Falling Down a Mineral Rabbit Hole Led Me to a Strange Conclusion About the Planet

Author Aside: We’re in the middle of a brief run of what I call the “Deep Science” posts. They’re a bit more technical than usual, but they’re necessary to understand the larger story we will return to tomorrow, about water, minerals, and life. Hang in there for this one more rabbit hole, then we’ll return to one of, if not the, most important tales I have ever told.
 RECAP
 Before continuing, it is worth briefly recalling the elemental logic of the iron-sulfur-aluminum-water engine itself (ISAW). In earlier sections, I argued that Earth’s mineral–water chemistry operates through a kind of division of labor among four elements. Iron governs the movement of electrons, cycling between oxidation states and keeping energy in motion. Sulfur mediates proton activity and drives mineral transformations that reopen reactive surfaces. Aluminum provides the stable aluminosilicate framework within which these reactions can occur without collapsing the system. And water serves as the mobile medium that links them all together, dissolving minerals, carrying charge, and transporting the resulting chemistry outward into soils, oceans, and eventually living organisms.
 Living Water and the Deep Earth Circulation System
 In the previous act, I examined ISAW at the elemental scale, where water plays a critical role in activating mineral chemistry in rock and then carries both its energy and mineral inputs from rock into life.
 As I followed that chemistry outward from mineral reactions into planetary processes, one realization became unavoidable.
 The planetary energy system is not the cause of ISAW chemistry.
 It is the cumulative expression of it.
 Across the crust and mantle, iron-, sulfur-, and aluminum-bearing mineral systems continuously interact with circulating water. Wherever this interaction occurs, iron-bearing minerals oxidize, water is reduced, and electrochemical gradients emerge.
 Modern mineral physics confirms that this circulation is not confined to the crust. Two well-documented geological processes illustrate how circulating water and iron-rich rock naturally generate electrochemical energy long before biology appears.
 Natural Electrochemical Systems in Rock and Water
 One process that repeatedly appeared in discussions of early planetary energy systems is serpentinization. When water infiltrates deep fractures in iron-rich mantle rocks, a powerful chemical transformation begins. The minerals reorganize into rocks such as serpentine and magnetite, releasing hydrogen and heat.
 The surrounding fluids become strongly alkaline. When these fluids encounter comparatively more acidic seawater, steep redox and proton gradients develop. In energetic terms, this stores electrochemical potential, the same kind of energy difference that biology later exploits through electron transport chains and proton gradients.
 For this reason, serpentinizing hydrothermal systems are widely considered among the most powerful natural energy engines operating on the early Earth.
 Not long after encountering this process, I came across a closely related phenomenon described in the geophysical literature: what some researchers call “natural geobatteries.” In many regions of the crust, reduced iron- and sulfur-bearing minerals at depth are electrically connected through rock and groundwater to more oxidized environments closer to the surface.
 The arrangement resembles a battery: reduced minerals act as electron donors, oxidized zones act as electron acceptors, and groundwater serves as the ionic pathway that closes the circuit. Portions of the crust therefore behave as distributed electrochemical circuits, quietly moving charge through the coupled pathways of rock and water.
 At that point, the implication became difficult for me to ignore.
 Wherever water circulates through iron-rich rock under conditions of chemical imbalance, electrochemical gradients emerge that allow electrons and protons to move simultaneously through mineral structures and water.
 The metabolic machinery of life may therefore represent something deeper: not a new invention, but the internalization of an energy system that had long operated within rock and water.
 Water Circulation Through the Deep Earth
 When I zoomed out to view Earth’s energy cycle as a whole, water again emerged as the central medium through which planetary chemistry operates continuously.
 Heat rises from below, but it is the circulation of water, descending into rock, dwelling within fractures, exchanging charge and minerals, and eventually returning upward, that connects Earth’s interior chemistry with surface environments. Through this circulation, mineral reactions occurring at depth are carried outward and redistributed.
 Rainwater enters fractured bedrock worldwide. Once below the surface, water slows dramatically and transitions from an atmospheric process into a geochemical one. Moving through faults, fractures, and porous zones, it remains in prolonged contact with iron-, sulfur-, aluminum-, and silica-rich minerals as pressure increases, temperature rises, and time extends, thus becoming chemically conditioned by the geological environments it traverses.
 Some of this subsurface water returns quickly to springs and streams, but much of it remains confined for decades or centuries , repeatedly contacting the same mineral interfaces. One example of such transformation is the gradual alteration of biotite into vermiculite, in which potassium is released, without collapse of the structure.
 Eventually, this deep, mineral-conditioned water returns upward, sometimes gently through springs and seeps, and sometimes violently through ruptures, geysers, and volcanic systems.
 Ancient texts referred to these events as “the fountains of the great deep,” but the mechanism is physical: heat rising from the mantle drives portions of this conditioned water back toward the surface, carrying with it the chemistry acquired at depth.
 From Local Gradients to a Planetary System
 One discovery genuinely surprised me: just how much water the Earth stores at depth.
 Vast quantities of water are held directly within mantle minerals themselves, chemically bound as hydroxyl groups. Laboratory experiments and seismic observations indicate that mantle minerals may store one to three percent water by weight, suggesting that the mantle alone may contain an amount of water comparable to, or even exceeding, all surface oceans combined.
 The 2014 identification of water-bearing ringwoodite provided direct confirmation that water is embedded deep within the planet’s interior, not merely flowing above it.
 I present the sequence above as a conceptual framework that helps make sense of how several well-established geological processes, deep iron-rich reservoirs, circulating water, and persistent redox gradients, could couple into a continuous planetary energy system.
 Primordial Circuit Stabilization
 As I began connecting these pieces, a broader picture gradually came into focus.
 Over geological time, as these systems expanded and interconnected, Earth assembled into a planet capable of sustaining continuous electrochemical disequilibrium.
 Iron-rich mantle and crustal systems act as vast reservoirs of reducing potential, forged under immense pressure and heat. From these environments, heat, pressure, and reducing power propagate upward through the mantle and into the surrounding crust.
 As water infiltrates iron-bearing rock, iron oxidizes while water is reduced, producing hydrogen and alkaline fluids rich in dissolved hydrogen. These fluids move upward through fractures and hydrothermal systems, carrying chemical potential toward the surface.
 At the same time, the early oceans followed a different chemical trajectory. Influenced by volcanic gases, atmospheric reactions, and rainfall, surface waters were comparatively oxidized and more acidic.
 Wherever reducing fluids rising from depth encountered these more oxidized surface waters, strong redox and proton gradients emerged. These interfaces appeared repeatedly wherever rock, water, and chemical imbalance intersected.
 Within these environments, electrons moved through mineral networks while ions moved through water, establishing a planetary-scale architecture capable of sustaining continuous energy flow.
 Once sustained electrochemical gradients formed between Earth’s interior and its surface waters, their influence no longer remained confined to the depths where they originated. Circulating fluids carried heat and dissolved minerals through the crust, hydrothermal systems altered ocean chemistry, and reduced gases entered the atmosphere. Over immense spans of time these exchanges linked rock, water, and air into a continuously operating planetary system.
 Only after this planetary architecture stabilized did a fourth domain emerge from within it: the biosphere.
 At that point a realization began to take shape in my mind.
 Life did not invent this energetic logic.
 It inherited it.
 Long before the first cell assembled its membranes and enzymes, the Earth itself had already become a working electrochemical system.
 Figure D. The Planetary Energy Architecture: From Rock–Water Gradients to Biological Metabolism

