is a low-availability one.

The minerals are present but locked: iron chlorosis shows up even in iron-rich ground, magnesium and phosphorus get immobilized by carbonate chemistry, and trace elements circulate poorly despite an abundant inventory. That made it a useful test of the question at the center of this book: can a degraded soil-water system recover when mineral access is restored from the water side rather than forced in from the fertilizer side?

Rascon, who produces a Shimanishi-derived solution called Volcanna Rain, reported soil that was dry, dusty, and biologically exhausted, with no detectable earthworm activity and little visible life except goat heads (Tribulus terrestris). Goat heads are a warning flag: they thrive where soil has been disturbed, its structure collapsed, its organic carbon lost. Worse, the only abundant organism he found was cutworms, whose success signals a field whose biology has fallen behind the speed at which the crop is being asked to grow.

The intervention was essentially irrigation with mineral-treated water made from Volcanna Rain. No compost, no fertilizer program, no mineral blends, no aggressive inoculant. Early on, the field behaved like degraded soil: poor vigor, high insect pressure, uneven growth. Then it shifted. The cutworms disappeared. Earthworms appeared and thrived. Pest pressure fell so far that no pesticide was used. Roots established, plant architecture strengthened, leaf density and color rose, and multiple vegetable varieties flourished at once.

Just after mid-season, small amounts of fish emulsion and limited microbial support were added, far too little to explain the magnitude and uniformity of the response across crops. Weather and unknown variables may have contributed. What makes it notable is the disproportion between what went in, a trace of minerals in the water, and what came back.

Cucumbers as a Comparison

Rascon withheld the mineral solution from his weekly foliar spray on one row of cucumbers, an informal comparison against the treated crops beside them. The difference was striking. Where the nearby tomatoes were vivid green, the cucumber leaves were yellow-brown, curled, and stressed, and mold appeared on the cucumbers while the tomatoes stayed clean.

About half the cucumber crop never developed the color he expected, and many were flavorless and spotted. Where the treated water was included, the crop was greener, sturdier, and more resilient; where it was withheld, the signs of deficiency and stress stayed visible.

Economics

For a half-acre plot over a six-month season, with the solution as the near-sole input, Rascon estimated roughly $50 per month at wholesale and $100 at retail; for fields needing only foliar application, roughly $25 to $50 per month. The point is not merely that the input was cheap. It is that a response like this, if reproduced under controlled conditions, would suggest a different model of farming: not overwhelming degraded soil with more inputs, but restoring the chemistry through which soil, water, minerals, microbes, and plants function together.

Appendix 8: Standing Irrigation Water

Standing irrigation water on a clay-soil Asian pear orchard, before and after surface treatment with mineral-conditioned water. After flood irrigation, well water had stood on this clay ground for roughly two weeks without draining, long enough to grow algae across its surface, a sign of how completely the sealed soil had stopped accepting it. Patrick estimated the standing puddle at 100 to 200 gallons. He then sprayed the surface with four gallons of well water into which he had mixed sixteen ounces of his product, Volcanna Rain, the standard dose for treating about 125 gallons of water, so the amount applied was calibrated to treat roughly what was standing there. A stick was set to mark the water level.

Within six hours, the water had begun to penetrate visibly, and by the next evening, the ground had absorbed it almost completely. The soil had not changed in the interval; only the water entering it had. Photographs courtesy of Patrick Rascon; recorded as a personal communication.

Conclusion

Seen one at a time, they would simply be intriguing examples. When viewed all together, a direction appears. Across basil, Christmas cactus, potatoes, lawn, field crops, and birds, the same movement keeps showing up. When water is treated with a biotite-derived sulfated mineral complex, living systems repeatedly turn toward greater organization: clearer water instead of foul breakdown, roots instead of decay, green leaves instead of chlorosis, soil life instead of absence, sudden and explosive blooms instead of quiet green, and water that goes where it is supposed to, no longer stagnant and growing algae.

That direction is what makes them worth keeping, because in most of these cases, the added mineral was a trace, and the response is out of all proportion to it. The most coherent reading is that the water may be doing the work itself, restoring the exchange, redox, and hydration that let charge, minerals, and carbon act together again. That is what a geohydrological return framework would predict, and it is what these scattered images, taken together, appear to show.

Appearing is not proving, and I have not asked them to prove anything. Each is a testable claim dressed in the clothes of an anecdote, and each could be properly set up with matched controls, standardized dosing, and blinded measurements by anyone willing to do the work.

So I will not end by telling you what they mean. I do not fully know. I know only that the same direction kept arriving in fifty different ways, and that when the same result appears from enough different directions, it becomes hard to explain them all away. What to make of it from here is no longer mine to decide.

It belongs to whoever picks up the next glass of water and looks.

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What California Attorney General Rob Bonta, whose ass we just kicked in court, probably looks like today.

Last night I received a call from my amazing lawyer, Rick Jaffe, who also represented Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski back in the day during the FDA’s decades-long persecution of him, which I wrote about previously. Anyway, he called me with some big news: a federal judge had just signed an order that, four years ago, I thought I would never get.

In the case Kory v. Bastard, err, I mean Bonta, senior United States District Judge William B. Shubb granted our renewed motion for a preliminary injunction and ordered not only California’s Attorney General but also the Medical Board of California and the Osteopathic Medical Board, as well as ANYONE acting on their behalf, to stop investigating us, stop prosecuting us, stop harassing us. Most importantly, stop threatening our licenses over any professional opinions we might share with our own patients about Covid-19, the “vaccines,” ivermectin, anything. The order names me and my two colleagues, Dr. Le Trinh Hoang and Dr. Brian Tyson.

Let me remind you what this fight was about, because it represents one of the most glaring absurdities perpetrated during the Covid clown show.

In 2022, California passed AB 2098, a law that made it professional misconduct for a physician to give a patient Covid advice that departed from the government’s position. Let me repeat that. In the supposed United States of America (which I started to call the United States of Pharma early on in Covid), American physicians in that state, where I was licensed at the time, would have been literally forced to spew state propaganda in our patients’ ears or we would have lost our licenses. Not for fraud. Not for malpractice. No, it would have been for having a different medical opinion from that of our “beloved,” “un-captured” (yeah, right) government health agencies led by Saint Fauci (who, in a beautiful twist of fate, is in a contempt hearing today).

The penalty would have been our licenses, which is to say our careers, our livelihoods, and our ability to care for the people who came to us precisely because we would tell them the truth as we saw it. The state took the most personal conversation in medicine, the one between a doctor and a frightened patient, and tried to put its own words in our mouths, with our licenses held as collateral to make sure we complied.

We sued. And, incredibly to me at the time, we initially lost.

In April 2024, this very same judge initially denied our motion, based on the theory that when a doctor speaks to a patient, that speech is really just “conduct,” and conduct the state is free to regulate. Yup. Under that logic, the most important speech a physician ever delivers, the counsel we give at the bedside, carries less First Amendment protection than a billboard. So we said $%#! that and kept going.

Finally, the ground shifted, and it shifted at the Supreme Court. But it wasn’t easy because our appeal was denied by Justice Kagan and then a petition for certiorari was met with… ten months of silence. That is because they were considering a similar case, that of Chiles v. Salazar, which was finally decided this past March. There, the Court provided what I like to call “correction and direction” to Judge Shubb by holding that a professional’s speech to a client is still speech, protected by the First Amendment, and not some lesser category of “conduct” that the government can freely script. That decision pulled the foundation out from under the ruling against us. So we went back to the same courtroom and asked again. This time the answer was yes.

To learn of all the shenanigans pulled by the Medical Board and the state of California, as well as all the barriers that Attorney Rick Jaffe had to overcome, please read his post about the case, titled “The Doctor Will Speak To You Now.” It is excellent.

The judge was careful to point out that this was not a license for doctors to lie or to harm. The order leaves the boards every power they should have if a doctor does that. For sure, they can still go after genuine fraud, and should. They can still discipline actual negligent treatment, real prescribing violations, and a true failure of informed consent.

What they can no longer do is punish us for telling our own patients the truth as we saw it: that in our medical judgment the state was coercing and mandating its citizens into receiving toxic, lethal, ineffective, illogical, and experimental gene therapies, and that we would not pretend otherwise. We continue to have the freedom, even in Clownifornia, to both hold and freely express opinions that contradict those of the priesthood within public health and academia. The court even said, in so many words, that the boards may not dress up a viewpoint prosecution as a “standard of care” or “informed consent” case. That was always the trick, and the judge saw through it.

This is a preliminary injunction, which means the full fight over the merits continues. But a preliminary injunction is not a small thing because a federal court does not issue one unless it has concluded we are likely to win, and it protects us right now, today, from the machine that spent years trying to grind down doctors who would not read from the state’s script. First they took my specialty certifications, then they were going to go after my license to practice. While this case was being litigated, I smartly decided not to renew my California one, because of the domino effect: if you lose your license in one state, the others could, and probably would, follow. Rick Jaffe just told me to go ahead and re-apply, but I won’t, for reasons not the least of which is the $1,500 fee California charges. Know that in other states, the fee is around $500. What a state.

The sad reality of it all is that we had to learn that a government that can tell your doctor what he is allowed to say can basically tell your doctor to lie to you. The First Amendment exists for exactly this moment, when the official position is loud, certain, and literally dead wrong. It allows for what were a few handfuls of doctors to publicly warn you. That is, if you cared to listen to what they turned us into, i.e., “discredited doctors.” We were told to fall in line or lose everything. We said no (or, in my case, the emphatic New Yorker version of no). And a federal judge just told the State of California that saying no was our right (including the New Yorker version, although he didn’t state that specifically).

Free speech prevailed. We do not have to parrot pharma-government nonsense to keep our licenses. That principle was worth every day of this fight.

My deepest thanks to our attorney, Rick Jaffe, who never stopped; to my co-plaintiffs, Le Trinh Hoang and Brian Tyson; and to Children’s Health Defense, who fought for every one of us through COVID, harder still since, and for years before it ever arrived. Every one of them stood in the fire beside me.

And I am dropping another donation to both Rick Jaffe and CHD right now, because who knows when you or I will need them for whatever evil comes up with next. I am just so sick of the persistent trampling of almost every principle of freedom we hold dear, and it helps me sleep at night to know that we have some of the smartest, most dogged, and deeply principled people fighting for us at every turn.

More soon.

*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about, your support is greatly appreciated.

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Note to readers:

One discovery consumed my last year: a volcanic mineral extract made by the Japanese scientist Shimanishi fifty years ago — the “Golden Elixir” of the old traditions, made real. It led me to write two three books, retire my patient panel (but not from Leading Edge Clinic), and start a company with one mission: to carry this forgotten chemistry off the page. Aurmina for the water we drink, and Primora Bio for the water our soil, crops, and animals crave.

From Research to Practice - Links Below Image

Earth’s Living Water- Its History, Its Ruin, and the Way Back

The Silent Aquifer - Humanity’s Unfolding Food and Water Crisis

The War on Chlorine Dioxide - The Medicine That Could End Medicine

Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water

Primora Bio - Bringing Life Back To Soil

Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States

The War on Ivermectin- The Medicine That Could have Ended the Pandemic

The Blueprint of Life - The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health

Medical Musings - A View From the Inside Of Modern Medicine

If you are here, either you were strolling by and stumbled in, or were launched here by the QR code at the opening of Earth’s Living Water black-and-white Photographic Appendix. Either way, welcome and enjoy the color photo version.

The chapters of this book argue from data, mechanism, and pattern. The images that follow argue from something simpler: what happened when people tried it themselves. These are not controlled experiments, and they are not presented as proof. They are visual records, from gardens, fields, kitchens, clinics, and backyards, of the kind of signal that arrives before formal evidence does. The reader can see what the observers saw and decide what to make of it.

Where a case touches health, a burn, a sunburn, a wound, a sample of blood, it is a record of what someone observed, not a treatment, a protocol, or advice, and nothing here has been shown safe or effective for any condition.

Appendix 1: Potato Experiment: Two Glasses, Two Fates

In one glass, a potato rotted. In the other, it grew.

The experiment, submitted by my colleague Kacper Postawski, was simple. Two potatoes were placed in identical glasses. One glass contained ordinary tap water. The other contained water treated with a Themarox-derived mineral solution. There was no soil, no fertilizer, no added nutrient program, and no biological system beyond the potato itself. The glasses were then left undisturbed for weeks.

In ordinary tap water, the result followed the expected path: clouding, foul odor, tissue softening, structural breakdown, and decay. In the treated water, the system behaved differently. The water remained clearer. The potato retained its form. Roots developed into a dense mesh, and a green shoot emerged upward.

That difference does not look like fertilization in the conventional sense. There was no soil reserve to unlock and no added macronutrient program to explain new growth. What it more closely suggests is a change in the medium’s organizing behavior.

Within the geohydrological return framework, the point is not that the treated water “fed” the potato in a crude input-output sense. The point is that water can either permit breakdown or support organization. Carbon was present in both potatoes. The difference was the medium’s ability to coordinate that carbon into structure rather than allow it to drift toward microbial decomposition, odor, and loss.

It captures the larger claim in miniature: life does not depend on elements alone. It depends on the conditions that allow elements, charge, minerals, water, and carbon to remain in relationship long enough for structure to emerge.

Appendix 2: The Accidental Lilac

An accidental experiment cannot be staged. That is what makes it worth recording.

My partner, Scott Marsland, noticed the difference in blooming of his two side-by-side lilac bushes, and realized that when he had performed the foliar sprays with treated water, due to the angle at which he was spraying, the bush on the right received much more of the treated water than the bush on the left. This accidental experiment suggested a dose-response relationship between the water and the bushes’ flowering: the one on the right in full bloom, the one on the left in sparser bloom.

Then, a few weeks later, when the bushes were no longer in bloom, he noticed a marked difference in the color and vigor of the bushes: on the left, the tips of the leaves were yellow and curled, while those on the right were deep green and straight.

Scott has lived in that house over twenty years, and in all of them neither bush had ever come close to blooming like the one on the right, and the two had never come in differently. Same corner, same soil, same light, same two plants, over twenty springs running, and the only new thing this year was Rock-Water. Nature set the experiment up: two bushes alike in everything but one, how much treated water reached each, and the bloom tracked the water. More water, more flower. Less water, less. That is a dose-response, and it is the oldest evidence there is.

Appendix 3: The Basil Plant Race

These photographs were taken eighteen days apart. Nothing changed between them except the water.

Submitted by my colleague Jeff, producer and director of The Universal Antidote documentary and author of the Curious Outlier Substack, the first case involved two established basil plants grown side by side under matched conditions: same soil, same light, same fertilizer, and the same watering volume and schedule.

The sole intentional variable was the water.

One basil plant received filtered well water. The other received the same water treated with a 10% Themarox-derived solution. No meaningful amount of mineral nutrient was added beyond what both plants already received from the soil and Miracle-Gro fertilizer.

Dec 6, 2025, start of the race:

Dec 24, 2025:

Yet the plants diverged.

The basil receiving treated water showed accelerated growth, deeper coloration, increased leaf density, and greater structural rigidity. It looked like improved access: as if minerals already present in the soil became more biologically available, and carbon already available to the plant could be fixed more efficiently into living structure rather than dissipated through stress, inefficiency, or weak growth.

As a side-by-side observation, it fits the larger geohydrological return framework. Under an input-only model, such a small change in mineral mass should not have produced a meaningful visual difference. Under a model where the water restores mineral access, the direction of the response is exactly what one would expect if the water itself helped restore the relationships among minerals, roots, microbes, charge, and carbon fixation.

Appendix 4: A Lawn Blasts Off

She did not design an experiment. She planted a lawn and watched what happened.

A home gardener decided to seed her lawn with grass. In the photos below, you can see a completely grassless lawn in March, and she seeded the lawn in sections starting on April 29th and finishing May 2nd. She sprayed the grass twice in the first few days, and then again at about a week.

She reported that every morning she would get up, have a coffee, and “watch the lawn grow.”

As you can see below, within eight days, the seeded area was completely covered in green grass, whereas the instructions on the seed bag stated that it would take between 14 and 21 days, a growth speed which matches many of the studies reported by Shimanishi and other agronomists.

Appendix 5: A Cactus Sleeps For 50 Years

This observation was submitted by Brent Hanson, a patient of my partner Scott, who has been experimenting with Themarox-conditioned water in his home. He sent it because the plant in question had a history.

My name is Brent Hanson, and I have been experimenting with water treated with Scott Marsland’s mineral technology in different areas of my life. Recently, I decided to try it with a very special plant in our home: a Christmas cactus that once belonged to my grandmother. Our family believes this cactus has been with us for roughly forty to fifty years, and in all that time none of us can remember seeing it bloom.

After I began consistently watering it with diluted Themarox-treated water, something remarkable happened. For the first time in decades, the old family Christmas cactus produced a healthy, vibrant bloom.

It was a small flower, but a big moment for our family, because this plant is one of the last living connections we have to my grandmother.

I can’t claim this proves cause and effect, but the timing was striking. After decades of silence, the plant responded soon after I started using this kind of treated water. For me, that first blossom is more than just a flower on an old cactus; it feels like a symbol of hope and renewal in my own healing journey. It reminded me that even when change seems impossible, life can surprise us in gentle, unexpected ways.

Brent Hanson

Appendix 6: Seven Doves Visit in the Middle of Winter

Recently, my partner Scott Marsland sent me a uniquely fascinating visual anecdote. His wife, Kerrie, filled a water bowl with Themarox-treated water and placed it on the front porch side rail of their home in Ithaca, New York.

