Chris Masterjohn: Hormones Are Never In Charge

[RobertMichael]

I believe Chris Masterjohn is on a dangerous path at the moment. I have a bad gut feeling about the material he is so actively posting about lately.
He has been talking about identifying metabolic genetic defects with some extensive, likely very expensive genetic testing that he now offers to find out what „bottlenecks“ you have in energy production and giving you a specific supplement plan to fix your health. His waitlist is already full. I feel sorry for all those desperate chronically sick people, likely spending a small fortune on his new program because it ignites a spark of hope in them…

Just my 2 cents on this..

And I would like to see evidence that diet and nutrients fix or reverse type 1 diabetes, primary hypothyroidism, hyperthyroidism, addisons disease, cushings syndrome or primary hypogonadism.

Many on this forum are not even able to fix their more „simple“ diseases like IBS or depression with diet and nutrients.

well said

 

[TheSir]

I do understand your point too. I am also still struggling to get to the bottom of health and in no way I am trying to say I know the answer. Minerals are definitely up there right next to water in terms of importance.

Seems to me that zinc,magnesium, copper, calcium etc are just inorganic metals that need some unifying intelligence possessing medium to govern their actions/as you said/. It seems like water is the medium and it dictates what happens next. Most probably picking up a frequency signal from another dimension ???

When I look at old people over 90-100 yo - I see a dehydrated system that is losing form. Can't imagine pushing raw oysters and liver though the mouth could change much in terms of re-hydration and stabilizing the form, no matter the amount of proper nutrition or mineral balance. Haven't tried it myself though.

I agree that there must exist a unifying intelligence behind our bodies. I would be comfortable with calling this intelligence more fundamental than minerals, water, electricity or oxygenation. As far as treating diseases goes, it is difficult to properly tap into this intelligence. We don't understand it well. Clearly it is possible to tap into it though, seeing how there are people who have been cured of their diseases with the mere power of their minds. It is an area that definitely merits more investigation. Perhaps we will find in the end that all diseases are diseases of the soul.

As you said, just eating raw oysters and liver would not be enough to remineralize and rehydrate an old body. By the time you're old, you will have accumulated hundreds of layers of compensatory patterns in your overall bodily homeostasis. For example, a deficiency in one mineral will affect every other mineral, resulting in one layer of compensation. In turn, inability by just one of these 'other' minerals to participate in said compensation will cause all the other minerals to form up another compensatory pattern. And so on.

As you keep on living, these compensatory patterns continue to stack up as layers of metabolic states. Over time, acute conditions turn into chronic diseases as their root cause gets buried under the subsequent layers, which block the body from digging into the deeper layers from which the diseases originate. Thus you end up with seemingly incurable diseases.

The only exogenous, scientific and non-esoteric way to systemically unravel these layers is to address them one by one as they surface, modifying diet and supplements in response. It would be impossible to do this blindly without accurate scientific data. HTMA is the only way I know of that does the trick. Everyone else is supplementing more or less blindly and thus rarely getting anywhere.

This whole thing sounds like a chicken or the egg problem to me. I don't know of any disease with an actual cure to begin with. Hormones are probably the closest thing to that, at least for any degenerative disease. The whole point of their use is an attempt to optimize physiological function. Improving quality of life indefinitely sounds pretty darn optimal to me.

Diet is important, sure. But try to get a man to "cure" his type 2 diabetes (just for example) through diet alone, and then give him some testosterone and let him sort the diet out in time. I'll bet on the success of #2 and the failure of #1 any day.

Almost every disease has individuals who have been permanently cured from it. You might be saying that there exists no universal cures to diseases, and in that case you would be right. Of course, as readers of Peat, we know that the individual context is everything, meaning that the absence of such universality cannot serve as a legitimate argument for or against anything. What cures one can harm another even when the two are seemingly identically ill.

As far as I know, even though many different methods have been used to cure people of diseases, hormones have never cured a single disease. It is just not possible for hormones to cure anything, because they have no creative or constructive power. They can elicit particular responses from the metabolism, but no disease is just about the metabolism behaving incorrectly -- that's merely a symptom of disease. This does not mean that hormones can't be used as an effective complementary treatment though.