 Caption:
 Persistent electrochemical gradients arise wherever circulating water interacts with iron-rich rock under conditions of chemical disequilibrium. The iron–sulfur–aluminum–water (ISAW) chemistry described in yesterdays’ post represents one of the mineral architectures through which those gradients form, stabilize, and propagate through rock and water.
 In living systems, the same energetic logic reappears in miniature: electrons move through redox centers, protons accumulate across boundaries, and biological metabolism internalizes a pattern of energy flow that had long operated within the geology of the Earth itself.
 What I refer to as the Primordial Circuit Stabilization marks the stage at which Earth’s internal chemistry and global water circulation became sufficiently integrated to sustain persistent electrochemical gradients across the planet.
 Death, Decay, and the Chemical Return
 Why Life Is Not Immortal
 Up to this point, the Mineral–Water–Energy Cycle has been described within stone, followed by its journey into water, then into life, and the work it does to sustain all life—plants, animals, microbes, and humans.
 Now we must examine what happens when organisms reach the end of their cycle. What is the mechanism by which we give ourselves—literally—back to the Earth, to the same mineral–water chemistry we borrowed and that sustained us during our lifetime?
 ACT VII: Death as the Loss of Energy Governance
 Viewed cosmologically, death is a chemical transition. Nothing disappears. Heat it, freeze it, scatter it, bury it, dissolve it: the matter persists. Minerals do not die. Water does not die. Even carbon, the backbone of life, does not decay in any meaningful sense. It rearranges endlessly.
 What dies is control.
 Life is defined by the ability to govern the flow of energy. To move electrons and protons in precise sequences. To maintain gradients, timing, pressure, and coordination across trillions of interacting parts. A living human is not a thing but a process: a vast, synchronized choreography of movement. When that choreography holds, a person exists. When it fails, personhood vanishes instantly, even though every component remains behind.
 From this perspective, aging and disease are not mysteries. They are failures of flow.
 The minerals remain intact, but the structures that guide them degrade. Ligaments stiffen. Vessels calcify and narrow. Muscles lose elasticity. Nerve impulses slow as insulating sheaths thin and fragment. Carbon-based architectures, the proteins, membranes, and scaffolds that once flexed, conducted, and responded, begin to lose precision. Not because they disappear, but because they lose alignment.
 Pipes clog. Valves stick. Signals arrive late or not at all.
 Blood thickens. Clots form more easily. Circulation falters. Oxygen delivery stutters, areas of dead tissue or scar from, removing them from participation. Iron can no longer cycle smoothly through hemoglobin. Calcium and magnesium drift out of rhythm along nerve and muscle pathways. Stress hormones assemble imperfectly or fire at the wrong time. Receptors miss their signals. Feedback loops overshoot or collapse.
 Every system depends on uninterrupted cycling. When flow slows, pressure builds. When pressure builds, damage accumulates.
 Cancer is not chaos; it is obstruction. A mass presses on a vein, a nerve, an intestine. Flow is distorted. Signals back up. Energy pools where it should not. Elsewhere, starvation begins.
 Infection is an invasion with the destruction of cell or organ units needed for coordinated energy cycling. Pathogens slip past cilia, mucus, filters, and currents designed to keep surfaces moving. Cells sense danger and call for help. Inflammation floods the area with water, heat, and immune cells, firehoses aimed at a blockage that cannot be cleared.
 Autoimmunity is misrecognition within a machine too complex to tolerate confusion. Something in the environment mimics a familiar component. The guards misread the signal. Soldiers descend from the watchtowers and attack the courtyard itself. The system expends energy destroying its own infrastructure.
 Eventually, a threshold is crossed. The heart muscle, starved of oxygen and flow, can no longer maintain its rhythm. Electron transport fails. Proton gradients collapse. Energy production halts. The orchestra stops mid-measure.
 The minerals remain. The water remains. The atoms remain.
 But the battery is no longer regulated.
 Death is the moment when a system built to channel energy loses the ability to do so. The universe does not notice. Chemistry continues. But the person, the singular pattern of motion, response, memory, and intention, vanishes completely.
 Not because matter failed.
 Because harmony did.
 In living systems, this recursion has a hard limit. Unlike the Earth, the human body cannot recycle its own primary fuel indefinitely.
 Iron is the courier. Oxygen is the fire. Together, they are the gas that keeps the engine turning.
 Death arrives when coordination collapses.
 In older language, this was called the departure of the animating force, not because anything vanished, but because the pattern that once braided stone, water, and charge into a person dissolved. The stones still hold charge. The water still flows. But the cycle no longer closes.
 What follows is chemical reassignment.
 Closure and Renewal: How the Cycles Relate and Reset
 Once that organizing pattern dissolves, the elements that once participated in it begin their return.
 Iron and sulfur re-enter soils, waters, and sediments. Aluminum remains bound within silicate frameworks. Over time, sometimes very long spans of time, burial, pressure, and heat reorganize these materials back into layered mineral structures such as biotite.
 What life borrows, it returns.
 While thinking about this phase of the cycle, something else became apparent to me as well: water itself changes roles.
 During life’s emergence and operation, water helps maintain gradients, supporting organized flows of charge across mineral surfaces and biological membranes. But when biological structures begin to break down, water is no longer held within those ordered systems.
 Instead, it moves through heterogeneous environments shaped by microbial activity, enzymatic cleavage, fluctuating pH, and oxidation. The state of the water changes as the system around it evolves.
 Where once it helped preserve gradients, it has now become the medium through which those gradients dissolve. The same medium that once sustained structure now enables its dismantling.
 Water dissolves, mobilizes, and redistributes minerals, carrying them through soils, sediments, and aquifers, returning elemental components to the geochemical domain from which they came.
 Once I began to notice this pattern, I realized you can see the difference almost anywhere.
 Picture water emerging from a mountain spring, issuing cold and clear from a rock face. It may have spent decades or centuries moving slowly through fractured rock, pressed, filtered, and conditioned by mineral lattices. Such water supports gradients. It holds a charge. It sustains vitality, not because it is “pure,” but because it has been organized through prolonged contact with rock.
 Now picture water in a bog, dark, tea-colored, heavy with dissolved organic matter. It moves slowly as well, but through a very different environment: one dominated not by ordered mineral surfaces but by decaying leaves, microbial mats, and collapsing biological structures.
 Here, water performs a different role. It dissolves structure. Acids accumulate. Oxygen is consumed. Charge dissipates. Minerals are released back into circulation as organic architecture breaks down.
 Both waters are doing exactly what the system requires: one supports life by maintaining order, the other supports continuity by enabling return.
 Together, they complete the cycle.
 Conclusion
 By the time I reached this point in the work, the distinction between the different cycles had finally become clear to me.
 The Primordial Circuit Stabilization allowed planetary-scale energy flow to occur, as comparitively proton-rich surface waters began to encounter alkaline, electron-rich fluids seeping up from depth.
 ISAW is the recursive loop operating within that energized planet. It governs how energy and matter are organized, transferred, and sustained across rock, water, and life.
 And when life ends, the circuit does not stop. The chemistry returns to Earth, where water once again becomes the medium through which minerals dissolve, migrate, and eventually reform into new geological structures.
 Nothing disappears.
 One event established the planet’s energy architecture. A second system governs how life operates within it. What life releases returns to rock, and through water, pressure, and time, the system continues.
 But arriving at that realization raised one final question for me.
 For billions of years this mineral–water chemistry operated only within the slow machinery of the Earth itself.
 Until, at one point in the twentieth century, a human being managed to isolate a functional phase of that planetary chemistry and carry it forward intentionally.
 The person who did this was not a famous academic or a researcher at a government laboratory.
 That story begins with a man named Asao Shimanishi .

 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.
 Subscribe now
 If what you just read raised questions about the mineral system at the center of it, you can explore it further at Aurmina.com , where we are working to make Shimanishi’s extraordinary discovery more widely available.
 From Research to Practice - Links Below

 Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water
 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
 The War on Ivermectin - The Medicine That Could Have Ended The Pandemic
 Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States

Summary: The chemistry that powers living cells began long before biology, when circulating water and iron-rich rock were already generating the electrochemical gradients that life would later inherit.