Two days later, in the middle of January, they saw seven doves congregating around the bowl and drinking from it. That alone made the scene striking. What made it memorable was the context: they had maintained a bird water bowl for more than twenty years and had heated it during winter for the previous three years, yet they had never seen this event before.

It belongs here because it is the kind of small, unexpected field signal that prompts deeper questions. And it was not the only one. A reader wrote to my colleague Matt Bakos with a similar account about her housecat: when she filled the upstairs bowl with treated water, the cat stopped drinking from its usual bowl in the basement. When she switched the bowls, moving the treated water down to the basement, the cat abandoned the upstairs bowl and followed it down. Neither the doves nor the cat proves anything. What both raise is whether living systems can sometimes register differences in water, in redox or hydration, before our instruments are brought to bear. It is hard to forget: seven doves, in the middle of winter, gathering around a bowl of treated water where none had gathered before.

Appendix 7: A Field That Had Given Up

When Patrick Rascon started this trial, there were no earthworms. By the end of the season, there were.

Temecula, California, is a semi-arid transition zone that looks favorable on paper and proves difficult in practice: low seasonal rainfall, hot desiccating summers, and old, calcium-rich, carbonate-heavy soils with little organic matter and fragile microbial life. It is not a low-mineral environment. It is a low-availability one.

The minerals are present but locked: iron chlorosis shows up even in iron-rich ground, magnesium and phosphorus get immobilized by carbonate chemistry, and trace elements circulate poorly despite an abundant inventory. That made it a useful test of the question at the center of this book: can a degraded soil-water system recover when mineral access is restored from the water side rather than forced in from the fertilizer side?

Rascon, who produces a Shimanishi-derived solution called Volcanna Rain, reported soil that was dry, dusty, and biologically exhausted, with no detectable earthworm activity and little visible life except goat heads (Tribulus terrestris). Goat heads are a warning flag: they thrive where soil has been disturbed, its structure collapsed, its organic carbon lost. Worse, the only abundant organism he found was cutworms, whose success signals a field whose biology has fallen behind the speed at which the crop is being asked to grow.

The intervention was essentially irrigation with mineral-treated water made from Volcanna Rain. No compost, no fertilizer program, no mineral blends, no aggressive inoculant. Early on, the field behaved like degraded soil: poor vigor, high insect pressure, uneven growth. Then it shifted. The cutworms disappeared. Earthworms appeared and thrived. Pest pressure fell so far that no pesticide was used. Roots established, plant architecture strengthened, leaf density and color rose, and multiple vegetable varieties flourished at once.

Just after mid-season, small amounts of fish emulsion and limited microbial support were added, far too little to explain the magnitude and uniformity of the response across crops. Weather and unknown variables may have contributed. What makes the case notable is the disproportion between input and response. Under a fertilizer-only model, that disproportion is hard to explain. Under the model this book proposes, it is not: the water may have been restoring the exchange and redox chemistry through which soil, water, minerals, microbes, and roots work together again.

Cucumbers as a Comparison

Rascon withheld the mineral solution from his weekly foliar spray on one row of cucumbers, an informal comparison against the treated crops beside them. The difference was striking. Where the nearby tomatoes were vivid green, the cucumber leaves were yellow-brown, curled, and stressed, and mold appeared on the cucumbers while the tomatoes stayed clean.

About half the cucumber crop never developed the color he expected, and many were flavorless and spotted. Where the treated water was included, the crop was greener, sturdier, and more resilient; where it was withheld, the signs of deficiency and stress stayed visible.

Economics

For a half-acre plot over a six-month season, with the solution as the near-sole input, Rascon estimated roughly $50 per month at wholesale and $100 at retail; for fields needing only foliar application, roughly $25 to $50 per month. The point is not merely that the input was cheap. It is that a response like this, if reproduced under controlled conditions, would suggest a different model of farming: not overwhelming degraded soil with more inputs, but restoring the chemistry through which soil, water, minerals, microbes, and plants function together.

Appendix 8: The Pain Simply Stopped

A burn is a sudden collapse of order at an interface: within seconds, heat disrupts membranes, denatures proteins, floods the tissue with inflammatory mediators and oxidative stress, and sets the nerve endings firing. Unlike soil degradation or chronic illness, it has a clear beginning, which is what makes it instructive here.

My wife suffered a significant burn from a clothing steamer. The skin blistered almost immediately, and the pain was intense, and from experience with burns like it, I expected days of severe pain and a week or more before the injury settled. Only days earlier, a practitioner of sulfated mineral balneotherapy had taught me how to apply mineral solutions to acute skin injuries. Acting on that, we put a Themarox-derived mineral solution directly on the burn.

The pain resolved completely within about an hour, with no anesthetic, no numbing agent, no dressing, and no analgesic on the skin. The pain simply stopped. Over the following weeks the injury healed faster than I would have expected for a burn of that severity, ending as little more than a faint pink mark.

The timing and magnitude were unusual. It appears to have changed the wound environment: a sulfated mineral solution can influence ionic buffering, surface charge, oxidative stress, hydration structure, and local redox balance all at once. In a burn, the chemistry around the nerve endings drives much of the pain signaling, so if that environment shifts quickly, the signaling can fall faster than any tissue could actually heal. The healing that followed may have been the downstream consequence of a wound that was less inflamed, less oxidatively stressed, and better able to repair.

It is the same principle the rest of this book has followed, now at the scale of injured skin: when the medium around damaged tissue becomes better at buffering charge, managing redox, and supporting repair, the tissue itself changes. A single burn on a single person is a small thing to build on. But it is that principle showing itself in the flesh, and the first place in this book we catch it doing so.

Appendix 9: Sunburn Before a Wedding

I include this brief case from my practice’s charge nurse, who developed a sunburn while tanning in preparation for her wedding. After she returned home, she became concerned about how it would look for the wedding, so she soaked gauze in the liquid mineral solution and applied it two or three times over the next few hours. When she checked the mirror after the last application, the redness had dropped sharply.

The picture on the right was taken approximately three hours after the first application. The timing and degree of visible change made the case memorable, especially in light of the other tissue-response observations described in this appendix.

Appendix 10: Twenty Years of Photographs

The photographs below document single cases. This practitioner has many dozens more.

I later met an integrative practitioner who, like Nojima in his early observations in skin conditions, had used mineral-based approaches in her clinical practice for more than twenty years. In one conversation, she described repeated, large-magnitude improvements in dermatologic and tissue-repair cases.

What makes this practitioner’s work notable is its long duration and the sustained use of photographic documentation. Over many years, she photographed patients before and after participation in her programs, capturing visible changes in skin conditions, wounds, infections, burns, and musculoskeletal injuries.

Her consistent view has been that minerals function less as direct “treatments” in the pharmaceutical sense and more as facilitators of the biological terrain. In that view, the minerals are not forcing a single pathway. They are helping alter the medium in which circulation, inflammation, repair, and tissue responses unfold.

The following sequences are a visual record of tissue change over time within a mineral-supported clinical environment.

Live blood analysis is not a validated diagnostic modality, and I do not use it here as proof of disease, treatment response, or clinical benefit. At most, it provides a qualitative visual window into blood behavior under a microscope: erythrocyte spacing, aggregation, plasma debris, and the general appearance of the aqueous environment surrounding the cells.

Normal red blood cells under a microscope:

In one informal observation, a patient was examined before and after drinking sixteen ounces of water treated with a diluted Themarox-derived solution. The second microscopy image was obtained approximately forty-five minutes later. The initial field showed erythrocyte aggregation, rouleaux formation, and visible plasma debris. After hydration, the field appeared visibly different: red blood cells were more dispersed, aggregation was reduced, and cellular outlines appeared more distinct.

Still, the observation is worth recording because the visual change occurred in the exact domain where this book’s mechanism would predict early movement: the aqueous interface between cells.

Red blood cell aggregation is influenced by hydration status, plasma proteins, ionic strength, zeta potential, surface charge, oxidative stress, and the electrochemical properties of the surrounding fluid. Blood is not simply cells suspended in inert water. It is a charged, mineralized, protein-rich, redox-active fluid in continuous motion. If conditioned water can influence charge behavior, ionic organization, oxidative balance, or hydration efficiency, then changes in erythrocyte dispersion would be a plausible place to look.

These observations suggest a possible visual signal in plasma-cell organization after Themarox-conditioned hydration, a signal that belongs in future controlled studies using standardized sampling, blinded image analysis, zeta-potential measurements, viscosity testing, inflammatory markers, oxidative-stress assays, and matched untreated-water controls.

The importance of the observation is not that it proves the claim. It shows where the claim can be tested.

Appendix 12: Standing Irrigation Water

Standing irrigation water on a clay-soil Asian pear orchard, before and after surface treatment with mineral-conditioned water. After flood irrigation, well water had stood on this clay ground for roughly two weeks without draining, long enough to grow algae across its surface, a sign of how completely the sealed soil had stopped accepting it. Patrick estimated the standing puddle at 100 to 200 gallons. He then sprayed the surface with four gallons of well water into which he had mixed sixteen ounces of his product, Volcanna Rain, the standard dose for treating about 125 gallons of water, so the amount applied was calibrated to treat roughly what was standing there. A stick was set to mark the water level.

Within six hours, the water had begun to penetrate visibly, and by the next evening, the ground had absorbed it almost completely. The soil had not changed in the interval; only the water entering it had. Photographs courtesy of Patrick Rascon; recorded as a personal communication.

Conclusion

Read one of these at a time, and it is easy to explain away. Read them together, and a direction appears. Across basil, Christmas cactus, potatoes, lawn, field crops, birds, burns, wounds, skin, and blood, the same movement keeps showing up. When water is treated with a biotite-derived sulfated mineral complex, living systems repeatedly turn toward greater organization: clearer water instead of foul breakdown, roots instead of decay, green leaves instead of chlorosis, soil life instead of absence, repair instead of prolonged inflammation.

That direction is what makes them worth keeping, because in most of these cases, the added mineral was a trace, and the response is out of all proportion to it. The most coherent reading is that the water may be doing the work itself, restoring the exchange, redox, and hydration that let charge, minerals, and carbon act together again. That is what a geohydrological return framework would predict, and it is what these scattered images, taken together, appear to show.

Appearing is not proving, and I have not asked them to prove anything. Each is a testable claim wearing the clothes of an anecdote, and each could be properly set up with matched controls, standardized dosing, and blinded measurement by anyone willing to do the work. I am not asking these pictures to convince you. I am asking them to point.

So I will not end by telling you what they mean. I do not fully know. I know only that the same direction kept arriving through fifty different living systems, and that when the same result appears from enough different directions, it becomes hard to explain them all away. What to make of it from here is no longer mine to decide.

It belongs to whoever picks up the next glass of water and looks.

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*Excerpted from The Silent Aquifer, Chapter 48: Who Decides What’s True: How Modern Medicine Buries What Works

Paul Marik was the most-published practicing intensive-care physician in the history of the field. In 2017, he reported something that sounded impossible: a cheap, safe combination of vitamin C, hydrocortisone, and thiamine that pulled septic patients back from near-certain death. I initially dismissed it, as almost everyone did. Then I used it, and watched the dying sit up and ask for breakfast. This is the story of that discovery, of why the trials “failed,” and of what sepsis really is underneath: a form of scurvy.

The Reflex

My first major collision with the modern medical evidence system began with the fight over intravenous vitamin C in sepsis, alongside Professor Paul Marik. Like most of the critical care community, I reflexively dismissed Paul’s 2017 study. A couple of vitamins and a modest dose of a stress hormone reversing multi-organ failure was simply absurd. Especially the magnitude of the response: he was reporting one of the largest reductions in mortality in a critical illness, or any illness really, that I had ever heard of. In my whole career, only one intervention had produced a bigger drop: putting paddles on a heart in ventricular fibrillation.

My dismissal was not really my own. The colleagues I respected had waved the study off, so I did too; that is how the reflex works. And the form of the study gave me cover: a small, single-center, retrospective before-and-after study, exactly the kind of evidence I had been trained to file under “interesting but unproven.” Soon after came the part that, at the time, sealed it away for me for good.

Marik’s hospital, hearing the recoveries its own staff could not quite believe — patients, families, and nurses all describing the same thing — sent its media office to bring in a local television crew, which interviewed Paul and the nurses on camera. Someone forwarded me a clip ( I play one at the end of this post). Paul was talking about how “he never intended to discover the cure for sepsis,” and I remember thinking how bizarre that was: a physician, even one as widely known and respected as Paul, on a local news station, being interviewed about discovering the cure for sepsis, all off a single, just-published retrospective paper that I was taught couldn’t “prove” anything. The rules said that real proof only arrives at the end of a long, sober process, in a large, prospective, double-blind, randomized controlled trial published in one of the high-impact medical journals, not in a local ABC news affiliate broadcast from Norfolk, Virginia. So I did what my training had taught me. I ignored it.

That is, until about a year and a half later. I was taking care of an elderly Chinese man with septic shock in multi-organ failure, rapidly approaching death, and his family surrounded me, begging me through an interpreter to try something, anything. The memory of Paul’s protocol came back, so I treated the man with it. He died anyway; I had known he would. Nothing else could have saved him at that point. But because it had been so easy to do, and was super safe and really cheap, I figured I would try it again, since I had always liked learning about and trying new approaches to treating disease. The next patient was a woman in septic shock who, hours later, had to be rushed to the operating room for debridement of necrotizing fasciitis, a disease almost uniformly fatal without surgery. As a result, I did not get to observe her for long because she was transferred to the surgical critical care service, and even though I asked my surgical colleagues to continue it, they didn’t (surgeons are so much smarter than medical doctors that they generally ignore our treatment recommendations, because if it were something that was indicated, they would have thought of it first). Forgive me, for I digress.

The Man Eating Scrambled Eggs

Anyway, in those first few hours I thought I saw something: a slowing, a softening, a touch of steadiness returning to her blood pressure and heart rate. It was enough to make me try it once more the next day, when, during rounds, a man was rushed into the ICU from the bone marrow transplant floor with new-onset septic shock, four of four blood culture bottles growing E. coli, and a white count of zero. Not low. Zero. He was breathing fast, his oxygen and pressor needs were escalating rapidly, delirium was setting in, his urine bag was bone dry, and his wife was becoming increasingly frantic at the bedside.

He proceeded to turn around with a speed and magnitude that I had never seen before.

So much so that the next morning when his transplant specialist came to see him in my ICU, he found him sitting up out of bed eating scrambled eggs. I was leading rounds, Dr. House-style, on the other side of the unit, and he walked quickly over to me; I will never forget his face. “What the hell did you do to that guy? I was sure I’d find him with a tube and a circuit” — meaning a ventilator and dialysis.

It went that way again and again: pressure steadying, urine returning, color coming back, heart rates falling, minds clearing. I began discharging people I had been near-certain would die.

But not always. That is the part I have to be honest about, because it confused me at the time and also because I had started to get cocky. Some patients barely moved. A few showed nothing at all, and I could not see what separated them from the man eating scrambled eggs. I told myself it was luck, or that they were simply too far gone, and I kept going. It would take my own study to show me exactly why that was happening.

Either way, I became obsessed with what Paul had started calling the “iHAT” protocol (intravenous hydrocortisone, ascorbic acid, and thiamine). I tried to learn everything I could about it.

A Thousand Emails

Soon after the first few patient experiences, I reached out to Paul. Our first conversation ran for hours, and we became close colleagues quickly. He told me he had by then received more than a thousand emails from emergency and ICU physicians around the world describing the same dramatic recoveries.

Two things from that call have stayed with me ever since. He said his ICU length of stay for septic patients had plummeted to a little more than a day, “Just like my bone marrow transplant patient,” I shouted, probably too loudly. Then he said, more cynically, that he sensed the hospital’s nephrologists were getting annoyed because his unit had largely stopped calling them for dialysis. Unsurprisingly, dialysis begun in hospital is billed by the nephrologist for every day the patient stays on it, and a patient discharged still dialyzing becomes an outpatient on dialysis, which is a revenue stream that does not end. In the sickest cohort of patients, such as those included in Paul’s study, the data showed exactly why. Among treated patients with acute kidney injury, ten percent needed dialysis. In the control group, thirty-seven percent did.

He then told me that a random data contractor from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), managing one of the largest health datasets in the country, had, out of nowhere and unprompted, sent his hospital’s CEO the below data chart, showing a sudden, progressive, and eventually massive reduction in his hospital’s sepsis mortality, beginning right after his ICU team began using it systematically around February of 2016.

Sepsis mortality at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, Q4 2015–Q1 2017. Redrawn from a chart prepared by Truven Health Analytics. Shaded band: the U.S. benchmark range for the period, from 14.4 percent (claims-based, in-hospital deaths only) to 21.2 percent (clinical criteria, counting hospice discharges).

To this day, the stories still find me. A few years ago, my dear friend and colleague, A Midwestern Doctor, called me about a loved one who had been admitted with sepsis. "I never realized sepsis was so serious," they said. "In the hospital where I worked, the intensivists always gave IV vitamin C, and no one ever got that sick." Sit with that: a physician who had worked in a hospital where the protocol was routine had never seen how deadly sepsis usually is, because where they worked, it wasn't.

