Editor’s note: This is Part 3 of the series “How Do We Lower the Cost of Health Care in the U.S.? Need Less Health Care.” Part 1 changed the framework and how you think about healing. Part 2 covered what to do when something’s wrong, but not urgent, and the alternative pathways outside the conventional system. Part 3 covers what to do when you genuinely need a hospital, and how to choose one that won’t bankrupt you or make things worse.

I’ve already told you about my dying sister’s catastrophic night, strapped to a gurney and shipped across town at midnight because “there’s a bed open now.” I’ve told you about my daughter, three centimeters dilated and forced into an unbiological 12-hour deadline, because everyone’s on the birth assembly-line clock. Regular readers know I don’t romanticize hospitals. I’ve called them Soviet-style hellscapes, and I stand by it.

But this isn’t that article. This is the practical one.

Because despite everything we covered in Part 1 (get your mindset right, your body can do more than you think) and Part 2 (when something’s wrong, there’s a whole world of healers outside the white coat system), sometimes you actually need a knee replacement. Sometimes you get cancer and you want conventional chemo. Sometimes it’s a hernia repair.

When that day comes, you have a choice most people don’t realize they have: whether to hand yourself over to a greedy, bureaucratic, medically dangerous hospital system, or get the exact same care somewhere that won’t financially and clinically wreck you in the process.

The Tell

If you ever needed proof that hospitals are raping and pillaging their own communities, look no further than the hospital cost interactive tool, a delightful little playground built by the incomparable Marilyn Bartlett for the National Academy for State Health Policy (NASHP). The tool also feeds a wonderfully useful interface, Sage Transparency, that combines quality data with the NASHP cost data.

The tool pulls from every hospital’s actual, required financial filings to the government - because they wouldn’t lie to the government, right? Their real costs. Their liabilities and debts and private equity and hedge fund investments. Their charity care. Their mix of money-losing Medicaid patients, break-even Medicare patients, and commercially insured patients who are, in every sense of the phrase, the golden goose.

But the best part of the tool is the number it hands you called the commercial break-even rate - the percentage above Medicare rates a hospital would actually need to charge insured patients just to break even. No profit. Just breathing room.

Spoiler alert: that number is almost never higher than 50 percent above Medicare rates. So that’s what they’re charging, right? Because, they’re charities?

Not exactly.

Per the RAND Corporation’s ongoing hospital price transparency study, hospitals actually charge private insurers an average of 254 percent of the Medicare rate - outpatient services run even higher, at 279 percent. That’s a three-times markup over what it takes to survive, extracted from patients, employers and taxpayers.

But they’re dying, you see. DYING. They have to close their doors, dying! They have to send Grandma to collections, because, dying.

If these institutions were the white-hat charities their tax status pretends they are, they would charge no more than the commercial break-even rate to you and your plan. The fact that they routinely charge nearly double that or more tells you everything you need to know about who they actually are.

The Bait-and-Switch

At the end of the day, the “health care” system is dressed up as a haven of healing, when really it’s an altar of sacrifice demanding our dignity, our autonomy, our agency, and too often, our ability to get better. The medical system profits most when we are sick, sick for life, and have high-priced stuff done to us or bought for us. That’s the opposite of our own priorities, which are to be healthy, and to pay less. All the incentives in the system are aligned against those priorities.

We’ve discussed in this space before how hospitals are clinically dangerous hellscapes unfit for humans. But they are also deeply dangerous to our financial health. This is one of the main reasons Step Three of this whole series matters so much: stay the hell out of hospitals for non-emergencies.

Here’s the fuller rap sheet, in case you needed more convincing:

• They wave their “nonprofit” status like a halo - billboards at the ballpark, Jesus-adjacent mission statements on the website - while hiring the priciest management consultants money can buy to make sure as few poor patients as possible ever find out about the free financial aid they’re legally required to offer.

• They collude with insurers to force you and your employer to pay anticompetitive contracted prices instead of the (usually lower) cash price, and refuse to take cash from patients whose plans they’re contracted with.

• They charge you a facility fee for the privilege of walking through their doors - a fee an identical, non-hospital-owned building down the street doesn’t charge for the identical service.

• They’re rolling out AI in the exam room, marketed as freeing your doctor to look at you instead of a screen, when a good chunk of what it’s actually doing is mining the visit for more billing codes.