Part II: Three Minerals and Water: The Engine of Life

ACT IV: Iron–Sulfur–Aluminum–Water (ISAW) — The Elemental Division of Labor
 By the time I arrived at this stage of the investigation, a pattern had begun to reveal itself. The energy-generating logic I kept encountering in rock and water was not random, nor was it the product of a single mineral reaction unfolding in isolation. Instead, the same elements appeared again and again, each performing a distinct role within a coordinated system.
 Iron moved electrons. Sulfur mediated proton activity. Aluminum provided the structural framework within which those exchanges could occur. And water, moving through rock and mineral interfaces, carried the entire process forward.
 Taken together, these elements form what I have come to describe as iron–sulfur–aluminum–water chemistry , or ISAW —a recursive engine capable of generating and sustaining usable energy as it moves through rock, water, soils, and eventually living systems.
 Once this pattern became visible, the division of labor among the elements began to make sense.
 Electron Flow — The Role of Iron
 As I followed the redox chemistry deeper into the geological literature, one element repeatedly stood out.
 Iron.
 Iron–sulfur redox systems embedded in rock represent one of Earth’s earliest distributive energy architectures. Yet that architecture would likely have remained confined within rock if it were not for the presence of water. Water serves as the continuity layer through which this redox logic was eventually inherited by biology, allowing it to appear inside proteins, mitochondria, cells, and organisms.
 Iron stands out among the elements because of its unusual redox flexibility. It can donate electrons when the chemical environment requires it and then accept electrons again when conditions change. Energy generation depends on precisely this kind of reversible cycling. A battery that allows electrons to move only once quickly exhausts itself.
 Iron, by contrast, can switch repeatedly between oxidation states, storing and transmitting energy without being consumed or structurally destroyed. It can perform this cycling indefinitely, keeping energy in motion while the surrounding structures remain intact.
 Every living cell ultimately depends on this controlled movement of electrons, coupled to proton gradients, to power respiration and metabolism. For this reason, redox-active minerals—especially iron-bearing ones—sit at the foundation of both geology and biology. Iron conducts life’s current because it keeps energy moving.
 Proton Flow — The Role of Sulfur
 If iron excels at moving electrons, sulfur excels at mediating proton activity.
 This relationship is not accidental. Sulfur exists across a wide range of charged states and participates in reactions that couple electron movement to the creation of proton gradients. Throughout Earth systems it appears in volcanic gases, reduced sulfur species, and sulfate dissolved in rain, oceans, sediments, and biological chemistry.
 But sulfur becomes especially productive when it operates within iron-rich mineral systems. In those environments iron-bearing minerals stabilize and organize sulfur’s reactivity, allowing the two elements to couple tightly in proton-coupled redox reactions expressed at water–mineral interfaces.
 This iron–sulfur partnership forms the energetic core of the ISAW system and underlies both ancient geochemical energy regimes and modern biological metabolism.
 What took me longer to appreciate was that sulfur also performs another role: it helps reset the cycle.
 Circulating continuously between rock, water, atmosphere, and life, sulfur links planetary-scale processes to local metabolic function. Delivered primarily as sulfate in mildly acidic rainwater, it participates in the slow weathering of iron-rich minerals such as biotite. Over geological time this destabilizes rigid mineral lattices and expands them into vermiculite, reopening mineral surfaces and restoring the reactivity required for continued charge transfer.
 Once that transformation occurs, water assumes the next role in the sequence. It enters expanded mineral layers, mobilizes ions, buffers proton activity, mediates electron transfer, and carries liberated mineral chemistry into soils, root zones, microbial systems, and eventually into living organisms.
 Sulfur renews the initiating chemistry, while water propagates it forward through the cycle.
 Controlled Redox Flows — The Role of Aluminum
 At first glance, aluminum seems like the odd participant in this system.
 Iron moves electrons. Sulfur mediates proton activity. Aluminum appears to do neither. Yet as I examined the mineral structures where these reactions unfold, it became clear that aluminum plays a role just as essential as the more obviously reactive elements.
 Aluminum does not participate directly in the constant exchange of electrons that defines redox chemistry. Instead, it locks itself into aluminosilicate lattices that form some of the most persistent mineral structures on Earth. These lattices carry a stable negative charge and remain structurally intact over immense spans of geological time.
 That stability turns out to be precisely what the rest of the system requires.
 Where redox chemistry involves relentless electron transfer and charged mineral movement, aluminum provides a fixed internal scaffold within which those exchanges can occur. Positively charged ions can bind to the negatively charged lattice, release when conditions shift, and be replaced by others without the structure itself collapsing.
 In this way, the lattice becomes a dynamic stage on which energy exchange can take place continuously. The structure holds steady while the actors—electrons, protons, and ions—move through it.
 This environment also shapes the behavior of surrounding water. The persistent negative charge of aluminosilicate frameworks organizes nearby ions and charge distributions in ways that allow energy differences to accumulate rather than dissipate immediately.
 Put simply, aluminum provides the architecture that allows the rest of the system to operate without destroying itself.
 Iron moves electrons.
 Sulfur mediates protons.
 Aluminum provides structure.
 If aluminum behaved like iron or sulfur, the system would burn through its own framework and collapse.
 The Aluminum Question
 At this stage in the investigation an apparent contradiction presented itself.
 Aluminum clearly plays a foundational role in the geochemical phase of ISAW. Yet when the same energetic logic appears inside living systems, aluminum itself is nowhere to be found.
 For a time this seemed puzzling.
 Eventually the answer became obvious once the system was viewed not as a set of elements but as a set of functions.
 In geological systems aluminum provides the stable, negatively charged scaffolding within which redox chemistry can occur. In biological systems that same stabilizing function is performed by proteins, membranes, and enzymes that establish boundaries and organize charge.
 What biology carried forward was not the element.
 It carried forward the role.
 The absence of aluminum from mitochondria therefore is not a contradiction. It is evidence that a successful transition occurred, in which a geochemical mineral architecture gave rise to a biological one capable of performing the same organizational work.
 The mineral scaffold came first. Biology later reinvented its function using organic structures.
 Water: The Control Layer
 At this point in the investigation the role of water could no longer be treated as secondary.
 Water is the medium through which the entire cycle operates. Without water, minerals remain locked within crystalline lattices. Without minerals, water remains chemically inert. Only when the two interact does the system become capable of generating and transmitting usable energy.
 The role water plays in biology, I came to realize, is inherited from the path water travels long before biology ever encounters it.
 In intact Earth systems rainwater does not simply fall to the surface and run away. Instead, it enters fractured rock and begins a much slower journey through mineral environments rich in iron, sulfur, aluminum, and silica. As it descends into these geological settings it remains confined within fractures and pore spaces for extended periods of time, interacting continuously with mineral surfaces under conditions of pressure, temperature, and time.
 Through this prolonged contact water gradually acquires organized charge distributions and structured ionic arrangements. Earlier cultures described such water as living water , a term that captured its unusual vitality long before the underlying physics was understood. Today similar states are increasingly described in physical terms as structured or coherent forms of water shaped by mineral interfaces.
 However one describes it, the important point is that the water biology inherits has already passed through a long geological preparation.
 ACT VI: Where ISAW Drives Generative Loops
 Biotite-Bearing Fracture Systems
 As I continued following this chemistry through geological systems, one mineral kept appearing in places where water, charge, and mineral exchange were especially active.
 Biotite.
 The layered aluminosilicate lattice of black mica lines many of the fracture planes through which groundwater circulates. This geometry turns out to be remarkably well suited to sustaining ion exchange, redox buffering, and charge organization at the mineral–water interface. What emerges from these environments is not simply mineralized water, but water whose physical behavior has been shaped by prolonged contact with ordered mineral structures.
 Biotite itself forms deep within the Earth, often tens of kilometers below the surface, where heat and pressure allow its layered structure to assemble. Over immense stretches of time tectonic uplift and erosion slowly carry these minerals upward toward the surface.
 As biotite approaches shallower environments, a new sequence begins to unfold.
 Sulfur-bearing rainwater and oxygen begin acting on the iron-rich layers of the mineral. Iron oxidation initiates electron flow. Sulfur, present primarily as sulfate, supplies protons that acidify mineral interfaces. These coupled changes weaken potassium binding within the lattice, allowing potassium to leave while water enters and hydrates the structure.
 Through this process biotite gradually transforms into vermiculite, a mineral whose expanded aluminosilicate lattice becomes far more open and reactive.
 The opening of that lattice serves two inseparable roles.
 First, it creates the structural environment within which redox reactions and energy generation can occur. Second, it becomes a sustained source of liberated mineral chemistry, gradually releasing iron, potassium, aluminum-associated trace elements, and charge into surrounding soils and waters.
 In this way the same structure that enables energy flow also supplies the material substrate from which biological systems are ultimately built.
 When Energy Becomes Generative
 At this stage an important question emerged for me.
 It is one thing for energy to circulate through geological systems. It is another thing entirely for that energy to become generative , meaning capable of producing new structure, organization, and complexity that can move forward into living systems.
 The answer, once again, pointed back to water.
 Water carries these coordinated redox processes forward as an ordered medium. In doing so it performs two inseparable functions. First, it acts as an energetic participant, organizing charge, sustaining gradients, and preserving coherence across mineral interfaces. Second, it serves as the transport agent that mobilizes mineral chemistry, carrying iron, sulfur species, potassium, and associated trace elements from weathered rock into soils, microbial systems, and eventually plants and animals.
 Through sulfated rainwater the rock opens. Charge organizes. Energy becomes transferable. Mineral chemistry becomes mobile.
 Materials that were once locked inside crystalline lattices are redistributed through water into biologically accessible forms, entering a system in which energy generation and material supply advance together.