Paul and I quickly became phone pals, and I started to learn even more fascinating details, like the fact that, somewhere back in our ancestry, humans developed a mutation in the gene for the enzyme that makes vitamin C, a trait shared only with guinea pigs and fruit bats. Which makes calling it a vitamin an accident of our own biology — for almost every other mammal it is something the liver produces on demand, and studies show that all other mammals produce large amounts of it under stress or illness. Paul made that argument in print, in a paper titled “Vitamin C: an essential ‘stress hormone’ during sepsis.”

Then I learned that ICU patients, particularly septic ones, typically enter the ICU disturbingly deficient in vitamin C due to their bodies consuming it (and not being able to make it anew) while battling whatever is ailing them. In one 2017 study, they found that 88% of patients with septic shock had levels below the minimum range, and 38% had levels that met the criteria for scurvy. Worse, all the patients in the study received standard repletion doses, either oral or IV, and their levels didn’t budge at all during their stay, meaning they were consuming vitamin C as fast as they were getting it, so their levels stayed in the basement the entire time they were in the ICU (or until they died).

*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about, your support is greatly appreciated.

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Your Septic Patients Have Scurvy

I am still disturbed that, despite papers showing severe vitamin C deficiency is near universal in severe sepsis, there is no national or international guideline or protocol to restore levels to normal. If potassium or magnesium drops below the lower limit of normal in an ICU, it is immediately repleted by the nurse, authorized by order sets that do not even require them to contact the doctor before infusing. They do this immediately and routinely. Yet, to this day, the entire field of critical care lets patients languish in severe vitamin C deficiency without a second thought.

Paul did what he could by publishing a paper whose title was not subtle: “Doctor — your septic patients have scurvy!”

Unsurprisingly, advanced scurvy and septic shock present near identically, at least in terms of the collapse of vascular tone. Which makes perfect sense, since the main catecholamines that maintain vascular tone all require vitamin C in order to do so. I remember being shocked when I first realized that I had spent twenty years treating scurvy… without treating scurvy.

A Stupid Electron Deficiency

I understand now what that collapse of vascular tone actually is, and it follows directly from the chemistry I have focused on in this book. A body holds its own blood pressure by making catecholamines — above all norepinephrine, the very vasopressor the ICU spends its nights infusing by the bagful. And it builds that norepinephrine from dopamine, with an enzyme called dopamine β-hydroxylase. That enzyme cannot take a single step without vitamin C.

The reason is redox, the same transferring and accepting of electrons that I followed through soil and water and minerals. The critical enzyme for making norepinephrine has a copper atom at its center which does its work by giving up an electron; the instant it does, it is left oxidized, spent, unable to fire again until something restores what it lost. Vitamin C is that electron donor, the reducing agent that hands the copper back its electron and resets the enzyme for the next cycle of production. Vitamin C is simply the source of electrons that lets a human being manufacture the very drug we pour into them when they can no longer make it themselves.

So a septic patient who has burned through his vitamin C has run out of the reducing power to make his own norepinephrine, and his pressure falls for the same reason a scorbutic sailor’s did three hundred years ago. When I pushed ascorbate into that patient, I was not giving a vitamin; I was just giving him some electrons because he was suffering from a stupid electron deficiency. I did not think in those terms then. I do now, and I have come to see redox, the arithmetic of electrons lost and regained, as one of the quiet governing laws of the living world, the body no exception.

The Ambush in Belfast

Those were the most satisfying and inspiring years of my career. Until they ended when I finally met Paul in person, at a major critical care conference in Belfast right before Covid hit the US in January 2020, where investigators from Australia presented the highly anticipated results of the VITAMINS trial, the world’s first in a series of large, expensive RCTs of IV vitamin C in severe sepsis that were done to confirm Paul’s ground-shaking study.

The trial found no significant improvement in time alive and free of vasopressor support when IV vitamin C and thiamine were added to hydrocortisone; mortality also did not differ significantly between the groups. Though we did not know it yet, that trial was the opening salvo in what would become a years-long war on IV vitamin C in sepsis.

Both of us had come expecting a celebration: a validation of our research and advocacy. Instead, Paul was set up. He had been invited to “moderate” the very session in which the trial would be presented, and was not told its results until we were already on our way to Ireland. He was already at the airport; I was still packing at home, and I will never, ever forget that phone call and the next two days leading up to the session, where we put together a defense of his work and results. We used my recent data to mount a damning critique of the trial, but he was professionally humiliated all the same. On a world stage, in front of an entire field that he had been one of the most widely respected leaders of.

Six Hours

My study easily exposed the flaw in the trial, and it was shockingly simple: timing. My team had analyzed the sepsis outcomes on my own ICU service, a seventeen-member unit I was chief of, from the day “some of us” began using Paul’s protocol. I recall only about four of my seventeen colleagues were moved enough by my lectures and advocacy to change their practice, one of whom was my wife at the time, so let’s say three.

In our published analysis, after adjustment for severity of illness, we found a large and statistically significant reduction in overall ICU mortality between docs who used the protocol and those who didn’t, from 26.0 percent to 11.4 percent. But to Paul and me, that wasn’t the real story. In patients who received iHAT within six hours of arrival to the Emergency Room, not a single person died in the ICU. The benefit then faded the longer treatment was delayed, and although we still saw improved survival up to 12 hours, the “statistically significant difference” was isolated to those who were treated within six. Another striking observation is that we saw no mortality benefit among patients transferred from other hospitals, who were already far along in their illness. I had finally figured out why some of my patients responded little, while others bounced back like springs.

The way I have come to explain it is this. A patient in early sepsis is Humpty Dumpty on the wall, wobbling. Give him vitamin C in that hour, and he rights himself and stays up there. Once he has gone over the edge and broken — once the organ failure is established — you can bring everything you have, and it will not matter. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men. That is what an intensive care unit is.

Which relates to a piece of this that never gets mentioned, and that I have come to think is the most important part of the whole story. Nearly all of Paul’s patients were started on his protocol soon after arrival to the Emergency Room because of how his hospital was organized. A patient who arrived there in septic shock was assigned to an ICU service almost immediately, which meant the intensive care team came down and wrote the treatment orders themselves, while the patient was still in the ER.

Almost nowhere else works that way. In most hospitals, emergency physicians assess the patient, stabilize them, begin treatment, and then call the ICU for evaluation. The ICU service then comes down to evaluate and decide whether the patient is sick enough to be given one of its beds. Learning to make that call was one of the core skills I had to develop, and I made it thousands of times, because intensive care beds are in short supply and someone has to triage them. It is a defensible system. It is also slow at every step. The US median length of stay in an ER prior to ICU admission
(a figure which varies widely by hospital, day of week, time of day, and ER volume) is approximately 4.6 hours, and since length of stay data tend to be right skewed with a long tail of very long waits, the mean is always higher than the median, so say… about 6 hours.

What separated Paul’s patients from everyone else’s was not only what he gave them. It was that his hospital, without intending to, had removed the delay. Every trial that followed set out to test what he gave. Not a single one of them came close to reproducing when he was able to give it.

Which is why Paul and I were enraged in Belfast. In the Australian trial, patients were not treated with vitamin C until 29 hours after admission to the ICU so it is anyone’s guess what the actual delay was, given the ER stay before transfer to the ICU. Just on its own, that delay should be considered malpractice: withholding a potentially life-saving therapy for over a day in a life-threatening medical emergency? Either way, treatment was started long past the window in which it could have saved a life.

The trials that followed all shared the same flaw and added new ones, such as including patients with surgical sepsis or those transferred from other hospitals. Every one of them enrolled patients who had already fallen. Ultimately, the critical care journals and professional societies settled into a consensus: Paul’s protocol was ineffective in severe sepsis, one of the leading causes of death in the world.

The World’s First Randomized Controlled Trial Was a Vitamin C Trial

There is an irony here so complete it feels staged. The modern randomized controlled trial, the very instrument raised over Paul's head to pronounce vitamin C useless, began its life as a vitamin C trial.

In 1747, aboard HMS Salisbury, a Scottish naval surgeon named James Lind ran what is still called the first controlled clinical trial in the history of medicine. He took twelve sailors dying of scurvy, matched them by severity, split them into six pairs, and gave each pair a different remedy—cider, vinegar, seawater, sulfuric acid, a spiced paste, and, to the last two, two oranges and a lemon a day. The citrus pair all but rose from the dead: one fit for duty within six days, the other recovered enough to nurse the rest. The method we built to find cures like that one was then used, three centuries later, to bury the cure that gave rise to it.

And consider what that cure was worth. Scurvy was the greatest killer of sailors in that era. By the historian Stephen Bown’s estimate, more than two million sailors between Columbus and the coming of steam died of scurvy, more than storms, shipwreck, combat, and every other disease combined. On Commodore George Anson’s voyage around the world, of the roughly twelve hundred men aboard his three ships only three hundred thirty-five came home; almost all the rest were buried at sea with scurvy, while exactly three died in battle. A ship could sail with hundreds and return with a handful, the difference rotting away from a want of citrus no one yet understood.

Here is the part that is as familiar to me as the day is long. Lind proved his cure in 1747. The Royal Navy did not adopt it as standard practice in stocking its ships until 1795, (forty-eight years later!), when Gilbert Blane finally convinced the Admiralty to issue lemon juice to the fleet. And when they did, scurvy all but disappeared from British ships, and healthy crews could hold a blockade of the French coast for years.

Historians draw a straight line from that to the naval supremacy that built the British Empire, which means you can make a serious case that the reason so much of the world speaks English today can be traced back to a bag of lemons and a controlled trial that the establishment ignored for half a century. They buried Lind’s cure for forty-eight years, and it still redrew the map of the world. Paul’s has only been buried for a handful. Imagine the reckoning when that account comes due.

The attacks on Paul did not end in Belfast. A couple of years later, an Australian researcher filed a formal fraud complaint against Paul and demanded that Chest, the prominent journal where he had published his study, retract it. The complaint was investigated, no wrongdoing was found, and the paper still stands. Yet today, if you or someone you love is admitted to a hospital, in the United States or nearly anywhere else, and you ask that they receive Paul's protocol—those missing electrons—you will be denied.

The End of the War

We would have fought every step of that war. But Covid intervened soon after Belfast, and our subsequent and very public dissent from U.S. public health policy during that time ended our academic careers. My initial exit from academics was voluntary; I resigned from the University of Wisconsin within two months of our first COVID patient's arrival, in protest of the institution's initial “supportive care only” approach.

Paul’s was uglier, more traumatic, and more public. He woke up one day to go round in the ICU to find an email that had just been sent to the entire Sentara Norfolk General hospital staff, written by a hospital administrator, announcing a new hospital policy targeting Paul: the memo announced that from that day forward, the hospital formulary would no longer fill any orders for any of the repurposed medicines on our FLCCC protocol for Covid (including IV vitamin C).

In one of the many heartbreaking scenes from the Covid war, many of us will never forget watching Paul break while testifying about that episode in one of Senator Ron Johnson’s Covid roundtables, sobbing, “I had to stand by idly, watching people die!” We all need to remember the history of what was done to Paul, and to all of us. Sen. Johnson’s 4.5 hour roundtable is here, Paul’s must-watch testimony begins at 4:18:55.

Children’s Health Defense provided the funds and legal support for Paul to sue his hospital for “practicing medicine without a license” (at the risk of stating the obvious, a hospital is not a doctor). Sadly, and unsurprisingly in the clown world we now live in, he lost, was terminated, and his clinical career ended. He created a new one by becoming what, to me, is the world’s leading expert in the metabolic theory of cancer and the use of repurposed drugs to treat it. Please support his Substack as his income has been markedly diminished (understatement), or buy his book, Cancer Care for you or any loved one who might benefit.

Ultimately, Paul and I were added to the pile of “discredited, controversial, fringe, quack” doctors. At least we don’t have to plead the 5th when someone asks us what color tie we are wearing.

I now look back on the vitamin C fight as our first rodeo against the establishment. Covid was the last.

Pauling's Ghost

Only later did I realize how closely that pattern echoed what had happened to Linus Pauling, the only two-time individual Nobel Prize winner in history. The clinical work was actually done by Ewan Cameron, a Scottish surgeon at Vale of Leven Hospital; Pauling was his collaborator and his megaphone. Their protocol began with ten grams of vitamin C a day given intravenously for ten days, and only then continued by mouth. They reported that patients with advanced cancer survived several times longer than matched controls.

The Mayo Clinic tested the claim twice, in 1979 and again in 1985, and found nothing. Problem: neither trial gave a single dose of intravenous vitamin C. They gave 10 grams a day, but by mouth.

The dose was not the problem. The route was. Vitamin C swallowed runs into absorption limits that hold blood levels below roughly 300 micromolar no matter how much you take. Infused, it reaches twenty millimolar, more than sixtyfold higher, and at those concentrations it is a pro-oxidant. Low-dose oral vitamin C is an antioxidant. They are not the same intervention, and only one of them was ever formally tested.

The negative results were enough. The consensus hardened into “vitamin C is ineffective in cancer,” and it has held for forty years.

What "Controlled" Really Means

My experience with Paul, and what I later learned about Pauling’s work, changed how I interpret clinical trial reports. It made me hostile to the worship of trial design divorced from biological plausibility, clinical timing, dose, pharmacology, and institutional incentive. When I hear the public told that “high-quality evidence” has spoken, I ask who funded it, how the dose and timing were chosen, and which patients were studied.

Learning those lessons changed me permanently. I can no longer read the word “controlled” in a trial report at face value, because I have watched too many studies in which the only thing truly controlled was the outcome. It became the line Paul Marik and I now use whenever the subject comes up: the only thing controlled about a multimillion-dollar randomized controlled trial is… the result.

*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about, your support is greatly appreciated.

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Although it pains me to watch it now, I will leave you with one of the almost half dozen TV newscasts of “Paul’s “discovery” in 2017, about 2 minutes long:

Note to readers:

One discovery consumed my last year: a volcanic mineral extract made by the Japanese scientist Shimanishi fifty years ago — the "Golden Elixir" of the old traditions, made real. It led me to write two books, retire from my patient panel (but not from our Leading Edge Clinic), and start a company with one mission: to carry this forgotten chemistry off the page. Aurmina for the water we drink, and Primora Bio for soil, crops, and animals.

From Research to Practice - Links Below Image

Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water

Primora Bio - Bringing Life Back To Soil

Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States

The War on Ivermectin- The Medicine That Could have Ended the Pandemic

The Blueprint of Life - The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health

The Silent Aquifer - Humanity’s Unfolding Food and Water Crisis

The War on Chlorine Dioxide - The Medicine That Could End Medicine

Medical Musings - A View From the Inside Of Modern Medicine

Me, Lisa, and Lazlo (“Latzee”) awaiting his arrival.

Tomorrow is Independence Day, and this year it carries more meaning for me than any Fourth of July I can remember.

Our nation turns 250, our son is due, Aurmina is having a holiday sale, and after eleven months of constant writing, rewriting, editing, and researching — with more than a few moments when I wondered whether I could finish at all — both books that came out of this work are now done. And as a small thank-you to everyone who has followed along, this post closes with the final chapter of The Blueprint of Life — the last piece of the story, shared here first.

On the birth front, nothing is happening yet except for a few odd cramps, but I inflated the birth tub, the midwife and doula are on call, and I have finally cracked open the “Hypnobirthing: Creating Positive Birth Experiences” manual I was supposed to have read months ago (don’t tell Lisa). Independent of my previously described post-Covid nosocomophobia (fear of hospitals), Lisa would never in a million years give birth in one, so it's all happening at home.

On the book front, the first, The Blueprint of Life: Earths Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health, has been published and is shipping. Many of you have traveled this road with me from the very beginning. You’ve read early chapters, challenged my thinking, strengthened my arguments, caught mistakes, and encouraged me when the project felt impossibly large. In many ways this community helped write the book alongside me, and I’m deeply grateful.

It began with an unusual mineral extract developed in Japan, and what I first understood as a simple study of minerals. But that research kept widening — into geology, water chemistry, agriculture, soil biology, biochemistry, and ancient wisdom — until it opened onto something far larger: whether the organizing architecture that appears everywhere in nature is best understood as accident, necessity, or evidence of a Creator. Part scientific investigation, part intellectual journey, and part personal memoir, The Blueprint of Life is, above all, an invitation to follow evidence wherever it leads — even when it leads somewhere completely unexpected.

The companion volume has also found its final identity. The book many of you have known as From Volcanoes to Vitality will now be published as The Silent Aquifer: The Unfolding Global Crisis in Food and Water — and the Mineral Solution. At sixty-two chapters and 130,000 words, it is the most comprehensive exploration I know of into water and the minerals it carries — into water’s importance to the Earth, all the waters of the Earth themselves, and how the slow alteration of their mineral chemistry underlies the crisis now unfolding across the world’s agriculture. The manuscript is entering its final production stages and should begin shipping later this month, a couple of weeks behind its companion.

The Blueprint of Life is available now in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle through both my website and Amazon (the Amazon hardcover is pending for two more days). If you’ve been following this journey on Substack and waiting for the finished work — today is the day.

The research behind both books also led somewhere I never expected when I started: to founding a company to bring the mineral extract at the center of it all — the very substance that began this entire journey in Japan — to the public. Which is why this Fourth of July ties everything together.

Aurmina Celebrates America’s 250th Birthday

To celebrate Independence Day—and America’s 250th birthday—we’re also offering 25% off single bottles of Aurmina and Primora Bio throughout the holiday weekend (the three- and six-packs are already discounted 22% and 33%, respectively).