• They’ve eaten nearly every independent practice and facility in sight, using monopolistic, cartel-like tactics to erase competition - which is exactly what that DOJ lawsuit against OhioHealth was about (which OhioHealth recently settled).

• They exploit the 340B drug program (h/t ) - a safety net program designed to help free clinics and HIV providers stretch scarce dollars for poor patients - by buying drugs at pennies on the dollar and then billing plans and patients full price, pocketing the spread.

• They turn outpatient visits into revenue funnels, pressuring employed doctors to refer patients to pricier services inside the system, corroding the trust between doctor and patient and grinding down the souls of well-intentioned physicians in the process.

• They charge you whether they heal you, cure you, or make you worse - and they cover up the errors and the inhumane staffing conditions that produced them.

• They create the very complications they then bill you to treat.

• They hide their prices behind contract gag clauses and simply ignore the federal transparency rules when the fines are cheaper than the exposure.

• They prohibit self-funded employers from cutting a better direct deal with them than their insurer already negotiated.

• They’ve even gamed Medicare’s rural and urban hospital designations (h/t ) simultaneously - claiming rural status for one payment program and urban for another - to squeeze extra money out of both. HHS tried to force hospitals to pick a lane. A federal court struck the rule down.

• And of course, they lobby at industrial scale to smother any reform of these abuses, before it reaches a floor vote.

Despite this parade of horribles, sometimes (regrettably) you may actually need one.

What Hospitals Are Actually For

The system does have real, if narrow, uses. For a hospital proper, that use case is life-threatening emergencies.

• I have a bullet in my belly.

• I have a bone sticking out.

• I’m having a stroke.

• I’m having a heart attack.

• I’ve drowned and I’m unconscious and not breathing.

• My placenta is blocking the birth canal during delivery.

• I have a tumor blocking my colon.

As I’ve written before, these are exactly the services that aren’t profitable for a hospital, and can’t be made profitable:

“The life-saving, acute services that are valuable are not profitable. They cannot be made profitable. They require an expensive crew of high-skill labor, cutting edge technology, the most expensive forms of ground and air transport, with 24/7/365 access for a catchment area that does not produce enough of these needs each year to recoup costs.” from Hospitals are Soviet-Style Hellscapes Unfit for Humans

The Stuff That Actually Pays the Bills

The rest of the hospital enterprise - the part that really rakes in the money - isn’t curing or healing much of anything. It’s suppressing symptoms, slowing disease progression, or preventing some hypothetical worse outcome that hasn’t happened and might never have happened.

Think:

• Joint replacements

• Chemotherapy and radiation

• Mastectomies for breast cancer

• So-called transgender procedures

• Dialysis for advanced diabetes and kidney failure

• Cardiac cath lab procedures - stents, balloons, and the like

• Infusions for rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune disease

• The majority of C-sections - as I’ve written before, for every genuinely emergent C-section, there are roughly two more elective or unnecessary versions, scheduled around a clock and a convenience, not a crisis

Very little of what actually generates revenue in a hospital is aimed at healing, curing, or reversing anything.

Plenty of the surgeries on that list have been shown in rigorous trials to perform no better than a well-run placebo. Some cancers resolve on their own or in spite of the treatment thrown at them - though it’s genuinely hard to pin an exact number on that, because we almost never test what would happen with radical lifestyle change or emotional healing tried alongside (or instead of) the poison-cut-burn protocol. Nobody’s funding that trial.

None of this means these treatments are all garbage, or that nobody needs them. Once you’re standing in the clinical presentation these procedures exist to address, the window for other options may already be closed. I’m not telling you to skip your chemo or your hip replacement.

What I am telling you is this: not one of us wants to be the person needing this care. Every single one of us would infinitely prefer never to need it at all. That’s the whole premium proposition of health - not needing to ever darken the door of these institutions.

All of these treatments represent the failure of health care, not health care itself. They are sick care. Sick care is what happens after health care has already failed.

Should Hospitals Even Exist As We Know Them?

I’m honestly not convinced hospitals should exist as financially independent entities at all. As we just covered, the services that actually save lives can’t be made profitable without the kind of cravenly corrupt cross-subsidizing we just walked through.

Maybe hospitals should simply be allowed to be what they actually are: the known money-losing wing of a larger operation that profits when people stay healthy. Some employers have already started thinking exactly this way - floating the idea of building their own hospitals, designed from day one to lose money on emergency and trauma care, while the real value gets delivered through advanced primary care and world-class specialty care outside the hospital, in innovative, often physician-owned models.

