The Silent Aquifer: Photographic Appendix

If you are here, either you were strolling by and stumbled in, or were launched here by the QR code at the opening ofThe Silent Aquifer’sblack-and-white Photographic Appendix. Either way, welcome and enjoy the color photo version.Thechapters 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 FatesIn 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 aliveAppendix 2: The Accidental LilacAn 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 RaceThese photographs were taken eighteen days apart. Nothing changed between them except the water.Submitted by my colleague Jeff, producer and director ofThe Universal Antidotedocumentary and author of theCurious OutlierSubstack, 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 OffShe 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 YearsThis 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 HansonAppendix 6: Seven Doves Visit in the Middle of WinterRecently, 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 UpWhen 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 ComparisonRascon 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.EconomicsFor 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 WaterStanding 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.ConclusionSeen 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.Subscribe now

Summary: Visual Signals Across Living Systems


As of Last Night, the U.S Government Will Never Get to Tell Doctors What They Can or Can't Say Anymore

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 Iwrote 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, andliterallydead 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 toChildren’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 bothRick JaffeandCHDright 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.Subscribe nowNote 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 writetwothree books, retire my patient panel (but not fromLeading Edge Clinic), and start a company with one mission: to carry this forgotten chemistry off the page.Aurminafor the water we drink, andPrimora Biofor the water our soil, crops, and animals crave.From Research to Practice - Links Below ImageEarth’s Living Water- Its History, Its Ruin, and the Way BackThe Silent Aquifer- Humanity’s Unfolding Food and Water CrisisThe War on Chlorine Dioxide- The Medicine That Could End MedicineAurmina– The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking WaterPrimora Bio- Bringing Life Back To SoilLeading Edge Clinic- Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 StatesThe War on Ivermectin- The Medicine That Could have Ended the PandemicThe Blueprint of Life- The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and HealthMedical Musings- A View From the Inside Of Modern Medicine

Summary: In Kory v. Bonta, a federal judge just barred California’s Attorney General and its medical boards from coming after me and my colleagues for the expert opinions we share with patients.


Earth's Living Water: Photographic Appendix

If you are here, either you were strolling by and stumbled in, or were launched here by the QR code at the opening ofEarth’s Living Waterblack-and-white Photographic Appendix. Either way, welcome and enjoy the color photo version.Thechapters 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 FatesIn 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 LilacAn 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 RaceThese photographs were taken eighteen days apart. Nothing changed between them except the water.Submitted by my colleague Jeff, producer and director ofThe Universal Antidotedocumentary and author of theCurious OutlierSubstack, 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 OffShe 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 YearsThis 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 HansonAppendix 6: Seven Doves Visit in the Middle of WinterRecently, 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 UpWhen 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 ComparisonRascon 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.EconomicsFor 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 StoppedA 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 WeddingI 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 PhotographsThe 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 WaterStanding 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.ConclusionRead 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.Subscribe now

Summary: Visual Signals Across Living Systems


Professor Paul Marik Identified The Cure for Sepsis. I Watched Medicine Bury It.

*Excerpted fromThe Silent Aquifer, Chapter 48: Who Decides What’s True: How Modern Medicine Buries What WorksPaul 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 ReflexMy 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: asmall, 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 forwardedme 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 EggsAnyway, 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 EmailsSoon 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,” Ishouted, 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 includedin 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 vitaminan 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 forscurvy. 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.Subscribe nowYour Septic Patients Have ScurvyI 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 DeficiencyI 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 cannottake 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 BelfastThose were the most satisfying and inspiring years of my career. Until they ended when I finally met Paul in person, at amajor critical care conferencein Belfast right before Covid hit the US in January 2020, where investigators from Australia presented the highly anticipated results of theVITAMINS 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 HoursMy 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 USmedian length of stay in an ERprior 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 Cuntil 29 hoursafter admission to the ICUso 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 theleading causes of death in the world.The World’s First Randomized Controlled Trial Was a Vitamin C TrialThere 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 lifeas a vitamin C trial.In 1747, aboard HMSSalisbury, a Scottish naval surgeon named James Lind ran what isstill called the first controlled clinical trialin 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 thehistorian 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 shipsonly 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 shipsuntil 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 thatChest,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 WarWe 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 policyduring 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’s4.5 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 supporthis Substackas his income has been markedly diminished (understatement), or buy his book,Cancer Carefor 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 GhostOnly 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 byEwan Cameron, a Scottish surgeonat Vale of Leven Hospital; Pauling was his collaborator and his megaphone. Their protocol began with ten grams of vitamin C a daygiven intravenouslyfor 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 1979andagain 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 twentymillimolar,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 MeansMy 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.Subscribe nowAlthough it pains me to watch it now, I will leave you with one of the almost half dozenTV newscastsof “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 ourLeading Edge Clinic), and start a company with one mission: to carry this forgotten chemistry off the page.Aurminafor the water we drink, andPrimora Biofor soil, crops, and animals.From Research to Practice - Links Below ImageAurmina– The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking WaterPrimora Bio- Bringing Life Back To SoilLeading Edge Clinic- Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 StatesThe War on Ivermectin- The Medicine That Could have Ended the PandemicThe Blueprint of Life- The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and HealthThe Silent Aquifer- Humanity’s Unfolding Food and Water CrisisThe War on Chlorine Dioxide- The Medicine That Could End MedicineMedical Musings- A View From the Inside Of Modern Medicine