 The Insight
 The insight that emerged from following these processes was both simple and surprising. The same iron–sulfur–aluminum–water chemistry that drives the transformation of biotite into vermiculite also generates energy within the rock itself, and that chemistry is then carried forward by water into living organisms. What initially appeared to be separate domains, geology on one side and biology on the other, began to look instead like sequential expressions of a single system.
 At that point I realized I was no longer looking at two different systems. I was looking at the same engine operating at two different scales.
 ISAW, in other words, is not merely a mineral reaction occurring in rock. It is the underlying engine through which geology prepares the energetic and material conditions that biology later inherits.
 At this point in the sequence the chemistry of ISAW is already complete. Its components are established, its reactions sustained by geological processes, and its operation does not depend on the presence of life.
 What remains is time.
 Through pressure, water, sulfur, and immense geological patience, nature builds this chemistry gradually, storing potential energy within the layered structures of minerals such as biotite. These minerals rise slowly from depth over millions of years, carrying within them the accumulated tensions of a planetary energy system waiting to be activated.

 If what you just read raised questions about the mineral system at the center of it, you can explore it further at Aurmina.com , where we are working to make Shimanishi’s extraordinary discovery more widely available.

 From Research to Practice - Links Below

 Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water
 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
 The War on Ivermectin - The Medicine That Could Have Ended The Pandemic
 Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States

Summary: Life did not invent its engine. It inherited one from iron, sulfur, aluminum, and water.


Reclaiming the Digital Commons: No Bots. No Censorship. Just Humans.

A New Platform for Human Voices (and Why I’m Joining It)
 Over the last few years, many of us who write and speak publicly have learned a hard lesson: the modern internet is not a neutral space. Throttling, curating, algorithms, outright censorship, and propaganda boosting. Genuine human dialogue is drowned out by bots, trolls, and invisible moderation policies that shape what can and cannot be seen.
 So when Jeff Dornik , one of the best (and most censored) podcast interviewers I’ve had the chance to speak with, and with whom I’m doing a launch interview on Pickax today at 4:30 p.m. EST, told me he was building a new creator platform around a simple idea - let humans decide what matters, not algorithms - I paid attention.
 For transparency, I have no financial relationship with Pickax. I’m supporting this launch simply because I believe in the idea and in the people building it.
 The platform is called Pickax . Its premise is straightforward but also radical: no algorithmic manipulation of reach, the ability to publish full-length articles (not just fragments), embedded video content directly in the feed, and a verification system intended to ensure you are interacting with real people, not anonymous accounts or automated noise. Just as importantly for writers and independent thinkers, the business model is aligned with creators: revenue sharing, affiliate opportunities, and paywalled content options that reward meaningful work rather than outrage-driven engagement.
 What resonated most with me was the philosophical core. The stated goal is not to harvest data to train AI models or to engineer controversy for clicks, but to build a more human-centered digital commons where voice, authorship, and thoughtful exchange can actually flourish. That last part is key. I’m sick of the polarizing two sides to every argument when, to be honest, there are pieces of truth and honest perspectives on both sides.
 Given my own experience over the past several years and the audience we’ve built together here, that vision is one I want to support. I’ll be setting up my account and publishing there as well. For those who are already paid subscribers to this Substack, I plan to offer complimentary access to any paid content I post on Pickax as a thank-you for supporting my work here (not functional yet, but will be soon).
 We all benefit when more platforms exist that are aligned with creators and readers rather than control systems. I’m hopeful this one succeeds, and I’m willing to lend my voice to help it try.
 Thanks for listening and hope you guys check out… Pickax !
 P.S The Jeff Dornik Show on Rumble can be found here and on Spotify here (fun fact: Jeff had been kicked off Spotify prior to their bringing Joe Rogan on, after which they decided they would let free speech do its thing, and let him come back).

 If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about (or the Op-Eds and lectures I try to get out to the public), your support is greatly appreciated.
 Subscribe now
 From Research to Practice - Links Below

 Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water
 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
 The War on Ivermectin - The Medicine That Could Have Ended The Pandemic
 Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States

Summary: A new creator platform is attempting something rare in today’s internet landscape: real human reach, real dialogue, and no invisible algorithm deciding who gets heard.


"The War on Chlorine Dioxide" Is Now Published: Why a Simple Compound Became Too Dangerous to Discuss

Why This Book Had to Be Self-Published
 Let’s be honest: I knew when I started researching The War On Chlorine Dioxide that it was never going to fly on Amazon, or in a bookstore, or in an airport. We live in a very different world now, visible to some and invisible to most. That’s the thing about censorship: the people affected by it know it’s happening; everyone else is oblivious.
 In my case, I thank God for Substack, one of the few remaining refuges from the relentless suppression of information deemed “inconvenient” to the powers that be
 Pierre Kory’s Medical Musings is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

 But I am pretty much used to censorship by now, as my previous book, “The War On Ivermectin,” received the same treatment. No bookstores, libraries, or airports wanted to carry it. Yet, somehow I still have a fond memory of being interviewed during that “war” by the famous journalist Matt Taibi, who, in a surprisingly even-handed article, called me “The Ghost of the Internet,” because every time I appeared on a podcast during Covid, the host would receive a strike, or the episode would disappear, or the channel would be demonetized for disturbingly long periods of time.
 So yes, I suppose you could say I’m at it again. This time, my brilliantly witty co-writer, Jenna McCarthy (whose phenomenally sharp Substack you can find here ), and I decided to commit the crime ourselves: documenting, contextualizing, and preserving a story that was clearly not supposed to survive.
 When I began researching the book, originally a Substack series that grew into something larger, one of the first things I learned was that before 2020, chlorine dioxide was openly discussed. Social media allowed discussion. Amazon carried pamphlets and small books.
 Then COVID arrived, and the subject vanished. Information was scrubbed, discussion declared “illegal,” or more precisely, “in violation of community guidelines.” That was censorship in action, and as usual, most people never noticed.
 The most telling is what they did to Mark Grenon and his three sons. Mark is likely the most experienced chlorine dioxide practitioner alive today, and during my research and writing of the book, he became a friend and colleague.
 They had been selling (and giving away to those who couldn’t afford) chlorine dioxide at a truly modest cost for ten years, that is, until April 2020, when, after he refused to answer a threatening “cease and desist” letter from the FDA, officers from literally ten different law enforcement and regulatory agencies raided his house, helicopter overhead, accompanied by the local ABC news team filming the whole thing to beam it into millions of living rooms, as if it were a public service announcement.
 Mark and one son were in Colombia at the time, so the FDA politely asked Colombian authorities to arrest and imprison them, followed by their extradition to the U.S where they were sentenced to five years in federal prison (with release in the fifth year), while his other sons received the same sentence plus an extraordinary additional punishment: one of the longest contempt-of-court sentences in modern U.S. history — seven and a half extra years.
 So this genius thought it would be a good idea to write a book about the topic. Yup.
 But, here’s the thing: The “crime” I committed was the same behavior I have always pursued, simply following data, mechanisms, and clinical experiences wherever they led. Unfortunately, they led somewhere inconvenient, somewhere that doesn’t fit neatly into the stories we’re allowed to tell about cheap, unpatentable therapies with disturbingly broad activity across numerous illness categories.
 This book examines a molecule that has been deliberately mischaracterized, rhetorically flattened, and quietly removed from serious scientific discussion, not because it lacks data, but because it lacks profitability. Chlorine dioxide has been reduced to a single word, bleach , in much the same way other inconvenient ideas are reduced to labels (does “horse dewormer” ring a bell?), so no one has to look too closely at mechanisms, history, or outcomes.
 What you will find in this book is a forensic reconstruction of how a cheap, widely used chemical, employed globally in water purification, food sanitation, and industrial processes, became untouchable the moment people began discovering its therapeutic implications. Problem: it can’t be owned, branded, or controlled, thus it is verboten in modern Medicine. I was about to write “American” medicine, but that is simply not true. One of the most disturbing aspects of the book is the evidence I provide on the global reach of the suppression of discussion and restrictions on research. Every. Single. Country.
 When something threatens a business model, the fastest way to neutralize it is to caricature it. Call it bleach. Call it quackery. Call it “settled science.” This book documents exactly how much effort went into preventing that knowledge from reaching you in a serious, highly referenced, comprehensive way. Read the book.
 Recall the lesson behind “ The Kory Scale, ” which is that suppression is much more revealing of efficacy than its refutation. However, that suppression has not been total. And that is one of the discoveries I am most proud of in this book's research.
 I came across a handful of studies that slipped through the cracks of what can only be described as the “editorial mafia” governing modern medical journals, particularly the high-impact ones.
 These were well-designed, properly conducted studies, funded by a quietly daring pharmaceutical company called Neuvivo, hiding in plain sight.
 The trick was linguistic. In those papers, the molecule is never called chlorine dioxide. It is referred to by a different name, sodium chlorite , a closely related compound that serves as the therapeutic backbone and direct precursor to chlorine dioxide. The results are published, peer-reviewed, and statistically rigorous. And yet chlorine dioxide is never mentioned. Not once.
 Except, almost comically, in the title of a single reference buried in the bibliography. (Ooh. How daring.)
 Anyway, this book isn’t for everyone. That’s fine.
 It’s for readers who still believe that truth is what survives scrutiny. If you’ve followed my work for any length of time, you already know why this matters. If you haven’t, this may be an uncomfortable place to start.
 Read It. Argue With It. Share It.
 You do not have to agree with every conclusion in this book . In fact, I hope you don’t. I hope you read it skeptically. I hope you check the sources (there are tons of them). I hope you ask why certain studies exist quietly while headlines scream “bleach” so confidently. And I hope you recognize how often language is used to end conversations before they begin, especially when those conversations might cost someone money.