Merely becoming less sick does not sound very optimal. It might be immensely desirable, but it has nothing to do with great health. For example, going from 9/10 misery to 7/10 would naturally feel heavenly. Yet it wouldn't mean that your problems are gone.

 

[togeprrriii]

I agree that there must exist a unifying intelligence behind our bodies. I would be comfortable with calling this intelligence more fundamental than minerals, water, electricity or oxygenation. As far as treating diseases goes, it is difficult to properly tap into this intelligence. We don't understand it well. Clearly it is possible to tap into it though, seeing how there are people who have been cured of their diseases with the mere power of their minds. It is an area that definitely merits more investigation. Perhaps we will find in the end that all diseases are diseases of the soul.

Yes, I think there is some "higher" unifying "intelligence", and people have tried to name it in various ways (dao, god, universe , ...). The role of the soul, if one wants to call it like that and name it - althoug i dont think it can ever be "found" through objectifying science, as it is in essence "located" on a subject-level - is to get in touch with this overarching unifying intelligence. that's where health - wholeness - is generated and maintained and thus, can be restored. In this sense of the word soul, many (official) diseases and disease-like states (like the many metabolic ailments) are indeed diseases (as in dis-ease) of the soul and can and probably often must be approached by tuning into one's "soul" again (and therefore, by tuning into the unifying intelligence).
It sounds esoteric, but it can be described (or at least circumscribed) in quite simple terms i think: if a living being is not in good contact with the conditions it needs to thrive, it can not be fully healthy (in the sense of 'whole'). These conditions are of course, in part, of chemical and physical nature (i.e. nutrition, light, etc.). But what a given being needs specifically it has, in the end, to find out for itself - and here comes the role of the subject-level into play, the coming-into-contact with one's needs and gut-feelings, which i think are the interface to the uniying intelligence you have mentioned. That's why, as you said, there are lots of people who get well again without going into biochemical details as some/many of us do here.

 

[togeprrriii]

As you keep on living, these compensatory patterns continue to stack up as layers of metabolic states. Over time, acute conditions turn into chronic diseases as their root cause gets buried under the subsequent layers, which block the body from digging into the deeper layers from which the diseases originate. Thus you end up with seemingly incurable diseases.

The only exogenous, scientific and non-esoteric way to systemically unravel these layers is to address them one by one as they surface, modifying diet and supplements in response. It would be impossible to do this blindly without accurate scientific data. HTMA is the only way I know of that does the trick. Everyone else is supplementing more or less blindly and thus rarely getting anywhere.

I agree with you, to add to my last post, that unravelling of biochemical layers in the body can be part of the healing process. But I would add that only by tuning in with oneself are we at all able to "know" what we should try. "perceive, think, act" is in a sense one way to put it, as peat did, althoug these words can be misunderstood as seemingly omitting the strongly subjective foundation on which all (meaningful and possibly successful) decisions and actions lie. the aspect of the role of gut-feelings and intuition is at least not explicitly mentioned in those words, though i think ray meant it that way.

 

[Peatful]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8m-hnJiw_I



Certainly an interesting perspective; unfortunately I am not knowledgeable enough to analyze it from a Peat perspective, so posting for discussion.

Stress is in charge

See Hans Selye and Broda Barnes
(And Ray of course)






I look forward to reading the responses thus far

 

[Peatful]

Hans Selye (1907–1982): Founder of the stress theory

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

 

[Peatful]

The Stress of Life
Amazon.com

 

[Hidden49]

I believe Chris Masterjohn is on a dangerous path at the moment. I have a bad gut feeling about the material he is so actively posting about lately.
He has been talking about identifying metabolic genetic defects with some extensive, likely very expensive genetic testing that he now offers to find out what „bottlenecks“ you have in energy production and giving you a specific supplement plan to fix your health. His waitlist is already full. I feel sorry for all those desperate chronically sick people, likely spending a small fortune on his new program because it ignites a spark of hope in them…

Just my 2 cents on this..

And I would like to see evidence that diet and nutrients fix or reverse type 1 diabetes, primary hypothyroidism, hyperthyroidism, addisons disease, cushings syndrome or primary hypogonadism.

Many on this forum are not even able to fix their more „simple“ diseases like IBS or depression with diet and nutrients.