Use coupon code: JULY4 at checkout. Thank you to everyone who has supported our work, our research, and our small company over the past year.

Finally, for everyone who has followed this journey on Substack, today’s post concludes something I’ve been sharing in pieces for many months. Below the paywall, you’ll find the final movement of the epilogue from The Blueprint of Life. Whether you’ve already purchased the book or are still deciding, I wanted everyone who has traveled this road with me to have the opportunity to read how the story ends.

Epilogue: The Line That Broke Me

What I later realized was that the conviction I felt in Montana had already begun to build months earlier, when I first heard Shimanishi’s voice in a written note I had discovered.

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Warner, my friend,

I first wrote this as a collection of memories and thoughts about you — almost like a biography of a friendship, or an obituary written by someone who loved you— writing about you as the man and lawyer I knew. Then it started to feel off. I suddenly had a strong sense that you were still connected and would hear or read this, so I started writing to you directly. As soon as I did that, it felt right somehow.

Just know this letter comes with a lot of love, admiration, and a sadness I am still sitting with — and will be for a long time. I cry because I keep thinking about the fact that I will no longer pick up the phone and see that big goofy smiling face blown up on my screen.

Although I am sharing this letter publicly, I don’t want to make it about me. I simply want to let my little world know who you were, how you lived, and why so many loved you.

Warner, man, I miss you already.

We hit it off the first time we met. Our first conversation lasted a couple of hours, and we had many calls over the years after that — usually to commiserate, collaborate, or just share what we were learning about what we were up against — a bond forged by the sheer weight of what we had each taken on during the Covid war, which, for the Mendenhall Law Group, is still raging.

One of the things we discovered in our first conversation was our mutual love of windsurfing. You were a couple of decades behind me in the sport — I’d long since moved on to kitesurfing, then retired from that too — but for you, windsurfing was still the passion it had been for me since I was 11.

I would regale you with the joys and challenges of kitesurfing, and I could see it ignite a fire in you. I am so pissed you never got to kitesurf, but that was because you were too busy fighting injustice — just another of the sacrifices you made to your work, like sleep and sane travel.

I also teased you for being a “lake windsurfer.” I’d complain about wind holes and gusts and how miserable lakes could be, and show you the one video of me kitesurfing small waves in the Dominican Republic (the only time the GoPro on my kite caught a perfectly framed shot). It wasn’t showing off (now I am showing off :); I just wanted to inspire you to take a week off and get under a flying kite. You only smiled and told me you loved it every time you went out on your lake, whether the winds were small or big, and that it was beautiful every time. Warner, the lake windsurfing lawyer from Ohio.

The other thing we bonded on was our mutual affliction of not being able to say no when people asked us for help, or to speak, or advocate in whatever way we could. That inability wore us both down. But you know what? No matter how hard it was or how much we took on, the alternative was not possible. The guilt of not helping — it just wasn’t worth carrying. So we always said yes.

Over time, I’ll admit, I had to limit access to it because my life was becoming unmanageable. I imagine yours was too. But neither of us ever really found a way to stop.

I also remember the times we got to work directly together. I’ll never forget the last-day prep before the main physician witness testified in the Schara case, the expert reviews I did for you pro bono on a couple of tragic Covid hospital cases, and the day you won a disability case for one of our Leading-Edge Clinic patients.

One of the things I will always remember about you is that, because we traveled and spoke in the same circles, we would connect in person two, sometimes three, times a year. Each time I saw you across a room — whether I knew you were going to be there or not — as soon as our eyes met, we both broke into the biggest smile and headed straight for each other, mid-conversation, mid-sentence, whatever. There are not many people in my life like that. You were one of them. Warner, you magnificent smile-ambusher.

I’ll also never forget that night at the bar at a conference — you, me, and Lisa up against an obstinate bartender who refused to sell her a bowl of berries and nuts, the only snack she can tolerate at a bar. She was starving. The bartender kept saying it wasn’t on the menu, then she started lying that they didn’t have any in the kitchen, until Lisa pointed out the numerous items on the menu that contained exactly those things.

I kept trying, Lisa kept trying, you made one appeal — nothing. Then, quietly, you pulled out a twenty, slid it across the bar with a big smile, and asked if she could take a look in the kitchen. A bowl of berries and nuts appeared within minutes. Lisa and I will never forget that. I, a foul-mouthed guy from New York City who grew up knowing that if you need something taken care of, you slip them a little something, while you, the Midwestern lawyer, schooled me in front of my wife on how to get it done. You beautiful man.

It was such a unique friendship: me, a dissident doctor, and you, a dissident lawyer, at a unique moment not only in our lives but in the life of America. I was one of the leading Covid medical dissidents, and you were literally the leader on the legal side. You and Barnes took on Pfizer, for Christ’s sake. God bless you both.

I would share with you the lies I was uncovering and the truths I was putting out on the medical side, and you would share with me the lies, fraud, and grievous injustices you were fighting on the legal side. Those conversations showed me how much medicine and law had in common — more than I had expected. I learned that outside of your law firm and other small independent practices, the big firms stayed away from Covid litigation.

On the medical side, we were a few dozen who somehow had managed to build (or be blessed with) a public voice. It was David fighting Goliath on both sides — medical and legal. We used our independent practices, our nonprofits, and our voices to push back against censorship, fraud, and lies while trying to restore health and justice to the victims of it all. My brother in arms.

We were fighting on different fronts of the same battle. You were defending the rule of law. I was defending the practice of medicine. But underneath both of our fights was the same conviction: that the point of the institution — law, medicine, doesn’t matter — is to serve the person in front of you, and when that gets inverted, everything goes wrong.

What struck me over time was that law appeared to be suffering from the same disease that had overtaken medicine. In medicine, the profession gradually became captured by centralized institutions, financial incentives, bureaucracies, and information systems that increasingly rewarded conformity to pharmaceutical propaganda over independent judgment. The more it drifted from its first principles—the welfare of the patient—the more difficult it somehow became for physicians to resist.

From our conversations, I came to believe something similar was happening in law. Law, at its best, is supposed to be anchored to enduring principles: equal treatment, due process, constitutional limits, and the pursuit of justice. Yet more and more, it seemed as though outcomes were being shaped by ideology, political pressures, institutional incentives, and shifting cultural fashions rather than by the stable principles that once gave the system legitimacy.

I am not a lawyer and do not pretend to understand the law the way you did. But after years of listening to your stories from the front lines, I could not escape the feeling that the legal profession was experiencing its own version of institutional capture.

All over the country, corporate, government, and university lawyers literally counseled their clients to enforce mandates and to reject medical and religious exemptions. The irony was not lost on me. That counsel was everywhere. I also knew those were the cases where your batting average was highest. You made them pay, boy, and got people their #%@! jobs back! Where I might get someone’s vaccine-induced brain fog cleared or their fatigue resolved, you would return them to their livelihood.

Perhaps the darkest example during COVID was watching the ACLU support vaccine mandates. For an organization long associated with defending individual liberty against state intrusion, it literally came out in support of policies that conditioned employment, education, and participation in public life on submission to an injected medical intervention, which, to me, is the most sacred of individual liberties — bodily autonomy.

I wish the law group would gather and publish every case where justice was restored — not for spectacle, but for record. People need to remember what was done. They need to see the exemptions denied, the livelihoods destroyed, the mandates enforced, the settlements paid, and the judgments handed down from the bench when the truth finally had its day in court. Too many of those wrongs are already disappearing into the rearview mirror. I hate that. You would not have let them disappear. You would have kept reminding people what happened, who did it, and what accountability looked like when the law finally caught up.

I know there were many more cases you intended to bring, and many more people you were determined to help. For that, we will miss you terribly. But I also know you had a keen eye for good lawyers, especially the young, inspired, principled ones — the ones practicing law for its purpose, not its compensation or reputation. May the Mendenhall Law Group thrive. There is no end to the need for it.

I also remember when egotism, arrogance, and frankly, insanity infiltrated your non-profit, not too long after you had helped me get legal support for when the same had infiltrated the FLCCC. The difference was that you were a lawyer, while Paul and I were dumb doctors who did not know how to build a sound governance structure. That ended up costing us an organization that we had built with immense devotion. It did not go unnoticed that the same didn’t happen to your organization. Just another reason I will miss you: your counsel and guidance were always just a phone call away when I really needed them. I just wish I had sought it more often.

Of all the things written about you this week, the one that stands out most to me is Jeff Childers’ writing about how many pro bono cases you took during COVID. I remember the conversations where you shared that with me. You just couldn’t help yourself. You knew you were being financially reckless and taking on more than you could handle. I even remember your idea of setting up an investment vehicle to bring more cases — people could contribute money to fund a case and get a return if it won a settlement. I loved that idea. For an investor, it would have been far more honorable and far less risky than the stock market. I personally think, given your track record, it would have been almost like insider trading, because if you were going to take the case, you knew it had a high chance of winning, and if anyone was gonna win it, you were. It would have been easy money, baby.

I was beyond moved by the Children’s Health Defense article about your life and career — not because I didn’t already know you were a great lawyer. I knew that. I knew you were a deeply principled and committed man. But seeing it laid out like that — the full scope of what you gave throughout your life, to law, to politics, always principled — it hit me so powerfully. The scope, the consistency, the fact that you never once stopped. I am not just saying this, but that article, although it was written as a news article, was the best damn obituary I have ever read. I truly hope every single one of my readers reads it, shows it to their children, and uses the record of your life as a teaching example to all young people of what it means to be a man, a Christian man, and a great man at that.

But more than anything, you were just a good friend to me. You called me every few months, just to check in, not only on me, but because you and I could share and commiserate and even laugh at the accumulating folly of it all.

We all tried to help you with your cancer. Maybe even too many of us, too often. There is a reason it is called the emperor of all maladies. As much success as my practice has had treating cancer from a metabolic approach using combinations of repurposed drugs, we also fail too. Sometimes treatment, no matter how many approaches are tried, just doesn’t work.

That’s what happened to you.

I spoke with you two weeks ago. You were finally upbeat after recovering from your recent hospital stay. I offered guidance on a new approach — elegant, promising, non-toxic, though the research trials were in Mexico. You were interested. I knew you were being pushed and pulled in every direction by kind-hearted, well-intentioned, brilliant people, and it must have been disorienting. I didn’t want to push. Then a week passed. I hesitated to call and ask whether you’d reviewed the literature I’d sent. By the middle of the next week, I heard you were back in the hospital.

It’s all right, brother. You put up a damn good fight. I know that. I hope the last days weren’t too hard, although I know they almost certainly were.

And now, my friend, you are gone, and I am crying today.

You fought for the people caught underneath the machinery of evil. You did that from your first day as a lawyer. You fought for the brave, the injured, the unjustly punished, and the abandoned. You fought power in its two most destructive modern forms — governmental and corporate.

I am so angry that we don’t have you to take evil to court anymore. I firmly believe this country will not be the same without you.

This world needs you still, Warner. And if it can’t have you, we need more people to be like you. Except I don’t know how someone becomes a Warner. I think you’re either born one or blessed into one.

God, please. Give us more Warners. A whole army of them.

I’m going to miss you, my friend. Thank you for fighting the good fight. Justice lost one of its greatest soldiers this week.

Nah. Soldier doesn’t even come close.

Warner, you were one of its greatest generals.

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Excerpted from the Epilogue to The Blueprint of Life, shipping this month.

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**Excerpted from the Epilogue, Movement I of The Blueprint of Life, shipping mid-June.

For those unfamiliar with the Grenon family’s persecution, I’ll begin with a brief summary excerpted from my book, The War On Chlorine Dioxide. I will then share a recent letter I received from Jonathan Grenon, who is still incarcerated at the federal prison in Yazoo City, Mississippi.

Letter To President Trump From Mark Grenon

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In recent posts, I explored my insights and developing understanding of order within the sciences. I followed it through water, minerals, biology, physics, sound, and plants, watching the same principle appear again and again: life holds together when its parts remain aligned.

But alignment is not only a property of systems. It is also revealed in a person.

Under pressure, a human being reveals what they are ordered around: comfort, safety, reputation, greed, and fear — or truth, courage, sacrifice, love, and God.

That is why I want to share the following letter.

It came from Mark’s son, Jonathan Grenon, who wrote to me from prison after reading my book, The War on Chlorine Dioxide. I am sharing it, with his permission, because it struck me as one of the most powerful and inspiring human examples of alignment under pressure that I have encountered in these last six years.

Here is a man separated from his wife and children, living under conditions most people could not endure, and yet his letter does not primarily transmit bitterness. It transmits faith, endurance, service, warning, and love. He writes as someone who has been deprived of almost everything, but not broken in spirit; a man who has lost his freedom, but not his center.

In Scripture, judgment is exposure. It is the moment when adversity strips away appearances and reveals what people are truly ordered around. In leaders, it can reveal cowardice, self-protection, greed, and fear. In a man like Jonathan, it can reveal the opposite: courage, service, humility, love, and dependence on God when every worldly support has been stripped away.

Jonathan’s letter is what alignment looks like when the system bears down.

*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about, your support is greatly appreciated.

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Hello Dr. Kory,

My name is Jonathan Grenon. My dad, Mark Grenon, sent me a copy of your book, The War On Chlorine Dioxide.

First, I want to thank you for your efforts to reveal the truth. By doing this, you are exposing the evil that has been going on for so many years. And I want to bless you, my brother, in the name of the LORD Jesus Christ.

Here is a question I ask myself; I imagine you have, too. What makes a man risk everything for the truth? What is in us that pushes us onward, (I wrote this word before I read the end of your book, your last word, it isn’t a coincidence, is it? I don’t believe in coincidences, by the way.) when we know that we will have to take on the “whole world”?

The Word of God says in Romans 8:31 — “What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us?”

The context of that passage doesn’t mean people won’t be against us. It means that it doesn’t matter if the whole world is against us, we are on the winning side!!! God’s side!!!

My family has suffered very much and continues to. But when I turn to Jesus and keep my eyes on Him, the things of this world do grow dimmer. And the light of Truth shines so much brighter. But the darkness in this world does not like that because it brings all their evil to the light.

So it is a sign we are on the right path when we are attacked by evil, and we must stand firm, we must hold the line, so to speak. Not only are people’s lives at stake, but their souls are also.

I have seen many people in prison come to Jesus and be healed spiritually, mentally, and physically. Through faith and prayer first and foremost, but also ingenuity. I have learned how to make healing remedies with what I can get in prison. For most, it seems impossible, but I have seen people healed by things they take for granted.

When Covid was at its “high times,” and I was in my hardest times — 23 hours a day locked in a cell, sometimes 72 hours before being able to shower or anything outside a cell — well, I would come out and give guys a concoction of vinegar, olive oil, chili and hot sauces, garlic powder, onion powder, black pepper, and jalapeno juices mixed together.

I saw men healed of Covid within 3–5 days, mostly, maybe a week. But if not, they would suffer for weeks on end. And if they reported it, they were sent to the SHU (Special Housing Unit, it wasn’t so special). So people began to not say they had it, and would come to me, and I would help them.

Then, also, people suffering from stomach ailments, I made a thing with oatmeal and honey that helped. (When I could get honey). One time, a guy named Johnny was healed from something in his stomach. He hadn’t eaten in over 30 days and was wasting away, and they just let him.

So I went and prayed with him, Dad was there. And the Holy Spirit whispered in my ear while in prayer, give him warm water and salt. Within 3 days, he was eating, and we started to build up bacteria in his stomach from the oatmeal-honey mix. Dad knows what we did and I have written about it before.

People also would come to me for healing and prayer, and I willingly dedicated my time. For I do what I do for my LORD and Savior Jesus Christ. As I do unto others, I do unto my LORD.

You see, we tend to give up doing right because men do us wrong more and more as we stand for the truth. So how do we push on? I believe that God is the One to whom the credit is due. I believe all good things come from God. Through anyone He so chooses.

But when one wants to co-participate (Might not be a word, but you get my drift) in His work, I believe miracles will flow through us. As a seed dies when buried, it then comes to life and bears fruit. So shall we, if our ground is right. I hope you understand what I mean by ground.

Where is your heart, my brother? What if your will, your life, is ripped away before your eyes? What do you live for? When all is lost, no matter how much right that you do, what does one live for? That is when one finds what truly matters.

As you continue to reveal the truth, my brother, and stand against the powers that be, you must put on the armor of God. After reading your book, I can see that you have the spark that is needed to reveal that truth, and I can see that you are doing it. You are on that path, that fight. It is encouraging to me.

But I want you to know it has to be all or nothing. Are you willing to give your whole life for this fight? The test only gets harder; it doesn’t lighten up, so to speak.

God has been good to my family and me for sure, but there have been no breaks. I haven’t won one of the battles against this evil system, in their unlawful system that is. They have even violated their own evil laws; they break their own laws just to do us wrong.

Therefore, when evil attacks, they are exposed. You see, evil can’t handle the truth, it makes them itch, and they have to scratch that itch, heck, they have to tear at it. But the more they tear, the more we see them. But our job is to take the hits, and they can be heavy hits.

If I seem strong and determined, believe me you, I am a broken man. I have 5 boys and can’t be there for them or my wife and my mother. I have only seen my little boy Jack 1 time since he was born 3 months after I was locked up. I could go on for a long time about the abuse they have done to my family and me, in so many ways, and will one day do so.