 If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I then write about (or the Op-Eds and lectures I try to get out to the public), supporting my work is greatly appreciated.
 Subscribe now
 How To Buy The Book.. and How To Help Mark Grenon’s Sons
 If you’ve read this far, you already understand why this book could not exist inside the usual systems. The War on Chlorine Dioxide is a documented, heavily referenced account of how a molecule became untouchable.
 This book exists because suppression leaves fingerprints. What follows is the record of those fingerprints, assembled carefully, without hysteria, and with the respect that serious readers deserve. If you want to see what was buried, why it mattered, and how close it came to disappearing entirely, the book is available below (click on the image).

 APPEAL FOR THE GRENONS
 Here you have a chance to support those who, in my opinion, have devoted their entire adult lives to helping humanity. Humanity should come to their defense in return. I myself just sent a donation to support their legal defense.
 I will end with this appeal on behalf of the Grenon’s, written by Dr. Robert Yoho on his Substack, Surviving Healthcare :
 Mark is now 67 years old and needs your help. His Social Security benefits were terminated in Sept. of 2020. Grenon’s sons, Jonathan and Jordan, are still being held in federal prison. Please consider donating to the Grenons’ legal defense HERE . Since the FDA and DOJ silenced the Grenons, many people died unnecessarily from Covid. Also, you can purchase his books HERE (print version) and HERE (PDF download). A wide-ranging discussion with Mark, describing his and his family’s situation, the availability of chlorine dioxide, commercial products, and much more, is HERE .
 Pierre Kory’s Medical Musings is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Summary: When a subject threatens a business model built on chronic disease management, curiosity towards simple solutions becomes heresy. Booksellers run. Platforms get twitchy. So we went around them.


In Defense of Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo and Structured Water: When Saying “Might” Is a Crime

I. The Ladapo “Scandal”
 The absolute best Surgeon General in any state’s history is Dr. Joseph Ladapo, and there isn’t even a close second (though, in fairness, only six states have Surgeon Generals, and the position itself is barely two decades old).
 Given we live an hour apart, Lisa and I have gotten to know both Joe and Brianna (and their three little rascals) and consider them both friends. Joe possesses an impressive combination of personality traits, a rare mix of kindness, intelligence, objectivity, courage, and determination. He’s one of the most impressive people I have encountered during my Covid journey. And with those traits, it should surprise no one that he was, and remains, one of the most publicly attacked and denigrated figures of the era.
 There’s a quote commonly credited to George Orwell, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” If that line ever needed a modern case study, Joe Ladapo is it.
 Now, although I run a fairly popular Substack, as much as I would want to, if I had to write a post every time one of my “brothers in arms” was targeted by corporatized, government-captured media propaganda, I’d be posting every single day (and probably twice a day).
 Imagine trying to respond to the daily fusillade aimed at my friend Bobby Kennedy over the past twenty years, now supercharged since he became Secretary of HHS. The pharma-media attacks began only when he shifted his focus from keeping mercury out of fish to keeping it out of children. I love that line about him: nobody ever called him anti-fish, but the moment he tried to protect kids, he was branded anti-vax. It’s a label he’s carried with the same resolve and grace as the parallel nonsense hurled at Dr. Ladapo.
 To mount real-time, daily defenses of people like Joe or Bobby (or Robert Malone), I’d need a staff of writers and a media conglomerate larger than my Substack.
 And it would still be pointless, because any rebuttal of mine would never reach the same eyeballs as the hit pieces pumped through NYT, Washington Post, Gizmodo, Yahoo, Fox, and the rest of the narrative-enforcement apparatus.
 But the latest attack on Joe made me both furious and laugh out loud.
 This time, they went after him for talking about water .
 II. The “Crime”: Saying “Might”
 I’m a structured water guy now, and it seems Joe might be one too. So I figured I’d defend both. Check out this clown-show of an article that a friend sent me:

 It’s funny how even the most obvious propaganda headline still “gets” you for a split second. That’s what propaganda is designed to do: insert thoughts into your head before reason catches up.
 Embarrassingly, my first reaction was, holy cow, is Joe selling a structured water product like I am? Then I thought maybe, kindly, that he’d heard about Aurmina and mentioned it positively. I dug in. Nothing. No mention of me or my product.
 Totally cool with me but I was instead shocked to learn that Joe’s high crime was a single sentence in a tweet:
 “Drinking structured water might offer more advantages.”
 Might. That’s it. No product, no claims, no prescriptions, no certainty.
 Just a cautious statement acknowledging biological plausibility. Apparently, that now qualifies as “peddling.”
 But here’s where the article crossed from laughable into enraging: the author didn’t just attack Joe. He attacked the very idea that water can be structured , or that it might have biological effects. My rage turned from what they were doing to Joe to what they were doing to upstream physiology.
 The position the Gizmodo journalist was tasked with presenting was not skepticism. It was deliberately feigned ignorance.
 III. Why This Attack On Upstream Physiology Matters
 And that is exactly why I could never spend my days hurling truth at the lies embedded in propaganda; that kind of work requires no insight, no rigor, and no curiosity. It would render me intellectually anesthetized.
 But for this one time, and because it defends my company, Aurmina, I will make an exception. So let’s do it.
 Water organizing itself into structure is not a fringe belief. It is documented across physical chemistry, membrane biology, biophysics, and agricultural physiology. Interfacial water, hydration layers, charge separation, and non-random molecular organization near mineral and biological surfaces are taught concepts, not mysticism.
 And the real-world data are even harder to dismiss because I literally just published a post compiling veterinary and agricultural studies showing improved outcomes like growth, fertility, metabolic efficiency, stress tolerance (even sperm production), when animals drink structured or modified water. Not humans. Animals. Where variables are controlled, and outcomes are measured directly.
 Animals don’t placebo. They don’t comply. They don’t read Twitter. They just respond. Which is exactly why that literature is so threatening.
 IV. Credentialism as a Weapon
 The article sneers:
 “2026 is already looking to be filled with plenty of crank science.”
 “Structured water isn’t something that really exists, according to actual scientists.”
 Clever! Inferring that Joe is not an “actual scientist.”
 Let’s pause.
 Joe Ladapo is an MD from Harvard Medical School , holds a PhD in Health Policy from Harvard , served as an FDA staff fellow , is Florida’s Surgeon General , and is a full Professor at the University of Florida College of Medicine .
 MD.
 PhD.
 FDA.
 Professor.
 But not an “actual scientist,” apparently. That was the funniest part.
 It gets better. To make Joe look foolish, the journalist had to reach across the planet to find a suitably credentialed critic, pulling in a chemist from New South Wales to dismiss structured water as “nebulous.”
 Even that quote accidentally concedes the point:
 “…at its most scientifically plausible, it describes unusual properties of water near an interface.”
 That is structured water.
 V. Pattern Recognition: The Kory Scale
 The article then recycled Joe’s previous COVID positions, positions that were cautious, evidence-based, and repeatedly vindicated by time, and closed with the now mandatory flourish: anti-science zealot.
 This is how modern propaganda works. You don’t debate the claim. You delegitimize the messenger, collapse nuance, and warn readers not to think.
 But why attack something as banal-sounding as water ?
 That really stumped me at first. But then I remembered The Kory Scale and, through that lens, what was behind this seemingly stupid article hit me, and it was glorious (for Aurmina and me).
 “They” aren’t just threatened by Joe and the profoundly “inconvenient” work he’s been doing, things like rolling back vaccine mandates, challenging reckless Covid vaccine recommendations, surfacing data on the lethality of Covid vaccines, and pushing research into cancer treatments using off-patent drugs (my man!).
 Now it seems they’re also threatened by… structured water? Truly terrifying stuff.
 To understand what was really behind that article, it is imperative that we revisit the central thesis of the Kory Scale (one of my most popular posts, actually);
 The conceptual underpinning of the Kory Scale is that the efficacy of any proposed therapy should be scored in direct proportion to the degree, breadth, and viciousness of the attacks generated from pharma-media and the “medical establishment.”
 Once I remembered my own damn (unquestioningly brilliant) theory, I got excited. They are scared of structured water!
 Not because it’s silly, but because it’s upstream of all illness.
 VI. The Vitamin D Parallel
 My long-time readers know this, but for those who joined more recently, know that my initial entry into the study of modern “disinformation” techniques occurred in early March of 2021, four months after I had unwittingly become globally known as an “ivermectin advocate” (thanks, Ron!)
 I woke up one day, coffee in hand, cruising through my inbox, when I stumbled upon an email from someone I did not know, a Professor by the name of William B. Grant, who I later learned was one of the most published researchers in Vitamin D science. It read:
 “Dear Dr. Kory, what they are doing to ivermectin, they have been doing to Vitamin D for decades.”
 That was it. Actually, no, that wasn’t it, because he also included a link to an article called “ The Disinformation Playbook ,” written by an organization called “ Union of Concerned Scientists .”
 Anyway, that article literally changed my life as it finally allowed me to understand what was happening to me, to my partner Professor Paul Marik, to our careers, to our non-profit organization, etc.). It explained ivermectin. It explained Vitamin D. It explained Covid. And now, it explains the threat of structured, mineral-balanced water.
 Not-so-fun fact: that very same organization refused my request to include images from the article in my book, “ The War on Ivermectin, ” because I was “too controversial.” Whatever.
 Tell me if you think I am over-reaching here, but my interpretation of this stupid Ladapo hit-job article became, “Holy cow, is structured water presenting as much of a threat as Vitamin D?
 The Decades Long Disinformation Campaign Against Vitamin D
 Quick refresher on the Disinformation campaign on Vitamin D, something Professor Grant has been fighting for decades.
 Vitamin D is literally the conductor of the orchestra that is our immune system (and other systems). Vitamin D supplementation (and K2 and magnesium), at the right doses and frequency, tuned to achieve optimal levels, is one of the best defenses against literally any disease. “They” know this.
 Thus, their decades-long injection of studies into the medical literature aimed at showing that Vitamin D supplementation (at anemic and infrequent doses) has zero efficacy in treating or preventing any disease. For every positive study of reasonable dosing that manages to get published, they will then inject two, larger, “more rigorous” (yeah, right, how about more “rigorously” manipulated) studies of low-dose, short-term, infrequently delivered Vitamin D that contradict any “positive” findings.
 “They” then buy the professional medical societies, allowing “them” control of the treatment guideline committees, lowering what is considered a “normal” level to the absolute lowest possible level without causing friggin rickets.
 I used to be afraid to say this, for fear of sounding like a tin-hat conspiracy theorist, but, based on now 5 years of fighting the pharmaceutical industry, I will state objectively, and fully; “they” do this to keep us as unhealthy and/or sick as possible, so that we become more voracious consumers of pharmaceuticals and sophisticated, immensely expensive health treatments. Period.
 Just one example; if the population were to achieve and maintain truly optimal Vitamin D levels (at least 50, I like mine over 100), the biggest bear of them all, the cancer industry, would undergo a massive downturn. And that’s just cancer; the markets for literally every disease and specialty would be affected.
 Know that in human antiquity, vitamin D levels were far higher than what is considered “normal” today. Multiple lines of evidence, from studies of modern hunter-gatherer populations living traditional outdoor lifestyles, to physiologic modeling of sun exposure at equatorial and temperate latitudes, consistently place ancestral serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels in the range of 40–70 ng/mL , with many individuals likely spending substantial portions of the year above 60 ng/mL .
 These levels were achieved naturally through daily, full-body sun exposure without sunscreen, indoor confinement, or seasonal light deprivation imposed by modern living.
 By contrast, contemporary populations in industrialized societies cluster around 15–30 ng/mL , with anything above 20 ng/mL now labeled “sufficient” solely because it prevents overt rickets, not because it reflects optimal immune, metabolic, or endocrine function. In other words, modern “normal” vitamin D levels are not a biological baseline; they are a deficiency threshold rebranded as adequacy.
 VII. Are They Doing It Again? Structured Water as the Next Threat
 So am I really leaping to conclusions, or just stating the obvious, by wondering whether my recent work on minerals and structured water, and the launch of Aurmina , a historically unique mineral solution that structures drinking water and has seen extraordinary adoption and customer satisfaction, is starting to worry them because they somehow believe that it might threaten demand for their therapies?
 I asked AI if there were any other mainstream media articles in the recent past that tried to critique or dismiss the idea that structured water might be good for your health. The list totaled 6 articles, but I cut them down for you. Still, buckle up, buttercup, we are gonna start with an example of the increasingly pervasive propaganda tool, the “Fact Check” article, from Australia, no less:
 1) AAP FactCheck — Structured Water Health Claims Are False
 A fact-check from the Australian Associated Press states that claims about “structured” or “hexagonal” water having superior health benefits are false , noting “there’s no such thing as structured water” according to expert chemists.
 Quote:
 “Structured water… has far superior health benefits than regular water… This is false. There’s no such thing as structured water.” — AAP FactCheck, quoting chemistry experts.

 3) Vitarx — Marketing Myth and Lack of Evidence
 The Vitarx health site calls structured water (including “H₃O₂”) a marketing myth , stating that bulk water isn’t a stable form you can buy, and that any purported health benefits lack strong human evidence.
 Quote:
 “Structured water or ‘H₃O₂’ is not a real, stable form of water — this concept is a marketing myth, not science… Most chemists and biologists say there’s insufficient evidence to prove structured water offers any special health benefits.” — Vitarx.

 Sorry guys, but anytime I read an article that includes the term “insufficient evidence” as above, it triggers me to share, yet again, the one tattoo that I stupidly submitted to (or sought in anger) during the “ War on Ivermectin ”

 6) Wikipedia on Hexagonal Water — Marketing Scam
 Wikipedia’s entry on hexagonal water (another term for structured water) describes it explicitly as a marketing scam , not a scientifically substantiated health product.
 Quote:
 “Hexagonal water… is a term used in a marketing scam that claims the ability to create a certain configuration of water that is better for the body… the hoax… despite the reality that this compound is neither water nor stable.” — Wikipedia.

 My favorite was the last one from Wikipedia, err, I mean “Wiki-media.”
 VIII. What “Structured Water” Actually Is (and Isn’t)
 Although I will give them some credit for identifying that, aside from water containing Shimanishi’s mineral complex, every other method can only create a transiently “structured state” of water. Now you know why I have invested my life into Aurmina . If you add Shimanishi’s mineral complex, your water will remain structured and mineral-balanced for as long as you need it to (within reason).
 The importance of understanding the “stability” of water structured via a unique composition of a broad palette of sulfated minerals cannot be overemphasized for you to understand that I am discussing structured water in a ”scientific sense,” not a symbolic, experiential, or pseudoscientific one.
 Major Problem: The concept of structured water is poorly understood in wellness circles as well as in industry (and even science), with the many claims supporting devices or methods that supposedly structure water lacking published supporting evidence.
 Based on the work of Gerald Pollack at the University of Washington, a man considered to be the world's expert in the study of structured water (a term for which he uses “Exclusion Zone” water), the test he used to define water as “structured,” was an Ultraviolet Absorption analysis using a UV spectrometer.
 EZ water in Pollack’s framework is associated with an optical absorption peak near ~270 nm in UV–Vis spectroscopy.

