Photo of the retina at the back of the eyeball, where macular degeneration occurs
Age-related macular degeneration is the #1 cause of blindness high-income societies. A recent study found that metformin use by type 2 diabetics at least 50 years old reduced the incidence of macular degeneration by ~35% over the course of five years. The authors consider their results preliminary and, as usual, recommend further study.
Macular degeneration can be difficult to reverse or treat once it takes hold. As with many illnesses, prevention is better. One of the treatments involves injecting the eyeball. Can you imagine that?
Metformin is among the top drug therapies for type 2 diabetes, but it has many competitors on the rise. If macular degeneration runs in your family, this study suggests it may be a good idea to stick with metformin.
…..according to Dr. Rhonda Patrick. She’s not a physician. Her Ph. D. is in biomedical science. I’ve listened to several of her podcasts and think that she does a good job of keeping her recommendations science-based. Her supplementation recommendations assume you’re generally healthy, eating a healthy diet (e.g., Mediterranean!), and exercising regularly, including some vigorous exercise like HIIT (high intensity interval training.
Here’s the list:
Vitamin D
Omega-3 fatty acid (1.5-3 g/day)
Standard multivitamin (ideally containing lutein and zeaxanthin) (she mentions Centrum Silver)
Lutein (if not in your multivitamin)
Zeaxanthin (if not in your multivitamin)
Magnesium
Melatonin 1.5-3 mg/day, 2-3 hours before bedtime
Creatine monohydrate, at least 5 g/day, 10 g is better
Ubiquinol
Sulforaphane
I’m not very familiar with sulforaphane. Two commenters at YouTube wrote that she likes the Avmacol brand. PreserVision AREDS 2 formula of multivitamins contains zeaxanthin and lutein. You might want to compare that that product to Centrum Silver. I’m sure Dr Patrick goes into details of these items at her YouTube channel (FoundMyFitness) and podcasts (FoundMyFitness and The Aliquot). In another video Dr. Patrick said the dose of vitamin D is 4,000 IU. I say the dose may depend on your latitude and amount of sun exposure. I’ve heard for years that magnesium oxide and magnesium chloride are very poorly absorbed; magnesium glycinate, citrate, taurate, and malate are better absorbed. So the latter are the preferred magnesium forms. Dr. Patrick also says magnesium is better absorbed if your total daily dose is divided; e.g., take half your daily dose in the AM, half in the PM.
Many times in my career I have sat across from a patient who expressed that they are getting serious about their health, and then rattle off a list of things that they are doing to improve their health – all mostly worthless. I do not blame them – they are victims of a self-help, supplement, and wellness industry that has completely mislead them. A typical list might include: eating only organic, avoiding GMOs, taking daily vitamins, eating low-carb, and using a sauna (or perhaps cryochambers). Sometimes they throw in fully magical interventions, like feng shui or reiki. In short, they invest a lot of time and money into interventions that will not make them more healthy, and distract them from the things we know will.
If you want to improve your health and longevity the data suggests there are five things that are of primary importance (in terms of lifestyle) – eat a well-rounded balanced diet, get sufficient quality sleep, don’t smoke, limit alcohol intake, and exercise regularly. Obviously, getting good medical care is also very important. Get regular checkups (including for dental health), and address any specific health issues you have, including mental health.
The good news is – there is not mystery to good health. The lifestyle factors I list above are the 99 percenter, meaning that together that have the overwhelming largest effect on your health. So stop worrying about the 1%, there is no magical “superfood” our there, no hack, and no secret.
So, who ya gonna believe. An M.D. neurologist or a Ph.D. in biomedical science?
Is this real or is she AI-generated? How can she be so articulate? I saw little evidence of editing. Was she reading a teleprompter?
I wonder how I would have reacted to this if I were 40, 50, or 60 years old. I’m 71 now, and it made me tear up at the end, and thereafter for many minutes, thinking about my wife, my life, my children, and the time I have left before I shuffle off this mortal coil.
It may be impossible for folks under 40 or 50 to think seriously about these issues.
—–Steve Parker, M.D.
PS: I can help you maximize your lifespan and “healthspan.”
Anthony Fauci privately acknowledged “impressive data” showed stronger immunity from a COVID-19 infection than vaccination while publicly pushing mandated shots, newly released documents show.
Former President Joe Biden’s top pandemic response officials discussed a thorough study from Israel showing the superiority of natural infection in August 2021, simultaneous with the initiation of federal vaccine mandates via an Aug. 24 Pentagon memo, according to documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by Protect the Public’s Trust, indicating officials who helped compel COVID shots had contemporaneous scientific evidence they were unjustifiable for millions of Americans.The officials distorted the evidence in public statements, repeatedly saying vaccination is necessary for immunity.
The authors of the Great Barrington Declaration suggested that letting the infection spread through the population would lead to a speedier resolution of the pandemic. Maybe they were right.