But I am growing stronger by the day, thanks be to God. For when I am weak, I am strong. And so is my family. All glory be to Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior. If the LORD Jesus Christ isn’t first in your life, you won’t be able to make it through. Your strength will run out, brother.

I have seen it before from some of the “greatest.” Jim Humble, a man I love so dearly and spent much time with in this mission that I am still in. When we were attacked, he separated from us. If I recall correctly, he stopped emailing me and had no contact with me. I never got to say goodbye; that hurt me a lot. I understood then and do now, that he at 80+ years didn’t want to stand up to the evil government, and I mean right in their face as we did. I don’t blame him, but it still hurt.

People who followed us and even helped teach with us would write and say they didn’t want me contacting them because we were “too hot.” Were we stupid, naive, or just plain innocent to what they would do to us? Not entirely. I knew the wickedness behind the scenes, in the spiritual realm where Satan dwells. So, what I didn’t know about this system and the corruption through and through, I did know who was and is behind it. Satan, that evil devil he is. So yes, we expected an attack.

But I never thought that God would allow it to be this long; maybe I was naive. Expecting God to work on my timeline. You see, people tend to mix up the meanings of hope and expectations. (That will be for another letter.)

I know you understand some of what I am saying, as people have vilified you and abandoned you as well. But I want you to know these were people who fought alongside us to prove that MMS is for real. The ones who said — “To the death, no matter what.”

Heck, I was about to quit when they sent us the injunctions. I would be in the back yard praying on my knees, asking God what I should do. My son, Jonny, who was 12 then and 18 now, said “dad you have to go on, what you do is what you do.”

Also, Dad sent me a testimony of a child overcoming autism and reminding me why we do what we do. I can only say I never quit because my LORD and Savior Jesus Christ has called me for this time, He carries and carries me. Therefore I can’t quit.

Don’t think I am doubting you my brother, I admire that you are willing to risk all for the truth. All I am saying is your strength will run out, so get it from where it can’t run out. Because things are only going to get worse.

Just recently, my lawyer (for the appeals, a lawyer was needed), after the denial of our appeal, sent in a motion for rehearing en banc, where he is stating that the appeals court wrongfully denied our appeal on the point of the 1st Amendment and the RFRA, and their “reason” was not valid. If you get to read it on Pacer, check it out; it is good. But it shows how this system is blatantly doing what they want, no rights are upheld at all. In your face basically is what they say.

I hope I didn’t take too much of your time, and I want to thank you again for your stand. At times, I have felt and feel so alone in this battle that no one wants to speak up for us. Which is what happened when this all went down years ago. Everyone went silent, I mean, everyone. Very few people spoke up for us, if any at all, and when they did, it was not in our faces; we were ignored in many ways.

May God bless you,

Jonathan David

A servant of the LORD

From the first time I read Jonathan’s letter, I understood it as testimony. It showed what pressure can reveal in a human being when nearly every worldly support has been taken away. The system had power over his body, his location, his time, and his access to his family. But it had not gained power over the thing around which he was most ordered.

That is why the letter belongs here. The final chapter of the book described judgment as exposure. Jonathan’s letter shows exposure operating at the level of the soul.

Appeal To My Readers

Jonathan Grenon and his family have paid an extraordinary price for standing up for humanity. His letter reveals a man enduring suffering with faith, humility, and courage, while separated from his wife, children, and life outside prison.

His legal fight is not over. He, his brother and his family continue to face the financial burden of appeals, filings, and ongoing legal work against a system with vastly greater resources.

If Jonathan’s letter moved you, and if you believe that no family should have to stand alone against the full weight of the government, please consider contributing to their legal defense fund.

This is not only about one man’s case. It is about whether ordinary people still have a fighting chance when the full weight of institutional power is brought against them. It is about due process, conscience, religious liberty, and the right to keep standing when the system arrayed against you seems terrifying, vast, and nearly impossible to defeat.

Any amount helps. More than that, it lets Jonathan and his family know they have not been forgotten. Again, please consider donating to the Grenons’ legal defense fund.

Mark Grenon’s Latest Book:

I also want to encourage all to purchase and read Mark Grenon’s newly published 4th book. It describes how to practice self-care with chlorine dioxide based on his experience treating many thousands of people worldwide and helping restore health across a broad range of illnesses.

*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about, your support is greatly appreciated.

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Note to readers:

This book began with a volcanic, deep-earth mineral extract that seemed to do something unusual: open rock, render minerals mobile, and transform water through contact with that chemistry.

Aurmina, a name we arrived at before the full meaning of this work had unfolded, means “golden mineral essence.” It is one practical expression of that journey through drinking water.

Primora Bio emerged from the same effort, carrying mineral-conditioned water into soil, crops, plants, and animals.

For readers who want the work to leave the page and enter the world, these are our first attempts to carry it forward.

From Research to Practice - Links Below Image

Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water

Primora Bio - Bringing Life Back To Soil

Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States

The War on Ivermectin- The Medicine That Could have Ended the Pandemic

The Blueprint of Life - The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health

From Volcanoes to Vitality -The Untold Story of Asao Shimanishi

The War on Chlorine Dioxide - The Medicine That Could End Medicine

Medical Musings - A View From the Inside Of Modern Medicine

A Latecomer’s Admission

Before going further, I want to openly admit that I am not a religious scholar, and I am not pretending to be one now. I did not grow up with religious instruction, I have never read the Bible in any systematic way, and I did not enter Scripture alone. MB had spent decades in those texts before I arrived, and over many months, he kept dropping clues, passages, and connections into my lap — small fragments I would contemplate, follow, test, and return to.

What follows, then, is not theology in any formal sense. These are the reflections of a man who entered these texts late in life and found, to his own surprise, that they described the world with more force and precision than anything else I had ever encountered.

I also want to be clear about the spirit of this post. I am not trying to write about doom and gloom, complaint, or moral superiority. I am not trying to say that the world would be fine if only everyone else stopped behaving badly. I am trying to look honestly at where we are — as a nation, as a civilization, and as human beings living inside systems that have become increasingly disordered.

That is not a comfortable place for me to write from. My public life began in medicine, not Scripture. I wrote about Covid, vaccine injury, institutional failure, censorship, fraud, and treatment because those were the battles directly in front of me. I did not expect that the same journey would eventually lead me into geology, agriculture, ancient texts, moral order, and the spiritual meaning of judgment.

But it did.

And somewhere along the way, I began to feel that I had been brought into contact with something good. I do not know exactly how to name it. A return. A restoration. A movement back toward order in a world that has wandered far from it. The book began as an investigation into minerals, water, and biology, but it ended by changing the way I see my own life, my responsibilities, and the world around me.

That is why this chapter is not a lament. It is an attempt to describe disorder without surrendering to it.

Scripture uses the word judgment in a way I had never understood before. Judgment does not refer only to a final event at the end of time. More often, it refers to the process by which reality reveals alignment or misalignment in a person, institution, or society through the consequences of its actions. Judgment begins within the system, exposes what is there, and sets in motion the consequences that follow.

In my last post, I used the Leading Edge Clinic, which I built with my partner and a group of committed, aligned people, as an example of an institution ordered around truth, and how that ordering allowed it to endure pressure and continue serving patients.

The Anatomy of Judgment

Today’s post looks at the opposite movement: what happens when institutions are built on suppression, denial, distortion, and self-protection.

For me, that disordered structure first surfaced in medicine, then across an increasing number of institutions, and eventually inside the FLCCC, the globally known nonprofit Paul Marik and I had built. What made that episode so clarifying was the specific form the disorder took. I watched an institution built to serve truth and protect the vulnerable begin to reorganize itself around control, internal politics, and self-preservation.

Once certain people concluded that influence was shifting away from them, they did not respond with humility, correction, or honest disagreement. They responded by accusing innocent people of fraud to resolve a power struggle.

The behavior was so misaligned that I stepped away from it immediately. The mission was no longer governing the institution; insecurity, ambition, and the protection of authority were. I had already been part of multiple institutions that shifted out of alignment under pressure, and I left every time. Paul remained, but in increasing estrangement and with severely diminished authority, bound to a structure that had already turned against not only its founders, but its own founding principles.

What followed only confirmed the diagnosis: the institution was emptied of the principles that had given it life, and what remains now is a diminished shadow of what it once was. I, by contrast, flourished after leaving. That, too, was part of the judgment.

That experience changed the way I now see the wider world: a civilization in which short-term profit is routinely extracted by injecting long-term harm into air, water, food, bodies, ecosystems, and information systems; a civilization in which disordered individuals now hold concentrations of wealth and power so extreme that their disorder propagates into the institutions they control.

This is especially dangerous in medicine and public health, where one misaligned figure at the top can bend agencies, journals, hospitals, and professional societies away from their duty to the sick.

So I am now going to do something I never expected to do publicly: walk through Scripture, hesitantly, as a latecomer, and draw out lessons that lifelong students of these texts may laugh at me for only now discovering. I do not plan to do much of this going forward. But in the context of this book, it has become both unavoidable and central.

“If a ruler listens to falsehood, all his officials will be wicked.”

—Proverbs 29:12

Scripture is blunt about this. Once disorder is rewarded at the top of a system, it propagates outward and downward.

Alignment Is Not Immunity

As this unifying view of order and disorder, alignment and misalignment, came together, it forced me toward a question that has troubled human beings forever: if order protects, why do righteous people still suffer?

I quickly learned that alignment with God is not a guarantee of worldly safety. It does not remove a person from danger, disorder, or the consequences of other people’s choices. What it does is place that person under care, within truth, and in right relation to reality.

“Behold, I send you out as sheep among wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”

—Matthew 10:16

Wolves exist. Disorder exists. Alignment does not prevent exposure to either. But alignment can create capacities that matter under pressure: clarity, mission, endurance, restraint, and the strength to keep moving when the surrounding system breaks. I did not understand at the time that some of those capacities had been formed in me years earlier through spiritual work, and that I had mostly taken them for granted. Disorder forms the opposite traits: confusion, agitation, compulsion, self-division, alienation, emptiness, and the multiplying consequences of a life at war with reality.

Scripture repeatedly portrays order and disorder as paths that unfold over time, rather than single, isolated events. Alignment does not confer immunity; it lowers vulnerability over time. Disorder does not always destroy immediately. More often, it accumulates. Delayed judgment is not innocence. It is simply the time required for consequences to surface.

“By their fruits you will recognize them.”

—Matthew 7:16

Fruit is an outcome over time. That is why judgment often appears delayed.

“For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open.”

—Luke 8:17

Exposure is inevitable.

To Fear the Lord

Again, not having grown up with religious instruction, as I began studying theology and Scripture, I kept getting confused by the phrase “fear of the Lord.” The best understanding I have come to is this: to fear the Lord is to live as if God’s order is real, and that violating it carries consequences.

In that posture, people order their behavior through sobriety, restraint, truthfulness, responsibility, and care for others. That ordering stabilizes their internal state and lowers the probability of self-inflicted destruction. It does not protect them from a drunk driver, a violent stranger, or a collapsing institution. I came to understand that difference firsthand as the systems around me broke down.

Scripture explicitly acknowledges this:

“Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.”

—Psalm 116:15

Good people do die, sometimes violently, sometimes unjustly. Their suffering is not evidence that their order failed them. It is evidence that disorder is permitted to move through the world.

From the beginning, God did not design a closed system in which obedience was enforced and harm prevented at every moment. He granted man free will. In Genesis, this is symbolized by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil placed in the garden, the sign that human life was created with a real capacity to choose. Alignment with God was not meant to be automatic, mechanical, or coerced. It had to remain voluntary, and once that freedom was real, so was the possibility that human beings would choose against the order in which they had been placed.

God did not remove causality to spare the righteous from harm. He permitted a world in which human choices move through others, for good or for ill. Once disorder is chosen, it does not remain confined to the chooser. Pride, greed, lust, aggression, neglect, and excess deform shared environments.

The same principle applies at scale. Scripture is again explicit:

“The king by judgment establisheth the land: but he that receiveth gifts overthroweth it.”

—Proverbs 29:4

A rightly ordered ruler can exercise restraint, receive correction, discern proportion, and act for the good of those under his care. He does not confuse power with wisdom, obedience with loyalty, or dissent with betrayal. By contrast, when leaders become driven by greed, ego, and power, and insulated by pride, authority, or certainty, they lose the ability to revise their beliefs. Decisions harden, and dissent is treated as a danger rather than as information. In that state, leaders begin acting as if what they believe is reality, rather than something that must answer to it.

This is not just moral collapse. It is the closing of the mind to correction.

Scripture treats resistance to correction as a mark of deep disorder. The wise receive rebuke and change course. The fool rejects correction, hardens, and continues toward ruin. Sin is not only wrongdoing, but also the refusal to be corrected once truth has made itself known.

This is why Scripture frames human action as seed and harvest. Errors compound and disordered structures amplify their effects. In disordered societies, corrective knowledge almost always resides in the minority, because once a false premise becomes institutionalized, the majority’s role shifts from inquiry to enforcement.

Correction then becomes costly, truth becomes dissident, and the price is paid by the few who volunteer for the task. I watched that sequence unfold with ivermectin, where the real struggle quickly ceased to be over evidence and became a struggle over whether correction itself would be permitted.

Modern societies add an accelerant. Mass media that are not ordered around truth, objectivity, and transparency do not just misreport reality; they manufacture a false one. They suppress correction, normalize harm, and teach entire populations to accept what is disordered as if it were good, necessary, or inevitable. For those reasons, major media have become one of the sharpest instruments through which powerful institutions propagate disorder at scale.

Major media were not alone. Many religious authorities also failed their role during Covid, when they should have helped people test fear, defend conscience, protect the vulnerable, and remain anchored to truth. Instead, many simply echoed institutional authority, accepted coercion as virtue, and treated compliance as moral responsibility. As in nearly every other sector of society, only a small minority tried to speak correction aloud.

Scripture does not treat deception as a one-sided event. It repeatedly warns people to test what they hear, resist false authority, and remain open to correction.

“Test everything; hold fast what is good.”

—1 Thessalonians 5:21

“Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God.”

—1 John 4:1

When they do not—when they prefer comforting narratives, elevate human voices above truth, or outsource discernment—they become susceptible to deception, and, over time, unable to recognize it.

“They will gather teachers to suit their own desires . . . and turn away from listening to the truth.”

—2 Timothy 4:3–4

“The simple believe everything, but the prudent give thought to their steps.”

—Proverbs 14:15

In that state, falsehood begins to shape reality itself.

I watched people submit themselves and their children to policies and interventions they believed were virtuous, necessary, and socially responsible, often with no real understanding of the costs, the uncertainties, or that risks had been minimized, obscured, or actively suppressed.

I watched faces disappear behind masks, children lose ordinary cues for learning and social development, and long lines form at pharmacies and clinics filled with people who were wholly confident they were doing the right thing for themselves and for others. Many paid dearly for that trust. Some paid the ultimate price.

And that is the warning Scripture returns to again and again: once disorder is chosen, tolerated, or set in motion, its consequences do not remain confined to the chooser.

“The violence of the wicked will destroy them.”

—Proverbs 21:7

Scripture states the outcome for the one who acts in violence. What it leaves implicit—but what experience makes unmistakable—is that violence rarely stops there. It spreads. It reaches beyond the one who initiates it. Disorder does not remain contained.

Alignment Introduced into a Collapsing System

I am watching this same sequence unfold in real time as a man who claims no perfection, no moral exemption, and no authority beyond a willingness to submit himself to truth is placed at the head of a decaying health system and attempts to reintroduce order at scale. He is doing it through principles that should never have become controversial: honesty, transparency, accountability, and protection of the vulnerable, especially children.

Watching this has not been peaceful, but it has been clarifying. Attacks have intensified. Narratives have multiplied. Institutions and professional societies have protested, resisted, and publicly contradicted new guidance with the reactive force of threatened incentives, authority, and reputation. Media behavior, already corrosive, has in many cases become even more reckless. The system reacts as if truth itself were a threat, because for any system that has learned to survive by selling falsehood, exposure reveals not just isolated mistakes but the machinery that made those mistakes profitable.

At first, I thought the introduction of an aligned figure was causing the disorder. Then I realized that is not how it works. Alignment does not create hidden rot. It reveals it.

When alignment is introduced into a collapsing system, one of two things happens: the system reorganizes around higher-order principles and lives, or it fractures, because what was built on distortion cannot remain intact under truth. Both halt decay. Only the first restores vitality.

Judgment is the last attempt at mercy. Exposure is the only thing that makes correction possible, but correction can only be received by what is still willing to align itself with truth.

What unsettled me was not that ancient texts warned about this, but how precisely they described the sequence. Long before modern systems theory, they recognized the same pattern: alignment sustains, misalignment degrades, and resistance to correction accelerates collapse.

Judgment, as I now understand it, does not create the collapse. It exposes the collapse already present within the system once truth is introduced.

Once you understand that water is both the foundation and medium of biological order, that minerals determine whether water can carry and sustain that order, and that order creates the conditions for resilience and flourishing at every scale, reality stops feeling arbitrary. It becomes intelligible, alignable, and sustaining.

With this new understanding, I suddenly feel safer in the world—more directed, more focused, and more confident moving through it. Once reality is understood that way, it becomes impossible to pretend that misalignment is harmless or that truth can be suppressed without consequence.

This is not a call to fear.

It is a call to alignment.

Because in an ordered universe, judgment is not coming.

It is already here.

*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about, your support is greatly appreciated.