CMJ seems to have become completely obsessed with b2, biotin, carnitine due to his experience with them fixing his issues and now he is acting like they are answer to fixing a lot of other peoples health issues just because of his personal experience bias. I agree with you I think finding this rare genetic missing link that he speaks about is bs for the most part of people. I couldn't really watch his "How I found my health super unlock" video, the way he presented it was like he was writing a novel about the subject, sounded like a lot of gibberish to me. A whole lot of talking to not really say much in the end.

 

[sunny]

I believe Chris Masterjohn is on a dangerous path at the moment. I have a bad gut feeling about the material he is so actively posting about lately.
He has been talking about identifying metabolic genetic defects with some extensive, likely very expensive genetic testing that he now offers to find out what „bottlenecks“ you have in energy production and giving you a specific supplement plan to fix your health. His waitlist is already full. I feel sorry for all those desperate chronically sick people, likely spending a small fortune on his new program because it ignites a spark of hope in them…

Just my 2 cents on this..

And I would like to see evidence that diet and nutrients fix or reverse type 1 diabetes, primary hypothyroidism, hyperthyroidism, addisons disease, cushings syndrome or primary hypogonadism.

Many on this forum are not even able to fix their more „simple“ diseases like IBS or depression with diet and nutrients.

Off topic of hormones, but still on topic of Masterjoh, have you read his paper on methylene blue? His view seems to be mostly opposite that of those that advocate its use. I don't follow him, but had subscribed to his emails, so I get his write ups that I read occasionally. Considering the testing that you say he is offering, would you view his negative view of MB the same as his view of hormones?

 

[Bozidar]

The thing is, it is not possible to get an imbalanced body to function optimally with hormonal interventions. This is very much because hormones are not in charge, and it is exactly why it matters that they are not in charge. If hormones were in charge, hormonal interventions would cure diseases by the downstream effects of their application. After getting hormones right, everything else would fall in place.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. Hormones are never used to cure diseases. They are only used to manage symptoms. This can improve one's quality of life for an indefinite period of time, but it will not result in optimal physiological function. Instead, hormonal treatments will gradually imbalance the body further.

The most fundamental layer of the body consists not of hormones, but of minerals. Minerals create the form of our bodies. Peat wrote about the intricate relationship between form and energy, and how they generate each other. Linus Pauling argued that all diseases can be traced back to mineral deficiencies. Minerals form the engine in which hormones, neurotransmitters, enzymes, and so on, are created and operate. Hence in the end our health is determined by our mineral status.

Any attempt to cure a disease should thus revolve around fixing the underlying mineral foundation of the body. It is when you fix the foundation that the upper layers will fall in place effortlessly. Hormonal issues are routinely cured for good with mineral focused approaches. This is done all the time in HTMA, for example.

Ultimately, one has to decide whether they want instant improvement at the risk of delayed degeneration of health, or gradual improvement towards a deeper and less transient level of healing.

May I ask where do you draw this knowledge from? Is it some kind of healing philosophy? I find it really interesting. Can I find it somewhere online?

I find it so annoying how people fail to recognize what is this CMJ video about. I find him to be really on another level of understanding. I just watched his intro to energy metabolism titled Thermodynamics, Energy, and Order. Just wow!
I think a lot of people here are in a cult of dr. Ray Peat and very blind because of it.

 

[Healthseeker]

The video started a bit slow, but I thought it was worth a watch.
The most interesting thing he said for me was about the genetic mutations that cause bottlenecks in energy metabolism. Likely I think, supplementing hormones can override your bodies tendency to bottleneck, but it would be better if we actually understood our bodies.

 

[GTW]

"Your brain does not exist for thinking"
"Hormones are never in charge"
Edward deBono calls these PO. Provocative Operations that serve to stimulate innovative thinking, new perspective.
Hormone manipulation and supplementation can be pivotal in restoring health or more normal metabolism. As CMJ also writes about MB, for intervention, not for perpetual use.
Corticosteroids for maladaptive hyperimmune conditions
Insulin for T1D
Testosterone for diverse conditions
Progesterone for PMS
Your explicit or inductive definition of words like driving or in charge are red herrings.
"It is your voice that they hear, but what goes through their minds is their own thoughts." Rumi

 

[TheSir]

May I ask where do you draw this knowledge from? Is it some kind of healing philosophy? I find it really interesting. Can I find it somewhere online?