On a December evening in 2020, [President Donald] Trump granted clemency to Philip Esformes, a South Florida nursing home operator serving a 20-year sentence for orchestrating what federal prosecutors called the largest individual healthcare fraud scheme ever prosecuted in American history. The commutation freed Esformes from prison after he had served just over four years, though it left his conviction and roughly $44 million in financial penalties intact.
***
The first warning signs emerged in 2006 when Esformes and associates connected to Larkin Community Hospital reached a civil settlement with federal and Florida authorities. The $15.4 million agreement resolved allegations involving kickbacks and admitting patients for medically unnecessary treatment. Though the settlement required no admission of wrongdoing, prosecutors later pointed to this episode as evidence that suspicious conduct continued unchecked.
A decade later, federal authorities brought criminal charges that painted a portrait of systematic fraud on an unprecedented scale. In July 2016, prosecutors indicted Esformes on multiple counts related to what they described as a roughly $1.3 billion scheme to defraud Medicare and Medicaid. The government’s case detailed an intricate operation designed to maximize profits by manipulating patient care and gaming federal reimbursement rules.
According to court filings, Esformes orchestrated a system that moved beneficiaries among hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, and assisted living centers in carefully timed patterns. These transfers satisfied Medicare eligibility requirements such as mandatory three-day hospital stays and 100-day skilled nursing limits, allowing facilities to restart billing cycles regardless of whether patients actually needed the care. Prosecutors alleged that medical decisions took a back seat to financial calculations.
The scheme allegedly extended beyond unnecessary services. Federal authorities claimed Esformes paid kickbacks and bribes to physicians and physician assistants who referred patients to his network. These illegal payments flowed through intermediaries and were disguised as legitimate business expenses. Some payments were allegedly hidden as charitable donations, prosecutors said, while others appeared in fake contracts and invoices designed to conceal their true purpose.
Parker here. That’s just one way to get filthy rich in the healthcare industry. I wonder how much money Esformes got to keep in exchange for his four years in prison. I wonder if Esformes paid a substantial “donation”in exchange for his clemency.
I quit running my own medical practice in 2001 because I couldn’t make a decent living at it while following the rules.
—–Steve Parker, M.D.
PS: This Unz article illustrates the power we’re up against in trying to reform healthcare.
Counter-Currents published a review of William S. Blau’s recent book, Our Genetic Future: The Unintended Consequences of Overcoming Natural Selection. This thought-provoking and controversial book may explain why lifespans are decreasing in the U.S, cancers are becoming more frequent in younger people, and even the burgeoning “enshitification” of modern life. If you are intelligent and have an open mind, it’s worth checking out the review by Lipton Matthews. (You may be able to figure out a way to read it w/o subscribing.)
This issue reminds me of the “environmental-genetic mismatch” that many paleo diet pioneers pointed out. For example, we are not genetically programmed to eat ultrap-rocessed foods and live in close contact with thousands of other humans. Hence, we have epidemics of modern civilization, like anxiety, depression, diabetes, and hypertension.
A sample of Blau’s review:
Contemporary developed societies no longer face intense selective pressure from infectious disease. The selective advantage of immune gene variants that defended against lethal infections has vanished while autoimmune risks remain. The incidence of autoinflammatory and autoimmune disorders has increased markedly, affecting seven to nine percent of the population worldwide and ranking among leading causes of death for young and middle-aged women, with rates increasing ten to twenty percent annually over the past thirty years.
Perhaps most alarming is the documented increase in chronic disease burden across developed societies. Nearly half of American adults suffer from at least one chronic condition. Metabolic disorders including obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and fatty liver disease have increased dramatically. Early onset cancers affecting people younger than fifty are rising across multiple cancer types.
Blau cites research using the Biological State Index correlating reduced selection pressure with increased disease rates across nations. Countries with least opportunity for natural selection show dramatically higher incidences of cancers, dementia, and type 1 diabetes compared to nations where mortality remains higher. For cancers known to be strongly genetically based, incidence rates in the ten countries with least opportunity for mortality selection exceed rates in the ten countries with greatest opportunity by a factor of 5.7. These associations persist even after controlling for factors like gross domestic product, life expectancy, and lifestyle factors.
Blau’s book forces readers to confront truths that contemporary culture finds deeply unsettling. We prefer narratives of inexorable progress where science and technology ultimately solve whatever problems they create. The notion that our greatest medical triumphs may have initiated genetic degradation that will burden descendants for centuries contradicts every comforting story we tell ourselves about human advancement.
Headlines about plastic particles being detected in blood, lungs, placentas, and other tissues have been rapidly assimilated into the wellness ecosystem. Microplastics are tiny plastic particles that come from the breakdown of larger plastic pieces. Because microplastics are ubiquitous, persistent and easily dispersed, they are found in water, food and air – and our bodies. While their impact on human health continues to be studied, the message from wellness entrepreneurs has been simplified to: Plastics are accumulating inside you, and are causing you harm.