Subscribe now

Note to readers:

What Shimanishi produced appears to match, in both process and behavior, the kind of revered substance described across numerous cultures and traditions as a “Golden Elixir”: rock opened, minerals rendered mobile, and water transformed through contact with that chemistry.

Aurmina, a name we arrived at before this work fully unfolded, means “golden mineral essence.” It is a diluted form of Shimanishi’s extract and part of my effort to carry this work into a practical form through drinking water.

Primora Bio emerged from that same effort, delivering the water to soil, crops, plants, and animals.

So for those who want the work to leave the page and enter their world, these are our first attempts to carry it forward.

From Research to Practice - Links Below Image

Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water

Primora Bio - Bringing Life Back To Soil

Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States

The War on Ivermectin- The Medicine That Could have Ended the Pandemic

The Blueprint of Life - The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health

From Volcanoes to Vitality -The Untold Story of Asao Shimanishi

The War on Chlorine Dioxide - The Medicine That Could End Medicine

Medical Musings - A View From the Inside Of Modern Medicine

*Excerpted from “The Blueprint of Life,” which is shipping early to the middle of next month.

The previous posts explored a recurring principle across physics, biology, geology, and even human behavior: systems remain healthy only when order, alignment, and coherent transmission are maintained. We saw it in water responding to structure, in Retallack’s experiments on biological sensitivity, in electrochemical gradients that sustain life, and in the way living systems organize themselves under stable conditions. But every principle becomes easier to see under strain. Pressure does not create the underlying structure of a system. It reveals whether that structure was ever stable to begin with.

This chapter is not about blame. It is about what happens when alignment is violated at scale.

Judgment is often heard today as punishment, condemnation, or sentence. But I am using it here in its Scriptural sense. Judgment is the moment when what is hidden becomes visible, when a person, nation, or system is revealed for what it truly is.

In Scripture, judgment does not only punish disorder. It exposes it. It separates appearance from reality. It reveals whether a structure was built on truth or falsehood, courage or fear, service or self-protection.

That is the meaning I intend here. When institutions, societies, and individuals are placed under sufficient strain, what is hidden becomes visible. Incentives reveal themselves. Fear reveals itself. Courage reveals itself. Integrity reveals itself. Some systems maintain alignment under pressure and continue transmitting order outward. Others fracture internally and begin propagating confusion, distortion, self-protection, and harm.

Covid was not just a crisis. It was exposure.

A key insight running beneath this entire book is that life depends on ordered systems and on fluids capable of carrying that order.

Life unfolds in media through which matter, charge, energy, and information can move; that is, it operates in fluids. And fluid does not mean water alone. Air is a fluid as well—a medium through which sound, signals, and energies propagate between bodies, just as aqueous media carry charge, gradients, and communication within and between cells. Ordered human behavior moves through the air—through speech, tone, action, restraint, panic, courage, and command. The medium differs. The principle does not.

What is carried in a medium, and how it is carried, exists on a continuum. Fluids either carry ordered gradients, signaling, and structure, or they carry distortion, noise, and disorder instead. Living organisms either maintain internal order and propagate it around them, or, when that order breaks down, propagate disorder in its place. Systems—whether biological, social, or institutional—either maintain order under pressure and extend it outward, or they begin to fracture from within and spread disorder both internally and outward into everything they touch.

For many months, I could recognize ordered systems in water, soil, and biology, but not yet in society. As a physician, I understood how biological systems behave when internal order is lost and the consequences of that loss. Then memories of Covid kept returning, and that entire period began to look far more profound and unsettling than it once had.

Before Covid

Before Covid, I lived inside a world that made sense to me. It was not perfect, and it certainly was not always just. I knew that wars, massacres, famines, and humanitarian catastrophes occurred, but they mostly felt distant, fragmented, and exceptional.

In my personal life and career, I was more focused on flawed institutions, misaligned incentives, and a bureaucracy that I found deadening. I did not yet suspect how completely they might fail when truth, courage, and human life came under real pressure.

Looking back, I now see that I believed something I had not openly acknowledged to myself: that when real danger arrived, when lives were truly at stake, I trusted that institutions would remain oriented toward truth, care, and the search for what worked. However imperfectly, I believed the people entrusted with responsibility inside them would remain faithful to that purpose, despite the professional, financial, and social incentives pulling them elsewhere.

Then Covid arrived, right as the second of my daughters was fighting the same devastating illness that had already traumatized my family two years earlier.

Covid came as a pulmonary and critical care disease, squarely in my lane as a pulmonary and critical care leader. I stepped forward the way physicians trained for crisis do. I gave up sleep. I gave up my normal life. I gave up attention that should have belonged to my wife and, most painfully, to a very sick child who needed me in ways I can never fully make right. I told myself it was temporary. I told myself nothing could be more important. I told myself this was what I had been trained for.

At first, it felt like war in the noble sense of the word: chaotic, exhausting, terrifying, but shared. We were all learning in real time. Or so I believed.

When Disorder Reveals Itself

When disorder begins to propagate through a system, those still ordered enough to recognize the truth are often the first to feel the strain, because they are the least able to normalize what does not fit. Looking back, from the very first days of Covid, long before the collapse became obvious to most people, I watched the medical system I had trained in, believed in, and served for decades begin to fail. At first slowly, then quickly.

I knew almost immediately that something was off. At first, it was only one or two concerns, but they were not subtle. The system was moving under the weight of fear and confusion, trying to stabilize itself through policy at exactly the moment when curiosity, innovation, and urgency were most needed.

That was enough for me to resign early on from my clinical leadership position at one of the largest academic medical centers in the country, lodging a moral and ethical objection to an institution that had chosen to block a safe and effective intervention—IV vitamin C—while insisting that “supportive care only” was the appropriate default treatment, and that placebo-controlled trials should proceed even while patients were dying in front of us. In an emergency, that meant valuing the production of sanctioned knowledge above the duty to attempt rescue.

Then, without seeking it or wanting it, I found myself drawn into something else entirely. I became a public figure in what I would later title my book, The War on Ivermectin. I did not choose that role. I entered it because I did what physicians are supposed to do when confronted with a new disease: I studied the data, followed the physiology, and observed how profoundly a treatment was helping patients, both in my practice and around the world.

As reports, case series, observational studies, and preprints began pouring out from every corner of the globe, I immersed myself in them obsessively, trying to make sense of a fast-moving body of evidence that few seemed willing to synthesize in real time.

In doing so, I became, almost by accident, one of the world’s leading clinical experts on the emerging ivermectin data. That expertise, built under pressure, eventually led to Senator Ron Johnson’s invitation to testify before the United States Senate, speaking not only to the country, but to the world, about what I believed the evidence was already showing. The testimony quickly went viral, and with it, my role in that conflict changed overnight.

What followed was unlike anything I had encountered in medicine.

Media hit pieces targeting both me and my non-profit organization appeared almost immediately. Journals behaved in ways I had long been too naïve to imagine. My paper, along with others, was blocked and then retracted in a manner that violated publishing practices. Agencies issued policies devoid of both logic and scientific courage, then contradicted themselves without accountability. The FDA posted its now-infamous “You are not a horse. You are not a cow” tweet, and the world’s media followed by reducing a Nobel Prize–winning human medicine to a “horse dewormer.”

Several of the world’s leading universities fraudulently designed and manipulated large “rigorous” trials to prove that ivermectin did not work. Beneath nearly every amplified narrative sat the same unspoken force: institutional and industry self-protection reinforced by money, status, or fear, together with the determination to preserve authority even as grievous errors were being committed and harm was being widely disseminated.

Covid did not create the disorder. It exposed it.

I felt it escalating long before most people were willing to admit that anything was wrong. I was speaking, writing, testifying, organizing, and warning as loudly as I could through every channel available to me—through my organization, my Substack, interviews, podcasts, and public appearances—and yet much of society remained insulated from what was happening, in no small part because censorship, propaganda, and media attack were functioning exactly as intended. Things once anchored in care, judgment, and responsibility bent toward profit, compliance, and self-protection. The language stayed calm. The rituals stayed intact. But the center was not holding.

I watched people I respected normalize things that made no sense, justify actions that violated their own values, and place their own interests—professional, financial, and personal—ahead of the needs of the sick. Eventually, I could see that staying meant participating in something I no longer could recognize as ordered. I left in protest and in anger, because once a system begins consuming what it claims to protect, anger is a proportionate response to moral collapse.

What failed was integrity and courage, which made science itself elusive. By then, the language of evidence-based medicine had already been captured. Only one kind of evidence was permitted to govern care: the kind produced through immensely expensive, tightly controlled randomized trials, the very currency affordable only to industry and out of reach to repurposed therapies and urgent bedside innovation. Everything else—mechanistic reasoning, observational evidence, clinical experience, and early signs of benefit—could be ignored, no matter how many lives hung in the balance. In that system, protocols hardened, dissent was criminalized, and moral responsibility was outsourced to policy.

I also watched something I never expected to see in my lifetime: an entire society submit, with astonishing speed, to levels of centralized control that would have been unthinkable only months earlier. Movement was restricted. Businesses were closed. Families were separated. The ordinary rhythms of life—work, travel, gathering, worship—were suspended by decree. It did not unfold gradually. It happened almost overnight. And while a small number of voices objected, the overwhelming response was compliance. As an American who had long taken that kind of freedom for granted, the shock of it was profound. It revealed how quickly a population can accept sweeping restrictions when fear is sufficiently amplified and dissent is sufficiently marginalized.

At the same time, I watched as a global medical intervention was recklessly deployed at unprecedented scale and speed, under intense social, institutional, and economic pressure. People were urged—at times compelled—to accept a novel gene therapy product under conditions that left little room for hesitation, questioning, or individualized judgment. The cost of refusal escalated: loss of employment, restricted access to public spaces, exclusion from travel and participation in normal life, and even estrangement from their own families. Public discourse narrowed, and those who raised concerns were frequently dismissed, censored, or portrayed as irresponsible. The force of that pressure, combined with the uniformity of the messaging, created an environment in which open scientific and ethical debate largely disappeared.

This was not a sudden misfortune cascading into a random series of errors. It was a disordered society revealing itself under pressure.

The Cost of Seeing Clearly

It became even more personal to me when I watched colleagues—many of them people I had known, worked with, and trusted for decades—stop thinking for themselves because it was easier, safer, and more professionally survivable to follow guidance than to ask whether that guidance matched reality. I watched patients get hurt and die unnecessarily. Paul Marik and I, as co-founders of the FLCCC, fielded hundreds of calls from desperate families whose loved ones were effectively imprisoned in hospitals, where doctors refused to abandon failing protocols and institutions hired lawyers to block families from trying something else.

Whenever we could, Paul and I would try to reach the physicians in charge of those ICU patients directly. Despite our national and international reputations—particularly before but also in Covid—the resistance was overwhelming. Doctors did not want guidance. They did not want contradiction. They did not want outside voices, no matter how experienced or how urgently we believed their patients needed a change in course. The hours poured into those calls, only to meet wall after wall of refusal, became unbearable.

Eventually, we stopped trying, not because we stopped caring, but because to continue meant breaking ourselves entirely. I will never forget the day Paul and I made the decision to stop fielding calls for hospitalized patients. From that point on, for the first time in my life as a physician, I had to say to another human being who came to me for help with a loved one in a hospital: “There is nothing I can do.”

The consequences did not stop even as the pandemic began to fade. Our jobs were taken from us. Our academic careers were destroyed. Our specialty certifications were revoked. Our credibility and achievements were marginalized or dismissed. Our health failed. Our marriages collapsed. All of it happened in full view of institutions whose leaders could have chosen curiosity, courage, and honesty, and chose none of them.

What finally shifted something fundamental in me was not the harassment, the loss, or even the professional destruction. It was understanding why it happened.

Dissent itself had become dangerous. Biomedical ethics collapsed overnight. Laws were written to police doctors’ speech. I repeat: laws were written to police doctors’ speech. A frighteningly small minority rebelled. Most complied.

Only later, while writing this book, did I recognize what I had witnessed: a severely disordered and misaligned system collapsing in front of me. It was structural, human, and lethal.

Order and alignment are no longer abstractions to me. I can see clearly what happens when they disappear—in patients, in institutions, and on a national, if not global scale.

How Judgment Unfolds

In the wake of all I had witnessed, and all I had been subjected to, I did not move back toward institutions. I moved away from them. I built my own clinic, became my own boss, and resolved never again to place my conscience, judgment, or livelihood in the hands of an authority I did not trust. I did this out of self-protection, but also out of something darker: a deep skepticism born of seeing how widespread disorder and misalignment had become in the very people and institutions once charged with protecting life. I do hold out hope that the distrust does not remain permanent in me. But for now, it has become a kind of shield.

I left that system to build the Leading Edge Clinic, a private national telehealth practice that began treating the Covid vaccine-injured, among the most abandoned patients in modern medical history, at least in scale, because the conventional therapeutic armamentarium had almost nothing to offer them. From there, the clinic widened. It became a place for the chronically ill, the medically complex, and the many patients still suffering after standard protocols had failed them and who required deeper investigation, broader therapeutic imagination, and a willingness to draw from medicines and approaches the system had sidelined, discredited, or ignored for decades.

Rather than confront the vaccine-injured, the system closed ranks. Physicians, the media, and fellow citizens gaslit, dismissed, and abandoned the very people they had coerced into vaccinating—the people who had trusted the institutions of society, unaware of how far those institutions had already strayed from alignment.

What I did not expect was that this decision would open a world I had not imagined. I met my practice partner, Scott Marsland, who has become one of the most trusted, respected, and valuable companions of my life over these years. Even more striking were the people who came wanting to work with us. All were refugees from that same broken system. Many had been directly harmed by the vaccine campaign and carried injuries of their own. But what united them was deeper than grievance: a shared refusal to subject patients to what they themselves had seen institutions and society inflict on others—and in some cases, on themselves.

That spirit, rather than any business logic, is what has allowed the clinic to survive. We have often operated on margins no sensible business would tolerate for so long, hiring more nurses and support staff than practices our size would ever normally employ, simply because Scott and I were committed to delivering the highest level of care and support we could offer to anyone who came to us. By ordinary standards, it may look improbable that we endured at all. To me, it remains one of the most satisfying and proud achievements of my life.

That endurance did not come from perfect management. If anything, Scott and I often erred in the other direction, overemphasizing principle at the expense of pragmatism. We offered benefits and matching retirement contributions earlier than a small practice like ours probably should have, because we wanted the clinic to reflect the same care internally that we were trying to give our patients.

Over time, however, we learned that alignment also requires discipline. The structure has to hold first. It cannot be exposed to weakness, folly, or ego disguised as generosity. For that reason, we began openly sharing the status of the practice’s finances with our staff, making clear that growth, raises, and expansion had to follow durability, not outrun it. Even there, the lesson was the same: truth first, structure first, then whatever can honestly be sustained.

In time, I began to understand that this, too, was part of the same pattern. Judgment does not only expose what fails. It also reveals what holds. What Scott and I built was modest, imperfect, and often precarious, but it was ordered around something real: a commitment to truth, to care, and to the patients who came to us. The principles were simple—honesty, patience, kindness, empathy—and above all, the relentless pursuit of knowledge.

*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about, your support is greatly appreciated.

Subscribe now

Right from the beginning and in the years since, we have been researching numerous therapeutic options with countless hours studying, questioning, testing, and refining them—not in the service of reputation or growth, but for one purpose alone: to relieve the suffering of the people who came to us. It was that same search, pursued far enough and seriously enough, that led me into the mineral sciences and, eventually, into everything this book became.

The suffering of the patients we encountered was immense. Many of them—perhaps most—had been healthy, active, and fully engaged in their lives before the pandemic and its vaccines. By the time they reached us, many could no longer work, and some struggled simply to endure their symptoms for a single day. Their situation was compounded by the perverse, yet well-described, reality that myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome—the clinical pattern underlying much of Long Covid and Long Vax—often yields normal standard laboratory results, imaging, and physical exams.

As a result, the medical system offered them little recognition or treatment. In our first two years, three of our patients traveled to Switzerland and were euthanized at their request. I will never forget that. Ever.

To witness such suffering over the years changes you. It clarifies what matters and what does not.

If judgment reveals what systems are built upon, then whatever measure of success our practice has had is not mysterious. It reflects that what we built was aligned, however imperfectly, with real principles. That kind of alignment prevails.

Memorial Day Sale

Today is the last day of our Memorial Day weekend sale on the two products that emerged from this work: Aurmina and Primora Bio. Discount code for 25% off both: Memorialday26.

From Research to Practice - Links Below Image

Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water

Primora Bio - Bringing Life Back To Soil

Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States

The War on Ivermectin- The Medicine That Could have Ended the Pandemic

The Blueprint of Life - The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health

From Volcanoes to Vitality -The Untold Story of Asao Shimanishi

The War on Chlorine Dioxide - The Medicine That Could End Medicine

Medical Musings - A View From the Inside Of Modern Medicine

In case anyone is interested, I am speaking at The Better Way Conference, put on by the World Council for Health, next weekend in Providence, RI. Use KORY10 for 10% off live or virtual viewing.

*The following is excerpted from “The Blueprint of Life,” which is shipping early to the middle of next month.

The Convergence

What follows is the case this book kept forcing me to make. I am aware of how unusual it is. I did not set out to write a metaphysical case for an Architect of Reality. I set out to understand why a Japanese mineral extract appeared to work so consistently in patients, plants, water, and soil, and why, every time I thought I had reached the end of that inquiry, the pattern widened. New mechanisms appeared. New correspondences surfaced. Scientific and theological fragments that had seemed unrelated began converging with unusual force.