Summary: Becoming Paul Marik's close colleague was the most inspiring turn my career ever took, until the same partnership got us both excommunicated from academic medicine and ended his career at the bedside.


A Different Kind of Independence Day

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,Aurminais 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 ofThe 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 mypreviously 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 Lifeis, 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 asFrom Volcanoes to Vitalitywill now be published asThe 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 Lifeis available now in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle through bothmy websiteandAmazon(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.AurminaCelebrates America’s 250th BirthdayTo celebrate Independence Day—and America’s 250th birthday—we’re also offering25% offsingle bottles ofAurminaandPrimora Biothroughout the holiday weekend (the three- and six-packs are already discounted 22% and 33%, respectively).Use coupon code:JULY4at 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 fromThe 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 MeWhat 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.Read more

Summary: This Fourth of July marks more than America’s birthday: The Blueprint of Life is finally here, The Silent Aquifer is close behind, our family is about to grow, and Aurmina is celebrating all.


For Warner, A Letter to a Friend Who Is Gone, But Not Gone

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 theMendenhall 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 onevideo of me kitesurfingsmall 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 weredefending the rule of law. I wasdefending 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 isJeff 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 theChildren’s Health Defense article about your lifeand 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.Subscribe now

Summary: He was the leader of the legal resistance since the onset of the Covid war, and one of the finest men I knew. A letter to Warner Mendenhall, 1962–2025.


The Life That Prepared Me

Excerpted from the Epilogue toThe Blueprint of Life, shipping this month.In retrospect, I have learned that publishing a book in serial form did not work for me quite the way it worked for Dickens or Tolstoy.Shocker.But I tried.I mention that because many readers understandably did not follow the full progression of the book as it unfolded. Some encountered individual chapters as standalone Substack posts, which made the larger continuity difficult to see. Only the most committed readers could follow the thread as it developed across months of writing, revision, reversal, and discovery.All I can say is that this book took everything out of me.It is one of the proudest works of my life, and I suspect I will look back on it forever with gratitude for having been allowed to participate in the process at all.What this work did to me is difficult to convey, especially here on Substack.The next few posts, taken from the book’s epilogue, are my attempt to do that. They are the reflections of a man who gave himself to an effort that surpassed anything else he has ever tried to do.They are raw. They are honest. And they are more personal than anything I am used to sharing in public.This journey led me and MB into ancientHermeticandalchemical texts,which, in our research, we found had preserved sophisticated scientific knowledge in symbolic language for centuries. It led us to theRock–Water Circuit Theory,which became the key not only to reading those texts but also to seeingpassages of Scripturethat convey sophisticated scientific insights. What astonished us, in retrospect, washow much Scripture containeddescriptions of the same generative principle theEmerald Tabletcalls “the father of all works of wonder in the world.”It finally led us toward anargument for a Creatorthat I believe is rational, evidence-based, and far larger than many readers may have realized as the chapters appeared one by one.I admit I was surprised by how few comments along the way reflected an understanding of what we were actually putting forward. Substack just ain’t the place for that, I discovered. But that is behind me now.What remains are the emotions, questions, and reflections that came after the work had taken me as far as I could go.This is the first of three epilogue movements I will share here with paid subscribers before the book becomes public. The manuscript is now close to going to print, and unless I hear something that convinces me otherwise, this epilogue will remain part of the book.Read more

Summary: Before Covid and the discovery of order in rock, water, and creation, there was addiction, recovery, fatherhood, illness, loss, and faith—the life that prepared me for this book.