 This peak is considered a marker of altered water structure at hydrophilic interfaces, unlike that of ordinary bulk water.

 The absolute magnitude of the absorbance peak can vary with conditions and is not a fixed number , but its presence and reproducibility are the relevant finding

 Older Methods Of Defining Structured Water
 Although Pollack’s work has received the most attention, he was not a “discoverer” of structured water; others had been structuring water and studying its effects on humans and animals decades before him (Shimanishi knew his minerals structured the water, and he called it “activated oxygen water). Others, such as Lorenzen, in patent filings for his water structuring method in the early 1990’s, defined structured water with ¹⁷O Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) linewidth, finding that ordinary water shows a broad ¹⁷O NMR resonance (≈115–140 Hz depending on purity, while the patented “microclustered water” consistently showed narrower linewidths, often 25–70 Hz, with 60–70 Hz preferred.
 The claim was that narrower linewidths indicate: reduced rotational freedom, more uniform molecular environments and longer hydrogen-bond organization.
 UV Spectrometer Analysis Of Aurmina-Treated Water
 Below are the results of such a test conducted on water treated with a product identical in composition to Aurmina , with the absorption compared to both regular tap water and “laboratory” water, which is completely de-ionized (zero mineral content).
 The full PDF test report is below. Note that in the Methods section, a critical detail is that the treated water sat in the lab for 6 days prior to the test .
 Uv Absorption Test Report
 698KB ∙ PDF file

 Download
 Download

 In the above, you can see the long “hold” where UV absorption is occurring in the 6-day-old mineral-treated water, still with 95% absorption at 270 nm, compared to the 15% absorption in tap water, and 0% in Ultrapure water (table not shown). See tables below the graph:

 IX. The Field Correction: Structure → Coherence
 With over four months of obsessive research and writing on water and minerals, and the founding of a company with a “water structuring and purification” product, I suppose you could say I am now fully immersed in what people loosely call the “Structured Water Health Space.”
 I want to say this as humbly as possible. Not because I think I’m smarter than anyone, and certainly not because I’m all-knowing. Any clarity I have here is simply the result of being mentored by someone I consider the leading expert on Shimanishi’s mineral extract and the physics underlying what is often referred to as “structured water.”
 What has become painfully clear to me, embarrassingly late, and only after months of using the term myself, is that almost no one who talks about “structured water” actually understands what they mean. I certainly didn’t. I don’t say this to mock anyone. I say it because the language is wrong, the concepts are blurred, and until we fix that, the entire subject will remain vulnerable to ridicule rather than understanding.
 Some people may feel exposed by what I’m about to explain, especially those making money atop genuine confusion. But ignorance isn’t a crime. In many cases, it’s simply the price paid on the way to understanding.
 Energy Medicine, Wellness Culture, and Structured Water Claims
 Many advocate for and practice various forms of energy healing and believe water can hold memory or act as a therapeutic medium. What I appreciate about these practitioners is that they are absolutely correct in treating water as a source of life and vitality.
 Nothing alive can exist unless three material conditions are met: carbon, water, and minerals. Carbon provides the scaffolding of life, minerals provide coordination and regulation, and water is the medium that allows both to interact. Without water, carbon cannot assemble into living structures, and minerals cannot move, signal, or participate in biology. Access to water is not just essential to life; it is the condition that makes life possible at all.
 More relevant to these “wellness” advocates, know that across virtually every ancient tradition, water has been described as having an essence and a restorative quality. Long before hydrogen bonding or electrical gradients were understood, civilizations recognized that different waters produced different effects on the body, the land, and the mind. Springs were distinguished from stagnant sources. Certain waters were sought for healing, fertility, and longevity. These traditions lacked modern chemistry, but they were observing something real: water is not biologically neutral.
 Two simple facts make this unavoidable.
 Water without minerals is biologically inert.

 Minerals without water are biologically inert.