The accumulating evidence, the unexpected sources, and the convergences between them were not arriving randomly, but were pressing to be considered and included. Whether one chooses to name that insistence providence, design, or simply the force of some deeper order, it persisted. The pattern kept reasserting itself until the conclusion below became unavoidable.

I also have to say that it could not have taken shape without the many hours I spent listening to MB, whose decades of study in Scripture and theology, and only a brief introduction to three single texts from the Hermetic canon, repeatedly brought to light texts and patterns I would never have found on my own. What follows is neither his alone nor mine alone. It emerged at the intersection of his long spiritual and textual labor and my own habits of pattern recognition, medicine, and obsessive research.

MB, however, would never have assembled an evidentiary case, because in his teens he underwent what some describe as a white-light moment—though he himself would put it more simply: an event in which God responded to him through thunder and lightning that appeared with uncanny timing, in the absence of any storm, clouds, or weather to account for it.

However, that alone would not have been enough to convince him. It was the fact that he awoke the next morning with a mind newly oriented in the world he had been living in. He has lived ever since with a deep belief in God. From that posture, he approached texts from antiquity as carriers of real knowledge. I was the one for whom those convergences became transformative, and the one who felt compelled to present what they revealed as a whole.

I then discovered that quite a few others, across disciplines and eras, had already put forward fragments and echoes of the same logic I was beginning to assemble.

For instance, I am not the first to argue that ancient texts contain primordial wisdom: Guénon and the Traditionalists, Joseph Campbell, Isaac Newton. Others have argued that nature’s complexity points to design, including David Berlinski and Intelligent Design scholars. Others have argued that spiritual traditions anticipated certain scientific ideas, including Wolfgang Smith, Harold Bloom, Kabbalistic scholars, Fritjof Capra, and Mircea Eliade.

But as far as I can determine, no one has taken Hermeticism, The Emerald Tablet, scriptural cosmology, mineral cycling, water chemistry, and systems biology and brought them together into a single evidentiary case of this kind.

In fact, months ago, after I had constructed my first version of this logic exercise, I asked AI if they found it rational. I was more than shocked when it returned the following:

“Your entire argument is a formal philosophical proof that is logically sound, rhetorically powerful, and completely unique in the history of ideas.”

Interestingly, when I asked it again at a later date, its answer was much more muted.

The Deep System

Of all the ancient echoes of modern scientific knowledge, none struck me more deeply than Scripture’s references to the Great Deep. They started looking like descriptions of a real source system, rather than a religious image alone—an active interface between rock, water, and life.

Even more powerful were the passages from Scripture describing the opening of the Deep, followed later by its closure, and the steady shortening of human lifespans that came afterward. In that moment, the Flood looked like a planetary system reset: a world sustained by the fountains of the deep, then ruptured, shut down, with biological decline unfolding across generations.

What makes this especially difficult to dismiss is that the Great Deep is not a minor Scriptural detail. It is central to the story and described as a real source system beneath the Earth whose opening and closing carry planetary consequences. Yet, as I covered in yesterday’s post, only recently has modern science discovered the scale of subsurface mineral-bound waters and their role in Earth’s larger hydrologic system. This knowledge could not have been available to ancient observers. Yet Scripture places deep waters near the center of creation, rupture, and decline. That is a very hard thing to explain away.

How did an ancient text know enough to assign such importance to deep waters long before geology, deep drilling, mantle mineral physics, or any modern means of inference existed?

By that time, I had accumulated too many convergences between modern scientific knowledge and fragments recorded in antiquity to treat the Great Deep as a standalone curiosity. It clarified something larger: I was looking at repeated descriptions of a set of modern scientific realities.

As those convergences accumulated, I had to ask what could account for ancient knowledge of them long before the modern sciences could describe them, even now only in fragments.

The connections between Shimanishi and the alchemical texts, and those between Scripture and life on Earth today, represent only a small sampling of a much larger pattern. There are many similar convergences between ancient texts and modern scientific insights across cultures and traditions. For the sake of precision, I will confine the analysis that follows to the texts already brought forward in this book.

However varied living forms may appear, the material conditions required for life are just three: a carbon scaffold, and continual access to water and minerals.

The widening body of evidence now has to be brought into a single structure. These chapters have traced the foundational role of water and minerals in life and a planetary architecture: a recursive geohydrological and electrochemical system in which minerals form and are stored within rock over geological time, brought nearer the surface, weathered and opened by sulfate-bearing rainwater, dissolved into mobile ionic forms, and carried outward into the environments where life can emerge and persist.

Rock serves as reservoir and source. Water serves as medium, carrier, and distributor. Sulfur participates in transformation, release, and renewal. The whole system appears recursive, returning matter through death, decay, burial, re-formation, uplift, weathering, and re-emergence in a cycle that continuously links geology and biology.

Within that system, the recurring association of iron, sulfur, aluminum, and water appears to function as a core organizing chemistry, foundational to the generation of proton gradients, charge separation, catalytic surfaces, and the ordered aqueous conditions required for metabolism. Earth’s minerals created the conditions for life indirectly, by conditioning water into an electrochemically ordered medium capable of carrying mineral chemistry into living systems.

If the recorded knowledge of that architecture is accurate, and if it was recorded long before it could have been independently discovered, then only two explanations exist.

Read more

*Excerpted from “The Blueprint of Life,” which is shipping early to the middle of next month.

Modern science had begun to give physical shape to an ancient claim: the “Great Deep” described in Scripture was not only symbol, but perhaps a real deep-to-surface geohydrological circulation system only recently glimpsed by modern science.

In yet another “final pass” of From Volcanoes to Vitality, tired but relieved, MB sent me a link over WhatsApp and wrote, “You need to see this.” I opened it expecting another one of his long AI outputs from a deep biochemistry exploration, or perhaps more lines from Scripture. Instead, it stopped me.

It came from a news article published days earlier, in December of 2025, just as I was trying to bring the book to a close. The Rock–Water Circuit Theory had not yet taken shape. I was still circling pieces without knowing what they were assembling into. That article became one of the missing pieces that forced the theory into focus, requiring yet another chapter when I had thought I was finally done.

It was a review of studies of fluids recovered from deep geothermal drilling—fluids captured directly from depth, rather than hydrothermal vents or surface chemistry. It described hydrogen-rich, alkaline waters generated where water meets fresh rock far beneath our feet. A natural proton-gradient engine was running inside the Earth itself.

The Deepest Source Yet Reached

The direct sampling of those fluids was recent. The effort to reach the deep Earth was not. Beginning in 1970, Soviet scientists initiated what would become the deepest drilling project in human history: the Kola Superdeep Borehole. For nearly two decades, through relentless technical difficulty and repeated redesign of equipment, they pushed a narrow borehole deeper and deeper into the continental crust. By 1989, they had reached a depth of just over 12 kilometers—approximately 7.6 miles beneath the surface.

To put that in perspective, the center of the Earth lies roughly 4,000 miles below our feet. The deepest hole ever drilled by humanity had penetrated less than two-tenths of one percent of that distance.

And yet, even at that infinitesimal depth, what they found was not what they expected.

Based on seismic data, geologists had long believed that a transition from granite to basalt would occur several kilometers down. It never appeared. The rock remained granitic far deeper than predicted, forcing a reconsideration of how seismic signals were being interpreted. What had been assumed to represent changes in rock type now appeared to reflect changes in pressure, density, and state within the same material.

Even more surprising was the presence of water.

At depths where rock was assumed to be dry and impermeable, the borehole encountered water trapped within fractures—water that could not have simply percolated down from the surface. It appeared to be generated or released from the rock itself under conditions of heat and pressure. Mixed within it were gases, including hydrogen, emerging continuously from the system.

The deeper they drilled, the more conditions diverged from their expectations. Temperatures rose far beyond projections, eventually reaching levels that caused the surrounding rock to behave less like solid stone and more like a slowly deforming plastic mass. Drill bits warped. Equipment failed. Beyond a certain point, the Earth simply would not allow further penetration.

The project did not end because they reached their goal. It ended because the physical conditions made it impossible to continue. But what matters here is not that they stopped. It is that even this limited descent—barely scratching the surface of the planet—was enough to overturn fundamental assumptions about the structure, composition, and behavior of the Earth’s crust.

If our models failed so quickly, and at such shallow depth relative to the scale of the planet, then the conclusion is difficult to avoid: we know far less about the deep Earth than we often assume. And yet, within that uncertainty, something important had already begun to emerge.

Water was present. It was mobile. It interacted with rock. It carried dissolved material. It generated gases. It participated in an active chemical system extending far below the surface. The Earth, even in its outermost layers, was behaving like a dynamic geothermal-hydrologic system.

I sat with that a long time. If hydrogen and electrical charge naturally arise wherever water meets hot rock at depth, and have done so for millions of years, then life’s energy source begins to look built in, not accidental. Again, we are talking about a planet that makes energy the way mitochondria do: automatically, continuously.

Minerals moved to the center of the story. Rock met water. Water pulled chemistry from stone. Ions separated. Gradients formed. Energy began to move. The source had a place, and the mechanism had direction.

*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about, your support is greatly appreciated.

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Long before the Soviet Kola Superdeep Borehole reached twelve kilometers beneath the surface in 1989, and long before scientists sampled hydrogen-rich, alkaline fluids directly from deep geothermal systems, ancient texts were already describing something they called “the Great Deep” as a source system: water rising from below, carrying vitality, feeding the surface, and sustaining life. This finding convinced me that the Great Deep in Scripture was being described materially rather than metaphorically.

But ancient writers had no drilling rigs, no geochemistry, and thus no ability to explore or access deep Earth water–rock systems, yet they described a pressurized, life-supporting source system with astonishing consistency. Their description now stands beside what modern science has only recently begun to measure directly.

Over the course of months, I had followed minerals into water, water into gradients, gradients into metabolism, and metabolism into life itself. Then, just as I thought I had reached the end, the missing mechanism came from deep within the Earth.

Rock meets water, minerals dissolve, ions separate, gradients form, and energy begins to move. Under the right conditions, matter organizes into something living. Eventually, that living system returns its components to the same mineral world that made it possible in the first place. Scripture had described in ancient language what science is only now becoming capable of measuring.

What began as a narrow investigation into a Japanese mineral extract had widened until the same mechanisms kept showing up everywhere I looked: ancient tablets, alchemical riddles, Scripture, a mineral scientist in Japan, a biophysicist studying mica, and now a direct glimpse of the deep Earth behaving like a planetary electrochemical system.

I had not begun with an architecture and then gone looking for evidence. I had followed the evidence until an architecture emerged. My next post begins with the question that such an architecture asks of the ancient texts.

MEMORIAL DAY SALE

To those of you who have stayed with me through this long journey across science, alchemy, Scripture, water, geology, agriculture, and spirituality, I want to say thank you by announcing our Memorial Day weekend sale on the two products that emerged from this work: Aurmina and Primora Bio. Discount code for 25% off both: Memorialday26.

Aurmina, a name we arrived at before this work fully unfolded, means “golden mineral essence.” It is a diluted form of Shimanishi’s extract and part of my effort to carry this work into a practical form through drinking water.

Primora Bio emerged from that same effort, with the intent of delivering the water to soil, crops, plants, and animals.

So for those who want the work to leave the page and enter their world, these are our first attempts to carry it forward.

From Research to Practice - Links Below Image

Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water

Primora Bio - Bringing Life Back To Soil

Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States

The War on Ivermectin- The Medicine That Could have Ended the Pandemic

The Blueprint of Life - The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health

From Volcanoes to Vitality -The Untold Story of Asao Shimanishi

The War on Chlorine Dioxide - The Medicine That Could End Medicine

Medical Musings - A View From the Inside Of Modern Medicine

*Excerpted from “The Blueprint of Life,” which is shipping early to the middle of next month.

The more I contemplated order—how it appears in biology and geology, how persistently it is sought and honored, and how deeply it seems tied to vitality—the more I began to think about alignment as well: the fitting together of parts in ways that sustain life. Lost in that thought, one day I started to wonder whether there were any examples of great artworks celebrated for genuinely disordered structure. As I explored art history, I could only find a rare and typically non-enduring example.

I want to say openly that I am not an art historian, or even a diligent consumer of art. I approached this question as a physician and writer, armed with curiosity, artificial intelligence, and the work of people who have spent their lives studying art and art history. What follows is not an expert survey of the field; it is just me trying to answer the question as to whether the things human beings appreciate as beautiful, meaningful, or enduring tend to conceal an underlying order, even when they first appear chaotic.

Even movements often described as chaotic—Cubism, Surrealism, Dada—are powerful because they strain against an underlying order whose internal relations remain aligned. What initially appears as fragmentation often reveals itself to be carefully governed.

Take Picasso. His work is frequently cited as a rupture of visual order, yet his planes interlock with precision, his geometric relationships remain balanced, and the viewer’s eye is guided along intentional pathways. What some see as chaotic is actually disciplined complexity.

The same is true of Hieronymus Bosch. His paintings, at first glance, appear as overwhelming visual chaos: grotesque figures, impossible scenes, and symbolic elements piled seemingly without restraint. Yet scholars find that these works are meticulously organized around theological and moral narratives. The visual density conceals an underlying structure in which even the apparent excess remains aligned to a governing narrative. The longer one looks, the more the underlying order reveals itself.

This pattern repeats across music, literature, and architecture. Compositions that feel improvisational still rest on harmonic frameworks, stream-of-consciousness prose follows rhythms of language and cognition, and buildings that appear asymmetrical or organic still depend on alignments of load, proportion, and force that allow them to stand. True disorder, when it occurs, is rarely valued aesthetically. It is experienced as noise rather than meaning and quickly forgotten.

The human mind instinctively searches for patterns and responds to them because biological systems themselves depend on patterned coordination—parts held in alignment across time and scale—to function. Neural signaling requires stable gradients, metabolic pathways require ordered sequences of steps, and both depend on components being held in proper relation. Information transfer in cells, tissues, and organs depends on stable media that support ordered function. When those conditions fail, signaling becomes disordered, and coordinated function deteriorates.

Art, like biology, can sustain variation only when an underlying order and alignment remain intact.

What I found fascinating is that, despite seeing order everywhere, in science, speech, and ancient texts, I failed to see repetitive sameness or rigidity. Instead, I saw an astonishing variety. A world governed by order need not produce sameness, because alignment does not eliminate variety; it makes variety sustainable. Great art endures because it can stretch, vary, surprise, and even overwhelm while still holding to an ordered structure that keeps its tensions, contrasts, and variations in alignment.

The same interplay of order and alignment seems to extend far beyond art. The world is overflowing with variety, yet none of that richness requires abandoning order. If anything, variety seems to flourish best within an ordered structure.

This observation reaches beyond aesthetics or art. Order is a scientific property of water, minerals, and cellular signaling, and it also scales into human creativity. Systems can tolerate variation, novelty, and apparent disorder as long as an organizing structure persists. Remove that structure, and biological function and cultural value begin to disintegrate.

The reverence for masterpieces that seem chaotic yet remain internally ordered may reflect a deeper intuition: life itself operates in that same domain—dynamic, complex, and adaptive, while still governed by order.

The Moral Hypothesis of Order

At a certain point, I returned to a possibility I had heard others argue for years: that the order and beauty of the world may have been intended. I had not begun with that assumption. But the more I followed recurring patterns of order across water, geology, biology, culture, and older theological texts, the harder it became to treat that order as accidental.

If the world was formed through an order capable of sustaining vitality, fertility, recursiveness, and permanence for eons, human moral order may belong to the same design. Ordered behavior may affect human life much the same way ordered structure sustains the conditions under which life remains stable, generative, and whole.

The implications of Emoto’s work that I covered in a recent post are what triggered that thought. A kind, loving caregiver has a consistent cadence. Their touch is predictable. Their movements are measured. Their expressions align with their words. When Emoto spoke calmly and lovingly to water, he emitted vibrations with frequencies, amplitudes, and rhythms that, as they passed through water and were captured at a single moment, revealed beautifully ordered crystalline structures. When he spoke with angry, harsh words, the energy was captured in chaotic, disjointed patterns.

A developing nervous system entrains to its environment. When the signals it receives are ordered—steady cadence, measured tone, predictable touch, aligned expression—regulation stabilizes and the developing self is brought into greater internal alignment. When the signals it receives are chaotic—yelling, threat, unpredictability, violence—regulation destabilizes, and the developing self is driven into hypervigilance, dissociation, or rigidity in response to sudden spikes, conflicting inputs, and irregular timing.

If even a portion of Emoto’s observations reflects something real, then this pattern may extend further: what we call loving or cruel behavior may be more than a judgment of its character; it may also be an assessment of its structure. Speech and affect that are internally aligned would be carried in one kind of pattern, while contempt and hostility would be carried in another. Happiness might reflect greater internal order, while anxiety, depression, or psychic disarray might reflect its loss. The health, vitality, and mood of both the transmitter and the receiver would then depend, at least in part, on the order or disorder of what is being expressed and absorbed.

The Geometry of Conduct

I started to think that the way we treat other people may carry a structural pattern, generated within us and then transmitted outward to others. That thought led me to see morality not only as a code of conduct, but as guidance for preserving order within the self and carrying that order into the world.