This is the perfect setting for detox marketing. Much like the Candida detox kits popular 20 years ago, supplements, binders, sauna protocols, and “plastic detox” programs now claim to remove microplastics (instead of yeast) from the body or reduce an individual’s “plastic burden.” Some businesses and clinics offer testing panels that purport to measure retained plastics, despite the absence of validated methods to do so in a clinically meaningful way. Unlike Candida, microplastics are a real environmental and health issue worthy of study. And that’s happening. But, just like older detox trends, a real scientific issue is already being used to justify claims that go far beyond the evidence.
What’s missing from the marketing claims is any evidence that these detox interventions actually work. Detecting microplastics in human tissues does not automatically imply that they can be selectively removed, or that proposed detox strategies meaningfully alter health outcomes. There is no credible evidence that supplements, saunas, chelation-like binders, or dietary protocols can “flush” plastics from the body. The leap to offering a personal detox solution is marketing, not evidence-based medicine.
The microplastics detox narrative we’re seeing also exploiting a familiar (and recurrent) misunderstanding of toxicology: the assumption that detection equals danger, and that identification necessitates purging. In reality, …
Scott is justifiably skeptical about microplastics detoxification protocols. The time may come we can rid ourselves of this contamination. But it’s not now.
Regarding COVID-19 vaccines, LifeSite News reports that former Pfizer vice president and chief scientist for allergy and respiratory Dr. Michael Yeadon has concluded that someone with his expertise was directed to “…design injections that will injure, kill, and reduce fertility in the people you give it to. And design it so that it won’t kill everybody, it won’t injure everybody, but if we give it to enough people over time it will lower the fertility and their health and reduce population.”
The article states that Dr Yeadon believes that putting COVID-19 patients on ventilators caused adult respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). All the ventilator patients I saw had ARDS before they were ever put on ventilators.
I have a few other bones to pick with Dr Yeadon. He says there was no pandemic. The year 2020 undoubtedly saw a high number of respiratory deaths worldwide from what seemed to be an infection by a virus, whether it was COVID-19 or some other virus. Dr Y believes ventilators were used excessively and too early in the course of illness. I didn’t see that in my hospital. We used them in patients in extreme respiratory distress with sustained high respiratory rates (e.g., 60 breaths/minute) who we thought were likely to quit breathing soon if we did nothing. Putting them on the ventilator was often the only option we had left. Dr Y also is convinced that the drug treatment called remdesivir (“run, death is near”) was worthless. If memory serves, the World Health Organization in 2020 decreed the same thing. Yet there were professional societies of infectious disease specialists who thought it was useful. Either way, I’m not sure.
Posted onJanuary 2, 2026|Comments Off on Oh Great…One More Thing to Worry About!: Microplastics
It’s getting harder for me to ignore microplastics. They contaminate our water, food, soil, oceans, and air. The guy in this video says the average adult brain contains as much invasive plastic as a typical plastic fork (5 grams?). These plastics are said to cause medical problems although I’m not sure of the strength of the evidence. Very few physicians know about this issue. The video speaker below talks about nanoplastics but in my experience “microplastics” is more often used. Something nano would be smaller than micro, a thousand times smaller if we’re using the metric system. Colloquially, nano may just be “quite a bit smaller” than micro. YouTube posted the video Dec 3, 2025:
The speaker refers to a scientific article published at Nature Medicine on Feb 3, 2025: Bioaccumulation of microplastics in decedent human brains. Seems to me they should have used “nanoplastics” in the title instead of “microplastics.”
Not only are the microplastics allegedly bad for us, they are linked to “forever chemicals” which may mediate the badness. E.g., BPA-like chemicals (bisphenol A).
Katie Couric interviewed Dr. Matthew J Campen, one of the authors of the study referenced above and a toxicology professor at the University of New Mexico. He impresses me with the idea that his study’s findings are very preliminary and need verification by other labs, and that the implications for how we live today are not clear by any means. He speculates that the nanoplastics he finds in human tissue samples were ingested as nanoparticles that originated in landfills years ago. Discarded plastic waste deteriorated over time, breaking down to nanoparticles that contaminated groundwater and also ended up in agricultural products. Therefore, he suggests that there is not much individuals can do about avoiding nanoplastics except perhaps limiting meat consumption. Dr Campen notes that cutting down on our use of plastics now is more likely to help those a couple generations hence than to help us. He is highly skeptical about any current remedies that purport to remove nanoplastics from our tissues. Yet he suggests that our bodies may indeed have an intrinsic mechanism to reject (eject?) the particles.
Posted onDecember 21, 2025|Comments Off on Basic Science Lecture: How Do Ozempic, Zepbound, Wegovy, and Mounjaro Work?
This alleged pathologist explains how drugs like Ozempic, Zepbound, Wegovy, and Mounjaro work to reduce appetite and lead to weight loss. Which could help if you have type 2 diabetes. These drugs are analogs of either GLP-1 (glucose-like peptide-1) or GIP (glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide), or a combination of both.
Paleo Diabetic 