Which brings us to the actual playbook.

If You Need a Hospital, Don’t Go to a Hospital

Ok, to be fair, if it’s a true emergency, go to the nearest ER, full stop, no footnotes. (PS if it’s a broken bone that’s not sticking out of the skin, try an ortho urgent care instead).

But if it’s not an emergency and you still need or want conventional medicine, the single most important decision you’ll make is this: don’t do it at your local hospital system, or at any facility with their logo on the door.

Hospitals have swallowed so many independent physician practices, imaging centers, labs, and surgery centers that finding the survivors takes a little effort. But they’re out there, they’re often physician-owned, and physician-owned facilities consistently post better outcomes than the hospital-owned version of the same service. Here’s the rundown, category by category.

Surgery

Outpatient, freestanding surgery centers exist for nearly every elective (the kind you schedule) procedure now - GI surgery, joint replacement, even a lot of cancer surgery. These are called ambulatory surgery centers, which is just fancy talk for a place you walk into in the morning and leave before dark. Some also keep a handful of overnight beds for more complex cases.

It is rare, at this point, for surgery to genuinely require a hospital-owned facility. A huge share of it is now done laparoscopically or robotically rather than the old rip-you-open approach.

• Google “independent, not owned by hospital, surgery center in [your area].”

• For orthopedic procedures specifically, ask AI: “is there an Ortho Forum affiliate near [your area]?”

• If you’ve already found an independent orthopedic practice for your consult (which you should - steer clear of the ones with a hospital logo on their website), just ask your orthopedist where the independent surgery center is that he personally uses.

If your surgeon happens to be hospital-employed, he’s going to schedule you at the hospital, and when you push back, he’ll walk you through all the reasons your particular risk profile is so special that, unlike normal patients, you can’t be operated on outside the hospital. Get a second opinion from a truly independent surgeon. That explanation is, more often than not, garbage.

If you want help finding the cash-pay option, a vendor like MDSave lets you shop surgeries, procedures, MRIs, and infusions for a transparent price. Use it to pay cash and submit to your plan afterward if you’d like - or just use it to find where the independent options near you actually are, then book there through your normal insurance if you’d rather not self-pay.

Infusions

Freestanding infusion centers are excellent for chemo and other infused drugs - like the ones treating rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, and other autoimmune conditions. They almost always take your insurance. Find one near you through the National Infusion Center Association locator.

Even better than a freestanding center: ask your health plan whether they’ll cover home infusion. It’s often dramatically cheaper and more convenient for a plan to send a nurse and the drug to your living room than to pay hospital or community oncology clinic rates. Search for a provider through the trade association’s directory.

So the pecking order is: home infusion first, freestanding infusion center second, and community oncology practice as your fallback if neither of the first two is available. Community oncology practices still tend to overcharge for the drug and its administration - but at least you’re not also paying hospital facility fees on top of it.

Imaging

MRI, CT, ultrasound, mammogram, DEXA scan, x-ray - whatever it is, stay away from a hospital system for it. Find a freestanding radiology facility instead. They’re usually named something like “[Your Town] Radiology,” or just ask AI to find the independent imaging center nearest you.

These places almost always take your insurance, and their cash price frequently beats whatever your plan is actually paying on your behalf. So if you’re still working through your deductible, don’t lead with your insurance card - say you’re self-pay, pay the cash rate, and submit the receipt to your plan afterward for deductible credit.

I also like RadiologyAssist.com for booking a cash-pay appointment at an independent facility near you - or just use it to identify where they’d send you, then book that same location through your insurance if you’d rather not pay cash upfront.

And if you do end up in a hospital and get hit with the bill you knew was coming, don’t just pay it. Go pull out my free playbook for outsmarting the medical billing trap and use every page of it.

We close our series with a review: the way to sustainably lower health care costs in this country isn’t a financing trick, a new middleman, or a better contract - those are all important whack-a-mole tricks staying one step ahead of the bad guys. The real solution is needing less health care - especially the kind that is bankrupting the U.S. and eating up almost half of every federal dollar.

That starts with living like a human, so fewer problems show up at all. When something’s wrong but it’s not an emergency - consider a partner in healing outside the white-coat paradigm. And when you truly need conventional care, get it anywhere except the Soviet-style hellscape on the tax-free real estate down the street, profiting from lifelong patients while pretending to be a charity.

