You Should Be Reading Paul Marik - One Of The Best Clinician-Scientists I Have Ever Met
I’m highlighting Part 1 of one of the most important and widely read pieces on cancer I’ve seen in years—Paul Marik's new Substack series on how nutrition shapes the cancer battlefield.
You should be reading Paul Marik’s new Substack (especially his recent and most popular post titled “How Nutrition Shapes The Cancer Battlefield”).
My Friend, My Colleague, My Brother-In-Arms
There are very few men in medicine I trust the way I trust Paul Marik.
As many of my readers know, Paul and I didn’t just work together. We went to war together.
We co-founded the FLCCC and stood shoulder to shoulder against one of the most corrupt and oppressive episodes in modern medical history. We paid for it. Jobs lost. Careers derailed. Board certifications stripped. Reputations attacked. Marriages lost. . The full weight of the machine came for us.
And through all of it, Paul never stopped doing what he has always done better than anyone I know: following the science all the way down.
That was always his gift. Long before the world knew his name from COVID, Paul was already a giant in critical care medicine. He had built a career on refusing to take anything he was taught for granted. He was never impressed by consensus for its own sake.
He always went back to the foundations, back to the original science, back to the studies and the assumptions underlying them. And time and again, he found the same thing: entire practices, dogmas, and “settled” conclusions built on bad interpretation, weak evidence, or shifting sand as a foundation. That is why he was always upending consensus. It is also why his lectures were legendary. Standing room only. Everybody wanted to know what Marik thought about the latest emerging therapeutic trends.
Further, he was, quite literally, the most published practicing ICU physician in the history of the field. And not just prolific—precise, careful, and relentless about supporting his views based on published scientific evidence.
So it should surprise no one that after the system exiled him from our specialty, he dove deep into a new field, where there was even more consensus to overturn.
Paul turned his focus to cancer, specifically the metabolic theory of cancer, and his book, Cancer Care, is, to me, unparalleled as it is a deeply scientific, review and grading of the evidence base for dozens of repurposed drugs and neutraceuticals. Spoiler alert: of the over 250 repurposed drugs and 2,000 nutraceuticals touted on the internet or by practitioners, only about 50 have sufficient published evidence to form a scientific opinion or recommendation on.
We’ve been using Paul’s work in our own cancer practice at the Leading Edge Clinic as it has directly shaped how we think about and treat these patients. The central theory is simple and was first validated in 2010 based on the work of Thomas Seyfried: cancer is a metabolic disease first, and the genetic mutations arise downstream from it.
He is the Principal Investigator of our Leading Edge Clinic study on the use of combination repurposed drug therapy and dietary interventions as adjunctive therapies in cancer.
His new Substack, Marik’s Cancer & Metabolic Healing Playbook, is exactly what you would expect from him: practical, science-driven, and fearless. He is tackling cancer with diet, repurposed drugs, and targeted nutraceuticals based on physiology and evidence.
In the post I’m highlighting today, “Metabolic Wars: How Nutrition Shapes the Cancer Battlefield,” he lays out something all of my patients’ “system” oncologists still ignore: that what they eat is foundational. Food is signaling, chemistry, and energy that can support or undermine tumor growth.
That is where medicine is going (eventually), whether the old guard likes it or not.
Paul has always had a gift for seeing what matters before the institutions are ready to admit it. He did it in critical care. He did it during COVID. And now he is doing it in cancer.
And if cancer is not something you are dealing with personally, then send this to someone who is. Send it to a patient, a friend, a family member, a caregiver, someone who needs to know there are still serious physicians doing serious work outside the walls of a badly broken system.
We’ve been through a lot together. We’ve seen how “the system” behaves when challenged. And we’ve both come out the other side still doing the same thing we always did, trying to understand what actually works, and then telling people the truth about it.
If you follow my work, you should be following Paul’s.
He is one of the sharpest clinical scientists I know, and he is now focused on one of the most important problems in medicine.
*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about (or the Op-Eds and lectures I generate for the public), your support is greatly appreciated.
From Research to Practice - Links Below Images
It is very annoying that Substack allows these fake impersonation sites on their own platform. Bad enough they do it for deceased names and use their work as content. But you are hardly that.
https://substack.com/@pierrekorymd