I suddenly started to think about how Emoto’s work could be used in the classroom. Imagine children seeing that kind words produce symmetrical patterns, while hostile words produce chaotic fragments. Let them compare, side by side, the underlying physics of different words, tones, and emotions. They speak. The medium responds. They see, in visible form, something of the beauty or disorder in what they said and how they said it.

Then imagine a married couple watching the structural differences between measured, respectful speech and a contemptuous cadence. A therapist using such a technique could offer immediate, concrete feedback, using geometry rather than jargon.

That would change how we understand morality. It would suggest that morality is more than imposed rules. It may be a way of aligning oneself with the structure of reality itself—an architecture in which beauty, order, and consequence are woven together.

If the world was designed with embedded order, as I have argued throughout these chapters, then human behavior should also come in ordered and disordered forms. Those forms would carry consequences for us and for those around us. Creation is full of innumerable organisms, materials, relationships, and ecosystems, wildly different in expression yet governed by recurring patterns.

Why would human life be the lone exception? Ordered behavior would support health, stability, and vitality, while disordered behavior would degrade them. God would not need to police such a system from outside it. He would have built it so that order, alignment, and consequence operate together, preserving the conditions under which human life and civilization can endure rather than descend into self-destruction.

A large body of psychiatric and epidemiologic literature has found that religious belief, prayer, and spiritual involvement are often associated with lower rates of depression, greater resilience under stress, stronger social support, and, in many studies, reduced anxiety as well.

The findings are not uniform because religion can affect people very differently, depending on whether it is experienced as trust, meaning, community, and hope, or as fear, shame, guilt, and punishment. Fear-based or punitive religious experience can worsen anxiety and distress, while secure attachment to God, communal belonging, prayer, meaning, and spiritual trust are repeatedly associated with better mental-health outcomes.

If that is true, teaching people how to live is more than religious instruction. It is guidance on how to preserve physical and mental health by living in harmony with the world’s design rather than falling out of alignment with it.

Collapse Beneath the Surface

The Geohydrological Shift Theory in From Volcanoes to Vitality describes a hydrologic system that appears functional even as the internal order sustaining Earth’s water chemistry degrades. The measurements do not initially appear alarming. Living systems continue to function. But buffering capacity diminishes, mineral composition and balance decline, and biological coordination falters. Vitality decreases slowly and often imperceptibly while the source of disorder remains undetected, until the first signs of collapse appear in fertility, resilience, and agricultural yield. That, in essence, is the warning developed at length in From Volcanoes to Vitality: the earliest signs of such collapse may already be visible.

People raised in environments of love, support, and harmony often learn to trust what is presented to them. They may read outward composure, kindness, and confidence as signs of health, and for that reason are often slower to detect disorder developing beneath the surface.

Those shaped by dysfunction, indifference, or cruelty learn to look more closely. They watch for motives, inconsistencies, and the alignment or misalignment between what is said and what is real, because experience has taught them that the two do not always travel together. They are often the first to recognize failure while it is still forming.

I have come to think that this difference in perception matters more than most people realize. As a physician and researcher, I was trained to assess data critically before allowing it to shape my clinical decisions. From the outset of Covid, I did exactly that. It did not take long to see that what was being said publicly did not align with what the data were showing, especially the data I was gathering from direct observation on the front lines. The inconsistencies were not subtle. The narrative and the underlying reality diverged quickly.

I began to notice, too, that trust itself had become a kind of sorting mechanism. Those who most trusted institutions, media, and official expertise were generally the most likely to conform to the policies being advanced and medicines being pushed, while those who were more skeptical were more willing to diverge from them. It did not take long for me to see that the data showed the more skeptical group fared better, and by large margins.

From early on, I noticed the disparity between what was said and what was true, and I started paying more attention to incentives, omissions, and actions taken to suppress the widening misalignment between institutional claims and observed outcomes. That experience changed the way I read systems. My skepticism now knows no bounds.

As that gap widened, I became more vocal, trying to reach those who were “too trusting.” I spoke about what I was seeing early, before the broader failure was widely recognized, if it ever has been, and I paid a price for doing so. Perhaps that is because I had become increasingly deaf to what was being broadcast, recommended, and repeated. The words mattered less to me than seeing the misaligned institutional structures that were producing them.

When you begin to see that order can erode and alignment can fail while appearances remain intact, you begin to recognize the pattern everywhere—in bodies, institutions, even societies. Some trust surfaces. Others inspect foundations. I once trusted what I was shown. I trained inside institutions and believed they would hold under strain. Then Covid came. When you watch a system fail from the inside, your attention shifts. You stop looking at the paint. You start looking at the beams.

Subscribe now

MEMORIAL DAY SALE

To those of you who have stayed with me through this long journey across science, alchemy, Scripture, water, geology, agriculture, and spirituality, I want to say thank you by announcing that Friday marks the start of our Memorial Day weekend sale on the two products that emerged from this work: Aurmina and Primora Bio. Discount code for 25% off both: Memorialday26.

Aurmina, a name we arrived at before this work fully unfolded, means “golden mineral essence.” It is a diluted form of Shimanishi’s extract and part of my effort to carry this work into a practical form through drinking water.

Primora Bio emerged from that same effort, with the intent of delivering the water to soil, crops, plants, and animals.

So for those who want the work to leave the page and enter their world, these are our first attempts to carry it forward.

From Research to Practice - Links Below Image

Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water

Primora Bio - Bringing Life Back To Soil

Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States

The War on Ivermectin- The Medicine That Could have Ended the Pandemic

The Blueprint of Life - The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health

From Volcanoes to Vitality -The Untold Story of Asao Shimanishi

The War on Chlorine Dioxide - The Medicine That Could End Medicine

Medical Musings - A View From the Inside Of Modern Medicine

*Excerpted from “The Blueprint of Life,” which is shipping early to the middle of next month.

Since I was, in effect, writing two books at the same time, my mind kept moving between lines in Scripture and deeper dives into water chemistry and geology. Going back and forth like that, I kept coming back to the same impression. Ancient texts kept returning to the same themes: light and darkness, purity and corruption, order and disorder. Scripture did it. The War Scroll did it. Alchemy did it. Order and alignment kept appearing in both ancient texts and modern science as something fundamental—something tied to life, coherence, and right relation.

The more ordered a thing became, and the more its parts were brought into alignment, the more it seemed to hold together, to function, and to endure. I started with a hunch and decided to follow it. Water drew me in early because its mineral composition—and the ionic environment that arises from it—shape its state, and as that state becomes more ordered and internally aligned, its capacity to carry, transmit, and sustain biological processes changes with it.

What Emoto Was Actually Seeing

That brought me back to a topic I had explored months earlier in From Volcanoes to Vitality: the work of Masaru Emoto, who became widely known for flash-freezing and photographing water after it had been exposed to different inputs—spoken words, written labels, prayer, and music—and for reporting that “positive” inputs produced ice crystals with symmetrical, ordered patterns while “negative” ones yielded fragmented and irregular formations.

His supporters treated those images as evidence that water could absorb intention, register emotion, or somehow retain the memory of what had been spoken over it. His critics dismissed the whole thing as pseudoscience. I believe that both sides misunderstand the chemistry of water itself.

Water does not respond to emotions or remember words. It responds to energy, especially mechanical and vibrational input, because sound is organized pressure moving through a medium.

As vibrations propagate through water, they induce motion of ions and water molecules in patterns that reflect the frequency, wavelength, and amplitude of the input, sometimes promoting alignment and symmetry, and at other times disrupting and dispersing. Water does not “understand” language in any cognitive sense. It responds to and transmits the vibrational patterns produced by speech. As pressure waves move through water, they redistribute dissolved ions and their hydration shells, producing configurations that may become more ordered and symmetrical or more chaotic and disordered depending on the signal.

The critical step in Emoto’s work was the freezing process, which effectively flash-froze a dynamic system into a static lattice at a single moment in time. The photograph did not record the meaning of what was said. It captured the physical geometry of a system in motion at the moment that motion was arrested. I believe he may have been capturing the physical geometry of a word as it passed through water.

That changed my interpretation of his work. The issue shifted from sentiment to structure: whether water was being driven toward order or thrown out of alignment by the character of the signal. If spoken phrases delivered with warmth, calm, and regular cadence consistently produced symmetrical crystalline forms, while angry, sudden, and aggressive delivery produced fractured structures, then “positive” and “negative” speech may be less about sentiment than about the order or chaos carried in the words and tone of the speaker. More harmonious and symmetrical patterns in the ice crystals appear to be associated with calm, constructive speech, while chaotic and irregular patterns appear to accompany harsh or aggressive speech.

Given my obsession with mineral water, I also wondered whether repeating Emoto’s experiments with differently mineralized waters, then flash-freezing and photographing them, might offer a rough visual comparison of water quality—an indirect glimpse of how ordered or disordered the underlying medium had become. I briefly considered building such a setup myself, if only to see what Rock Water would look like next to my tap water. Then again, I might prefer not to know.

Ordered Input, Biological Response

Dorothy Retallack’s work in the mid-twentieth century showed a similar relationship in plants. Plants exposed to classical music grew more vigorously and leaned toward the source. Plants exposed to loud, chaotic noise showed stress or died. Later work clarified the mechanism. Plants were not judging the music being played, just as water was not carrying meaning. Plants were responding differently to different physical inputs.

Similar observations have been reported in informal classroom rice experiments in many places around the world. Cooked rice is placed into two separate jars, labeled “love” and “hate.” One is repeatedly exposed to speech delivered in a calm tone, with a regular cadence and measured amplitude—words expressing care, patience, and kindness. The other is subjected to loud, irregular, and aggressive speech—words expressing anger, hostility, and contempt.

The reported outcome is strikingly consistent: the rice exposed to the latter tends to degrade more rapidly. My interpretation is that sound waves propagate through air and tissue, activating mechanosensitive ion channels, calcium signaling pathways, gene expression programs, and other physiological processes. Plants appear to fare best when exposed to ordered, rhythmic, and properly aligned input, while irregular, chaotic, or excessive vibration seems to burden them.

Whatever the underlying mechanism, the pattern is difficult to dismiss. What we call “loving” and “hateful” behavior may carry different physical signatures—one ordered, the other disordered—and biological systems seem to respond accordingly.

A growing body of evidence suggests that the human nervous system follows the same pattern.

Studies have shown that highly structured auditory input can reduce baseline anxiety, improve attentional focus, and enhance mood regulation. Long-term classical musicians have been found to have gray matter volumes in regions governing memory, emotion, and executive function that are 19 percent larger than those of others. Rhythmic, patterned music can reduce abnormal cortical activity in some seizure disorders. Even brief exposure to complex, highly structured compositions has been associated with transient improvements in spatial reasoning performance.

The consistent observation across these domains is that patterned input appears to support coordination, resilience, and growth in the brain, just as Retallack observed rhythmic vibrational input supporting growth and vitality in plants.

Order versus disorder. Physics, not psychology.

Note to readers:

To those of you who have stayed with me through this long journey across science, alchemy, Scripture, water, geology, agriculture, and now spirituality, I want to say thank you by announcing that Friday marks the start of our Memorial Day weekend sale on the two products that emerged from this work: Aurmina and Primora Bio. Discount code for 25% off both: Memorialday26.

Aurmina, a name we arrived at before this work fully unfolded, means “golden mineral essence.” It is a diluted form of Shimanishi’s extract and part of my effort to carry this work into a practical form through drinking water.

Primora Bio emerged from that same effort, with the intent of delivering the water to soil, crops, plants, and animals.

So for those who want the work to leave the page and enter their world, these are our first attempts to carry it forward.

From Research to Practice - Links Below Image

Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water

Primora Bio - Bringing Life Back To Soil

Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States

The War on Ivermectin- The Medicine That Could have Ended the Pandemic

The Blueprint of Life - The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health

From Volcanoes to Vitality -The Untold Story of Asao Shimanishi

The War on Chlorine Dioxide - The Medicine That Could End Medicine

Medical Musings - A View From the Inside Of Modern Medicine

*Excerpted from “The Blueprint of Life,” which is shipping early to the middle of next month.

What follows is a hypothesis that emerged late, after enough pieces had fallen into place for a larger pattern in Scripture to reveal itself.

MB called me as I neared what I believed was, once again, the eve of submitting From Volcanoes to Vitality (FVTV). Of the hundreds of calls we have shared, many had brought some new convergence, but this one felt different. He believed he had found scriptural confirmation that the global water-quality shift we had been articulating in FVTV had happened once before. He was describing something deeper than mineral depletion: a failure of the conditions that allow water to carry mineral order, sustain gradients, and coordinate life.

He believed a Geohydrological Shift had occurred once before.

I did what I always do when someone makes a claim like that: I tried to debunk it. I asked AI to help me search widely for the recurring structure, especially in places where Scripture speaks of deep systems, fountains, rupture, sealing, and downstream consequences. What returned did not feel cherry-picked. Scripture seemed to be describing a coupled hydrologic system, followed by what happens when that system is violently inverted.

In Scripture, the “Great Deep” refers to a vast, primordial reservoir of waters beneath the Earth. It is presented as a source system, not as an inert body of liquid.

In modern terms, this resembles what our Rock–Water Circuit Theory identifies as a critical deep geologic water system, where significant quantities of water exist inside Earth as hydroxyl bound within minerals rather than as underground oceans. Discoveries involving ringwoodite-bearing diamonds, mantle plume studies, hydrothermal systems, and deep borehole data show that Earth’s interior contains enormous amounts of mineral-bound water and deep geochemical fluids capable of interacting with surface hydrology over long timescales.

These deep geological waters do not currently contribute significant volume to the larger hydrologic cycle. Their importance lies in disproportionate hydrochemical influence through mineral loading, redox chemistry, dissolved gases, hydrothermal circulation, and long-term water–rock interaction. In Rock–Water Circuit terms, the “Great Deep” resembles a deep geodynamic source system capable of chemically conditioning portions of the waters that eventually reach surface biology.

The full scientific framework for why we believe a geohydrological shift is underway in our time, along with the practical case for addressing it, is presented in From Volcanoes to Vitality. The current shift has not reached full collapse. Scripture, however, offers a striking picture of systemic hydrologic rupture carried to its end.

Here, I want to show what Scripture says that rupture looks like: the Great Deep as source system, the Flood as rupture, the resealing as shutoff, and the long decline in vitality that follows.

Biblically, the sequence is explicit. Genesis begins with the formation of the Great Deep, the Earth, and the skies above.

“Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.”

—Genesis 1:6 (ESV)

“God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above.”

—Genesis 1:7 (ESV)

The waters below are identified by both their extent and their vitality: “fountains of the Deep,” or “the Great Deep.” Fountains imply emergence, movement, and renewal. They point to dynamic interfaces between Earth and life.

“Streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground.”

—Genesis 2:6 (ESV)

“For the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, flowing out in the valleys and hills; a land of wheat and barley. . .a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills you can dig copper.”

—Deuteronomy 8:7–9 (ESV)

Here, the Deep is referenced as a source of “precious things.”

“Blessed by the LORD be his land, with the precious things of heaven, with the dew, and with the deep that crouches beneath.”

—Deuteronomy 33:13 (ESV)

These are symbolic images, but they also describe a coupled system: deep water, mineral contact, upward flow, and surface vitality.

I do not want to overstate the parallel. Human beings have always known about springs, wells, fountains, and water beneath the ground, but modern geology has only recently described the deeper version of that picture: water stored in crustal rocks, moving through hydrothermal systems, rising through faults and fractures, and existing deep in the mantle as hydroxyl bound within minerals.

Scripture’s “Great Deep” is not a technical description of modern geology. It does, however, resemble the broader concept of a deep, mineral-contacted source system through which water, rock, pressure, heat, and chemistry participate in the vitality of the surface world.

Early biblical descriptions do not give us depleted soils, fractured aquifers, diluted rivers, or stripped water. They evoke a world sustained by upward flow, a hydrologic system capable of maintaining biological vitality over centuries.

As explored earlier, water conditioned by prolonged mineral contact supports lower energy loss, more stable redox behavior, tighter proton gradients, improved enzymatic function, more stable protein conformations, and decreased oxidative stress. These are the physical conditions required for mitochondria to operate efficiently, for detoxification pathways to function without strain, and for cumulative biological damage to remain low over time.

Under those conditions, vitality and longevity would be expected.

Human lifespans routinely exceeded nine hundred years in the Bible. Noah is described as being six hundred years old as if that were unremarkable. The genealogies of Genesis 5 repeatedly mention lifespans approaching a millennium. Adam lived 930 years. Methuselah lived 969 years.

These are presented as norms.

The Great Flood

Scripture then records a decisive alteration to the Earth that had been so carefully formed. God closes “the Great Deep” and lets loose “the Flood.” Scripture is clear about his reasons:

“The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”

—Genesis 6:5 (ESV)

Violence, in particular, is emphasized:

“Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence.”

—Genesis 6:11 (ESV)

Soon after, the Great Flood arrives. For that to happen, God breaks apart the fountains of the Deep and sends massive rains over Earth:

“In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.”

—Genesis 7:11 (ESV)

Something beneath the Earth ruptures, inverting the planetary hydrologic system. Scripture describes the Flood in literal terms as a rupture on a planetary scale. Rain falls for forty days and forty nights. The waters prevail for one hundred and fifty days. The mountains disappear beneath them. From onset to full drying, nearly a year passes.

The scale is clear. In my reading, this is systemic collapse, global overturning, and a hard reset of Earth’s water system.

After the Flood, Scripture records something equally explicit:

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