Most of it comes from Paul Eck (attached file) and Lawrence Wilson (drlwilson.com), who were/are the godfathers of hair mineral analysis, which is, like you guessed, a particular kind of healing philosophy. It really is an interesting modality and I wish more resources on it were available.

 

[PopSocket]

Most of it comes from Paul Eck (attached file) and Lawrence Wilson (drlwilson.com), who were/are the godfathers of hair mineral analysis, which is, like you guessed, a particular kind of healing philosophy. It really is an interesting modality and I wish more resources on it were available.

thank you for the resource. Interesting read. I was getting second hand knowledge instead of reading from the source.

 

[Pete Rey]

Almost every disease has individuals who have been permanently cured from it. You might be saying that there exists no universal cures to diseases, and in that case you would be right. Of course, as readers of Peat, we know that the individual context is everything, meaning that the absence of such universality cannot serve as a legitimate argument for or against anything. What cures one can harm another even when the two are seemingly identically ill.

As far as I know, even though many different methods have been used to cure people of diseases, hormones have never cured a single disease. It is just not possible for hormones to cure anything, because they have no creative or constructive power. They can elicit particular responses from the metabolism, but no disease is just about the metabolism behaving incorrectly -- that's merely a symptom of disease. This does not mean that hormones can't be used as an effective complementary treatment though.

Merely becoming less sick does not sound very optimal. It might be immensely desirable, but it has nothing to do with great health. For example, going from 9/10 misery to 7/10 would naturally feel heavenly. Yet it wouldn't mean that your problems are gone.

I'm saying quite the opposite -- there only exist universal "cures," and there exist no specific ones for specific diseases, save maybe for some edge cases like scurvy and vitamin C. Ultimately my argument here is that assigning cause and effect and waxing about "underlying problems" is just a theoretical game, and what really matters are statistics. And the statistics on hormone therapy are as good or better than anything you would theoretically consider to not be "complimentary" but rather fundamental. And therefore I question whether that is a useful or true delineation.

Given that nothing can ever be 100% effective, we have to view this in terms of probabilities. For example, the Gerson method has been known to "cure" almost any degenerative disease. It probably has one of the highest statistical chances of success (although we can only infer that since it will never be formally studied for obvious reasons). I think if anything deserves to fall under the category of "cure" that we can all agree on (focused on eliminating toxins and supplying nutrients), that's as good of a candidate as we're going to get. And yet it still has its limits and is far from a guarantee.

So the question is, is a type 2 diabetic that goes on testosterone and in a few months is no longer diabetic "cured" or not? If he ceases treatment and has changed nothing else, then the answer may be "no," but those few months of metabolic reprieve will still allow his body a better chance at recovery than if he had not used it. If he stays on indefinitely, and never tests positive for diabetes again in his life, regardless of what you want to say about underlying problems, I think it's hard to argue that the answer isn't "yes." And if he uses those few months of reprieve to make changes that would not have been nearly as effective without the intervention, and then successfully ceases treatment and remains non-diabetic, I think the answer has to be an unequivocal "yes." In other words, you wouldn't be able to separate out the lifestyle changes from the hormonal intervention to say what had the larger effect, and there is a very good statistical reason to believe that it's the intervention.

Lastly I would add that many conditions are obviously incurable on their face. Diseases like schizophrenia where neurons literally develop in utero to fire the wrong direction. Obviously there will never be a cure that flips them around the right way. Even Max Gerson would say, if a patient is too far gone or has received dialysis, the method will not work. This is the extreme end of the spectrum on which all disease exists, and the diseases we are most concerned with are degenerative, which slide along this spectrum, and are fundamentally indistinguishable from aging. We are all going to die from degeneration if we are so lucky to not get killed in some other manner. As such, I would argue that anything that delays that degeneration, even if only from a 9/10 to 7/10 as you say, is fundamentally indistinguishable from a cure.

 

[youngsinatra]

Most of it comes from Paul Eck (attached file) and Lawrence Wilson (drlwilson.com), who were/are the godfathers of hair mineral analysis, which is, like you guessed, a particular kind of healing philosophy. It really is an interesting modality and I wish more resources on it were available.