Nobody in Washington is coming to fix this for you. The real revolution is what you do the next time a scheduler tells you where you “have” to go.

Editor’s note: This is Part 2 of a three-part series. Part 1 was about the mindset shift - recognizing that the way to lower health care costs is to need less health care, and that your mind is the most powerful healing tool you own. Part 2 is what to do when something’s actually wrong and a white coat isn’t your first call. Part 3 is about when you genuinely need conventional care, and how to get it without a hospital system bankrupting you or making things worse.

When last I last left you, I was making the case that the best way to lower health care costs in the U.S. is living like a human, and the health that follows. Real food, real sleep, real sunlight, real movement, real people in your life. When we can pull this off, a shocking number of problems simply never show up asking to be “fixed.” But given that you’re operating inside a human body living in a toxic world, sooner or later, something is going to break anyway.

This article is about what to consider when you know something’s wrong. It’s real, it hurts, and every instinct you’ve had installed since childhood is coaching you to just go to the doctor.

If you’re reading this, you already know that the system conditions us to outsource our healing to authorities and experts in white coats, to rely on the conventional doctors and hospitals covered by our insurance plans.

You also already know this system, and the “authority” and “expertise” we pay it to provide us, has presided over the last century of medicine, coincidentally the same period during which we have become the sickest, fattest, saddest, most anxious, most infertile population in human history. We are facing extinction-level chronic illness rates.

The solution to these problems won’t be found in the health care system that’s failed to prevent or reverse them at best, and that profits from and contributes to them at worst.

Of course, if you have a bullet in your belly, or a bone sticking out, a heart that’s stopped beating, or some other serious mechanical problem, there is no place you’d rather be than an American emergency department. But if it’s not an emergency, there may be alternative approaches outside the system worth consideration.

As I described in Part 1 with my own aches and pains, and my encroaching vision issues, that means breaking the habit of getting on the orthopedic surgery superhighway, avoiding diagnostic imaging (aka hex-casting), and not assuming that certain symptoms (like vision loss) are just inevitable with aging.

There are alternative pathways.

There are practitioners like homeopaths, classical osteopaths, traditional naturopaths, acupuncturists and holistic-minded chiropractors. There are also conventionally trained practitioners who have chosen treatment strategies that are outside the mainstream, like the neuro-optometry clinic I described in Part I, the formerly-licensed MDs who now practice at the New Biology Clinic, or integrative oncology centers who use many more tools than traditional poison/cut/burn cancer protocols.

But I’m here to confirm just one more thing you likely already know - when you step beyond the white coat, it’s the wild, wild west. I mean that as both a warning and an encouragement. There are healers doing things that will genuinely blow your mind. There are also people who will happily separate you from thousands of dollars while accomplishing nothing. And there is no directory, no referral system, no friendly gatekeeper to sort them for you.

The gatekeeper is YOU. (Which, if Part 1 landed at all, is obviously exactly how it should be.)

Six Questions Before You Hand Anyone Your Body (or Your Wallet)

Every practitioner on earth - licensed or not, ancient tradition or invented last year - is situated somewhere on a continuum, or several. Knowing where you want to be on each continuum is half the battle.

Let’s go through the process I go through when evaluating a practitioner I might want to engage with.

1. Who’s in charge here?

The white coat system operates on submission. You’re the child. They’re the adults. They have all the power and all the expertise, they make all the decisions, and if you disobey, you get shamed (and sometimes punished) for it. That’s one end of the authority continuum. We won’t go that far.

The other end is full agency: the practitioner contributes structure and guidance, but you run your own healing. This may be too much agency for many beginners.

But neither end is inherently wrong. If you’re fresh out of the conventional system, the expert-authority model may be what makes you feel safe - and feeling safe is itself therapeutic (I wrote about your brain’s bootleg pharmacy here). You’ll migrate along the continuum over time. Everyone does, but figure out where you are on the spectrum and what type of help you are looking for - today - before you go searching.

2. What is their license actually worth?

Something you might not have thought about is that a licensed practitioner’s actual client is the state.

The state has total power over that practitioner’s livelihood, so he’s going to be careful, and you will get a bit more governmental groupthink out of the licensed ones - not because they are evil, but because they’re humans with kids and mortgages of their own. In exchange, you get some degree of accountability (as in, a licensure board to complain to) and a much better shot at insurance coverage. That’s the trade off. There’s no right answer, just know what you’re buying.