 Water and minerals cannot be considered separate biological entities. The old habit of listing three material foundations of life, carbon, water, and minerals, is actually wrong. To be scientifically accurate, that list collapses to two: carbon and water, but only if the water is “real water,” meaning mineralized water.
 In the experiment above comparing Aurmina-treated water to tap water and so-called “Ultrapure” water, it’s worth pausing on what that last term actually means.
 “Ultrapure” water is nothing but H₂O molecules stripped of everything else, and no such water has ever existed anywhere in nature. Every natural water on Earth contains minerals. Always has. The only thing that varies is which minerals and in what balance.
 My views on what that balance should look like are probably already clear from my writing (and my starting up of a friggin company). But the larger point is simpler and more important: water is not just a liquid. It only supports life when it functions as a medium, carrying minerals. Without them, water cannot coordinate chemistry, carry charge, or support living systems. It’s just wet.
 So maybe we need a new word. Should we stop calling it water and start calling it “Minwater,” or“Watermin”? Because that’s what it really is.
 I’m now imagining a future where a kid comes inside after playing ball, or, more realistically, after six straight hours of internet surfing, and says, “Hey Mom, I’m thirsty. Can I have a glass of Watermin?”
 Love that future.
 The only reason biologically inert water drinkers remain alive (hello R.O. and distilled-water enthusiasts) is that the moment water hits their lips, it begins pulling minerals from saliva, blood, bile acids, and tissues. Although these “robberies” are often subclinical, the published medical literature reveals myriad health problems that spike when demineralized water is suddenly introduced into discrete human populations. When readers tell me they’ve drunk demineralized water for decades and “feel fine,” my response is simple: I smoked nearly two packs of cigarettes a day for almost thirty years and feel fine.
 Jokes aside, this is where intuition gets mistaken for mechanism. The problem is not that these “magical or mystical” perspectives exist. The problem is that they are routinely conflated with scientific claims when they are not making scientific claims at all. When symbolic or experiential frameworks are presented as mechanistic explanations, the entire field becomes an easy target for dismissal and ridicule.
 Properly understood, these traditions are observational and descriptive, not explanatory. They reflect a long-standing recognition that water behaves differently across contexts and that those differences matter biologically. The error arises when intuition is asked to substitute for mechanism, rather than point toward it.
 The Water Structuring Device Industry
 Short Term Water Structuring Devices
 Most commercial devices claiming to “structure” water—whether through vortexing, magnets, ceramics, pipes, turbulence, or passive geometries—share a critical limitation: the structuring they induce is typically short-lived . In the peer-reviewed literature, water structured by magnetic, light, or mechanical energy alone is consistently shown to persist for hours to, at most, a few days , with the degree of structuring proportional to the intensity and duration of the applied energy and decaying exponentially once that energy is removed .
 Under those conditions, any water produced by such devices, even if measurably structured at the point of use, would often arrive at a laboratory partially or fully de-structured , because the organizing influence is no longer present and bulk water does not reliably carry that order forward on its own.
 Long Term Water Structuring Devices
 The only other method I found which led to water which maintained coherence ver time, had a critical feature in common with Aurmina which is that they added metasilicate salts to the water. This was deemed a critical aspect, and should not be surprising - a mineral composition with specific ionic behavior is a requirement.
 Differences between metasilicate salt method and Aurmina’s sulfated mineral method;
 In the former, energy inputs were required which shows that the mineral composition acted as a stabilizing scaffold, allowing structured states to persist long after the external energy input has ceased (weeks to months)
 With Aurmina, no energy input is required, you just add minerals, and are good to go. The one thing we dont have is data on how long the water would maintain strcuture, but based on the below comparision by AI, it is predictably far longer.
 Another difference between the meta-silicate mineral method and the sulfated mineral method, is that the former is not found in nature nor are silicates biologically indispensable, while sulfur is both biological necessary and found in natural springs. So the former is a man-made method, while Aurmina relies on the good ‘ole fashioned “nature’s method.”
 Where Can “Naturally Formed” Structured Water Found?
 As Gerald Pollack has stated publicly, the only places on Earth where naturally persistent structured water has been observed are near hydrothermal vents and in natural sulfate-rich springs .
 There is only one meaningful commonality between those environments, and it is that the minerals found there are bound with sulfur, specifically in dissolved sulfate species. Thus, I will refer primarily to sulfate going forward, because it is the most stable, soluble, and widely bioavailable aqueous form, and therefore the most biologically relevant in drinking water.
 Aurmina contains a broad and diverse palette of minerals that are all sulfated. That detail matters far more than most people discussing “structured water” realize.
 Sulfate is required for water organization because water organizes around stable charge separation, and sulfate is biology’s primary mineral for managing protons, electrons, and interfacial charge without collapsing gradients. This is why sulfate-rich environments can support persistent electrical organization in water while devices cannot.
 This fact is virtually unmentioned by those making claims about structured water. The result is widespread confusion paired with confident but baseless assertions, leaving the field wide open to skepticism, ridicule, and journalistic attack. I am trying to change that.
 One of my first steps is to advocate that we stop using the word “structure” altogether, because it hides what actually matters and misdirects attention toward the wrong thing.
 The Core Insight - “Mineral Sulfate Coherence”
 It’s not about “structured water.” It’s about water maintaining electrical sulfated mineral coherence through ionic mineral content.
 Water cannot hold structure on its own. Hydrogen bonds form and break trillions of times per second. Any apparent ordering is temporary and collapses the moment the influence is removed. Water cannot store energy, hold charge, or maintain order independently. When people say “the water is structured,” what they usually mean is that something external briefly aligned the molecules. That is not structure, and it is not coherence.
 Sulfated mineral coherence in water is about function: continuous ionic movement, stable charge exchange, and buffered electrical gradients. That only exists when sulfated mineral ions are present to support that exchange. This is what turns water from a passive solvent into an active conductive medium.
 The crucial reversal is this: water does not remember. Sulfated minerals do. Sulfated minerals provide charge buffering, electron donors and acceptors, ion-exchange capacity, and continuous conductivity. Water simply transmits, responds, and participates. Without sulfated minerals, coherence collapses and biological function fails.
 This is the missing logic in almost every discussion of water.
 Why Natural Spring Water Works
 Pristine, natural spring water moves through sulfated mineral strata, where it acquires ionic species, develops conductivity, and establishes redox balance. That is why it remains stable after bottling, behaves differently from reverse-osmosis or distilled water, and supports biological systems without devices. Nothing is “locking” the water into shape. The sulfated mineral ions keep it coherent.
 At this point, a terminology correction becomes necessary. The term “structured water” has become so overloaded and mechanistically vague that it now obscures more than it explains. What biology responds to is not structure as a static property, but water’s capacity to sustain electrical order through continuous ionic exchange. That capacity arises from sulfated mineral coherence , not geometry, intention, magnets, or momentary alignment.
 For that reason, I am deliberately going to stop using the phrase “structured water,” except when referring to how it is misused in popular discourse. It is not that nothing real is being observed. It is that the language used to describe it is wrong.
 Water does not hold structure; it maintains ionic sulfated mineral coherence only when the sulfated minerals support continuous charge exchange.
 That single sentence reframes the entire conversation correctly.
 From Serious Discussions Of “The Science” Back To Propaganda
 Remember, I am (or was) an ICU specialist; “pattern recognition” was the unique, differentiating skill I gained after 4 years of college, 4 years of medical school, 3 years of residency, 3 years of fellowship, and then over 15 years of running busy urban ICUs.
 If you don’t see something in the pattern of journalism articles above, I will explain it to you. Why would repeated, varied publications take the time to “debunk” something without first deeply researching and presenting “both sides” of the existing data on an “uncertain” topic, thus allowing the reader themselves to ponder the relative significance of the supposedly contradicting data? Why would they instead simply target the goal of “telling you what to think?”
 Weird right?
 To be clear, I am not claiming that drinking (what I will now give an acronym) sulfated mineral coherent (SMC) water is proven to maintain health or reverse disease (relax, FDA and FTC, I’m not that stupid). What I am asking is far more uncomfortable: was this hit piece on Joe commissioned because “they” believe, perhaps correctly, that MSC water poses a genuine threat to a business model dependent on a vast, continuously sick or metabolically unwell population?
 Conclusion
 X. Ancient Water vs. Modern Water
 How We Quietly Replaced a Living Medium with an Industrial Solvent
 What I am trying to say is simple.
 For most of human history, people drank water that moved slowly through rock, soil, and living systems before ever reaching the mouth.
 Springs, seeps, rivers, and shallow wells delivered water that was sulfated mineral-bearing, microbially mediated, and conditioned by prolonged contact with stone, clay, and organic matter. Water chemistry was shaped jointly by geology and biology, not by industrial optimization. There was no chlorination, no aggressive filtration, no ion stripping (hello again to the R.O. and distilled-water enthusiasts), no plastic piping, and no mandate to prioritize sterility over physiology. That water was not “pure” by modern regulatory standards, but it was often biologically legible as sulfated mineral coherent (SMC) water .
 What almost no-one has publicly called attention to (sorry for bringing up another “attack” of modern life on your health), but modern water treatment routinely strips or disrupts sulfated minerals , through softening, ion exchange, reverse osmosis, and coagulation, leaving water that is chemically clean but electrically and biologically thin.
 Modern water is really something else.
 Today, water is engineered for distribution, shelf life, and liability reduction. Municipal treatment prioritizes pathogen elimination, corrosion control, and chemical stability across miles of pipe. Reverse osmosis, demineralization, aggressive filtration, and disinfectants strip water of dissolved minerals and disrupt natural ionic relationships. What reaches the tap is often chemically clean but, again, biologically thin: low in calcium and magnesium, high in residual disinfectants, prone to inducing diuresis, and poorly buffered at the cellular level. The goal is uniformity and safety, not biological compatibility.
 I am not claiming that ancient people didn’t get sick. They did. What I am arguing is that their baseline hydration occurred in a medium that supported electrolyte balance, intracellular hydration, and sulfated mineral retention rather than constantly working against it.
 Just as humans in antiquity lived with higher baseline vitamin D levels because sun exposure was unavoidable, they also lived with more SMC water because industrial stripping or pollution had not yet occurred. Modern humans are not SMC water deficient because biology changed. We are SMC water deficient because the environment did.
 When something basic, upstream, and ubiquitous quietly disappears, the consequences do not announce themselves as a crisis. They show up as chronic inefficiency, fragility, and dependence.
 Which raises an uncomfortable question.
 Has SMC water wandered into the same forbidden territory as vitamin D, an upstream input so cheap, so basic, and so disruptive that it reliably triggers ridicule, dismissal, and coordinated propaganda rather than honest debate?
 Remember the Kory Scale . If journalists simply wanted to attack Joe Ladapo, they had hundreds of his actions and statements to choose from. Instead, they went after a single, cautious sentence about the potential benefits of SMC water (formerly known as “structured)”. He chose that (now old) word, carefully. And with a claim he did not overstate..
 Joe is dangerous precisely because he’s careful. He didn’t claim certainty. He said might . And a cautious statement from a credible authority invites thought.
 Thought is the one thing they don’t want you engaging in.
 So yes, they invented a scandal around a Surgeon General acknowledging uncertainty. And in doing so, they revealed the real scandal: a media system so captured that it now mocks upstream physiology like SMC water while calling itself “pro-science.”
 I’ll end with a confession.
 Especially for those of you who have followed my now four-plus-month deep dive into minerals, and into the historically unique extract derived from primordial biotite rock developed in 1977 by the Japanese engineer and chemist Asao Shimanishi.
 Until about two weeks ago, I genuinely thought the book I’ve been writing, From Volcanoes to Vitality , was a book about minerals. It took the animal studies I referenced above, along with several recent insights, to finally force the realization:
 The gravitational center of that book is not minerals. It’s SMC water (which would have been useful to know earlier).
 Gizmodo is trying to convince you that SMC water doesn’t matter (while calling it something else). And when the media mocks fundamentals like SMC water, it’s not because it is irrelevant.
 It’s because SMC water is dangerous.

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 More Stuff: Aurmina and Book Publications
 If you want to learn more about the water purifier we made from Shimanishi’s volcanic-mineral complex, go to Aurmina.com .

 Upcoming Book Publications
 Yup — not one, but two books are dropping from yours truly (at the same time? What?)

 If, instead of (or in addition to) these Substack posted chapters, you prefer the feel of a real book, or the smell of paper, or like to give holiday gifts, pre-order From Volcanoes to Vitality , my grand mineral saga, shipping end of January.

 And if you want to read (or gift) another chronicle of suppression, science, and survival, grab The War on Chlorine Dioxide —the sequel you didn’t see coming—shipping early to mid-January. On this one, I say: “Buy it before they ban it.” Hah!

Summary: They didn’t attack Joe Ladapo because he was reckless. They attacked him because a calm, credible authority suggested water quality matters, threatening an entire business model built on sickness.