Thanks for the resource! I‘ve read a great deal of it today, as I am a skeptic of this approach. After reading, it still seems like an HTMA leaves a lot room for analysis and interpretation. (and maybe even speculation) The mineral-interactions also seem never-ending and complicated. (that reminded me of gbold‘s post thats I could barely follow or understand when i read them)

Very nice to see the concept of thyroid (spark plug) + adrenals (fuel) = energy (ATP) which I just recently have seen on Dr. Myhill‘s website / protocol for CFS/ME.

But she does full thyroid panels, adrenal and sex hormone testing, serum vitamin and mineral tests mainly for diagnosis. And she does not only treat with nutrients, but also with NDT, pregnenolone, DHEA, cortisol etc etc

 

[gd81]

As far as I know, even though many different methods have been used to cure people of diseases, hormones have never cured a single disease.

I guess it depends what we mean by cure but I am unaware of anything else with these types of therapeutic effects with so few negative effects

"FIG1= 6.—Case #13. After 50 days on progesterone."

It is just not possible for hormones to cure anything, because they have no creative or constructive power.

Ray talked about a study where dropping an anti-thyroid substance into a tadpole's water tank resulted in a large tadpole that failed to become a frog. Dropping thyroid into the tank produced a premature frog. To me that suggests thyroid has an essential role in development.

 

[Highserotonin90]

@Pete Rey what would be the gersey method?

 

[Hidden49]

I agree that there must exist a unifying intelligence behind our bodies. I would be comfortable with calling this intelligence more fundamental than minerals, water, electricity or oxygenation. As far as treating diseases goes, it is difficult to properly tap into this intelligence. We don't understand it well. Clearly it is possible to tap into it though, seeing how there are people who have been cured of their diseases with the mere power of their minds. It is an area that definitely merits more investigation. Perhaps we will find in the end that all diseases are diseases of the soul.

As you said, just eating raw oysters and liver would not be enough to remineralize and rehydrate an old body. By the time you're old, you will have accumulated hundreds of layers of compensatory patterns in your overall bodily homeostasis. For example, a deficiency in one mineral will affect every other mineral, resulting in one layer of compensation. In turn, inability by just one of these 'other' minerals to participate in said compensation will cause all the other minerals to form up another compensatory pattern. And so on.

As you keep on living, these compensatory patterns continue to stack up as layers of metabolic states. Over time, acute conditions turn into chronic diseases as their root cause gets buried under the subsequent layers, which block the body from digging into the deeper layers from which the diseases originate. Thus you end up with seemingly incurable diseases.

The only exogenous, scientific and non-esoteric way to systemically unravel these layers is to address them one by one as they surface, modifying diet and supplements in response. It would be impossible to do this blindly without accurate scientific data. HTMA is the only way I know of that does the trick. Everyone else is supplementing more or less blindly and thus rarely getting anywhere.


Almost every disease has individuals who have been permanently cured from it. You might be saying that there exists no universal cures to diseases, and in that case you would be right. Of course, as readers of Peat, we know that the individual context is everything, meaning that the absence of such universality cannot serve as a legitimate argument for or against anything. What cures one can harm another even when the two are seemingly identically ill.

As far as I know, even though many different methods have been used to cure people of diseases, hormones have never cured a single disease. It is just not possible for hormones to cure anything, because they have no creative or constructive power. They can elicit particular responses from the metabolism, but no disease is just about the metabolism behaving incorrectly -- that's merely a symptom of disease. This does not mean that hormones can't be used as an effective complementary treatment though.

Merely becoming less sick does not sound very optimal. It might be immensely desirable, but it has nothing to do with great health. For example, going from 9/10 misery to 7/10 would naturally feel heavenly. Yet it wouldn't mean that your problems are gone.

I also like your thinking a lot and agree with you

 

[Bozidar]

Most of it comes from Paul Eck (attached file) and Lawrence Wilson (drlwilson.com), who were/are the godfathers of hair mineral analysis, which is, like you guessed, a particular kind of healing philosophy. It really is an interesting modality and I wish more resources on it were available.

Wau. Thank you very much. Very Interesting.