Beyond licensure, there are certifications (which are of course a mixed bag - though I confess a soft spot for practitioners who never stop taking courses) and then there’s experience. Some of the best healers out there have no letters after their name at all. They got good the old-fashioned way: by doing it, over and over, on real humans who left a trail of glowing testimonials.

3. What do they think a symptom IS - and what are they measuring?

This divides the entire healing world. Camp one: symptoms are pathology, something has gone wrong, and the job is to make it stop. Camp two: symptoms are adaptations - your body doing something right in response to a toxin or a threat - and the symptom is the visible part of that response.

Notice: are they chasing your lab values, your waistline, or the radical metric of whether you actually feel good and function well? Some practitioners won’t rest until your bloodwork is beautiful even if you feel fine. Others take the view that if you’re thriving, we’re not going hunting for reasons you shouldn’t be. There are merits to both. Just know which one you’re hiring, and which one you need. (I’ve had my own “I don’t care what the root cause is, I need to function tomorrow” moments. I’m not judging you.)

4. How do they know what they know?

Holistic practitioners aren’t anti-science.

Many of them just value ways of knowing beyond randomized controlled trials. Things like observation of nature, thousands of years of accumulated clinical pattern-matching, and intuition. Meanwhile, the trial-and-evidence crowd will tell you exactly what the latest study did and didn’t show (although often they fail to notice the garbage study design). This can be genuinely valuable, right up until you remember who funds most of the trials and how negative trials don’t get published in the journals.

As a practitioner, I try to consider it all. But everyone has a bias here, including your humble correspondent. Ask about theirs. You need to know.

5. How rigid is their framework?

An acupuncturist operates inside Traditional Chinese Medicine, a gorgeous, ancient, meticulously mapped system. She is not going to give you stretching exercises or prescription meds, because that’s not her framework. An energy healer may not notice that your elbow hurts because the bone is fractured, because fractures aren’t in her framework. Just like the functional medical doctor is going to lab you into oblivion and might miss the childhood trauma at the root of your autoimmunity.

The single most practical thing I can tell you is to understand what each practitioner sells, and don’t go trying to buy eggs at the hardware store. The hardware store sells hardware. It will not notify you that it’s out scope. It will simply keep speaking with authority. Knowing the boundaries of someone’s framework is your job, not theirs.

6. Is the healing done TO you, or BY you?

Some modalities are receptive. You lie there and you receive - bodywork, sound, frequency, prayer, laying on of hands. Others are active (eg, nobody can do your breathwork for you).

They both matter.

In fact, receiving matters more than our do-it-yourself culture wants to admit because a lot of what turns your symptoms on in the first place is running on subconscious processes, things like fight-or-flight programs responding to threats you’re barely aware of. Your conscious mind can’t switch off what it can’t see. Receptive modalities can rattle loose what your conscious mind can’t yet reach.

My strong recommendation is to pair one active modality with one receptive one. Because it’s very possible that the combination outperforms either alone.

And now, finally, the who’s-who, from most familiar (feels like a doctor’s office, only better) to the most woo (you’re running the show).

The descriptions of practitioner types in the Field Guide below are stereotypes, lovingly deployed. Individual practitioners vary wildly, which is why you’ll be doing homework on every single one.

Next: The Field Guide.

Everything above this line was deconstructing how to think. Everything below is about knowing who to call.

In The Field Guide I outline the entire landscape from functional MDs and classical osteopaths (sorcerers, I’m not kidding) to homeopaths, naturopaths, Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurvedic practitioners, herbalists, craniosacral therapists, energy workers, formerly licensed physicians, and the full-woo frontier.

Plus, how this works with insurance (and how it doesn’t) as well as a few cheap back doors and my field-tested rules for not getting fleeced. Paid subscribers get the full download.

(If you’re not joining us for this next part, no hard feelings - I’ll see you next week for Part 3: what to do when you genuinely need conventional care, maybe even a hospital, without letting the Soviet-style hellscape known as your local hospital bankrupt you.)

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Editor’s note: This is Part 1 of a three-part series. Everyone from the White House to your HR department is trying to figure out how to lower health care costs. They’re mostly asking the wrong question. The real answer isn’t about financing mechanisms or which insurance company gets the contract. The way to lower health care costs is to need less health care. Part 1 is about the mindset shift that makes that possible. Part 2 is about what to do when something’s actually wrong - and the system isn’t your first call. Part 3 is about when you genuinely need a hospital, and how to choose one that won’t bankrupt you or make things worse.

It had been the hardest “leg day” with my trainer I’d ever done.

I was proud of myself.

But later that day, the inside of my knee started hurting badly. It was brutal. I couldn’t even bend my knee without sharp pain, even touching it hurt. Knees, it turns out, are load-bearing. Inconvenient. I figured resting and elevating would help. But when it didn’t, of course, I started researching. The symptoms matched the signs of a meniscus tear, and my chiropractor later confirmed he suspected the same.

The usual treatment for this injury is meniscus repair surgery - where the doctor “shaves” the frayed ends of the torn meniscus. But I remembered how often, when surgery for various ailments was put to the most rigorous standard of a randomized controlled trial using “sham surgery” in the control group, outcomes from the placebo effect were often equally effective.

A few weeks later, the 10-year follow up report from the FIDELITY study of long-term outcomes from meniscus repair (the “shaving” procedure) surgery compared to sham surgery controls, would come out in the New England Journal of Medicine, demonstrating that the treatment was no better and probably worse than the sham surgery, both in the short and long term outcomes of interest. At this point, I hadn’t seen that study. I’d only seen enough similar ones to know that my mind was the most powerful healing tool and that it should at least be tried before heading into surgery.

Because of this, I didn’t even want to get an MRI to confirm my diagnosis.

Many MRI studies have shown that “abnormalities” appear in asymptomatic people so frequently that MRIs are not particularly useful in determining the cause of symptoms. However, MRIs are extremely useful at making you think the abnormality is the cause of your symptoms and getting you to pursue high-revenue surgical and other treatments.

In other words, an MRI finding can serve as a “hex” that makes you blame your symptom on some structural defect or injury or degeneration and assume that only an expensive white coat can “fix” it. This is disempowering thinking in the extreme, and unsupported in many cases by the evidence.

I didn’t want my mind polluted with the notion that my body couldn’t heal itself before I’d given it a chance.

So I rejected the hex.

I went regularly to a chiropractor and an acupuncturist for a few weeks. Their manipulations brought good circulation and energy to the location, followed by symptom relief - often temporary or slow. But after about two months, I was 95% better. Four months later, I could barely feel anything there at all.

My mind is frigging amazing. So is yours.

The Real Answer to the Cost Crisis

Health care costs are eating our economy.

It’s a multi-trillion dollar industry that is nearly a fifth of the GDP. Every business, every state Medicaid director, every family at the kitchen table - we’re all sucking wind from the gut punch of health care bills.

Our solutions are generally in the same genre: financing.

Who pays? How do we shift costs to someone else? Which middlemen can we cut out? These are legitimate questions and I’ve spent most of my career on them (including my current day job as a CEO building ethical health plans for employers). But admittedly, they’re deck chairs.

The ship is sinking because Americans are sicker than we’ve ever been - and getting sicker by the day with chronic disease driving roughly 90 percent of our health care spending. You can’t finance your way out of a demand problem. We can shuffle who writes the check, but when the demand keeps rising, the supply will get more and more expensive.

But what if some fraction of us just needed less care?

The benefits might even go beyond saving the country money. Real agency would invigorate the Don’t-Tread-On-Me American spirit. And it wouldn’t take everyone - a minority could make a huge difference. That kind of shift starts in our mind before it takes effect on our body and our wallet.

So, Back to My Aches and Pains

I’m now dealing with a similar situation with a hip/groin muscle pain.

My hip feels like it constantly needs stretching and that starts to hurt when I’m walking a while. If I don’t rest, it becomes debilitating pretty quickly. I did some acupuncture. But then I discovered something much more effective. Something that sounds so unhinged, I’m slightly embarrassed to type it. If I stop focusing on the pain in the area and instead imagine what it would be like to be completely free from pain, and repeat a certain mantra, I can turn the pain immediately off.

The mantra alone isn’t the trick - it’s choosing to feel the feelings I’d feel if the mantra were true. The mantra is: “my muscles and joints are as limber, flexible and fluid as a child’s.” This isn’t just repeating something I don’t believe. It’s choosing to imagine what it would be like - what it would feel like - if it were really true. When I do this, the pain - literally instantly - disappears. This lets me walk further than I could before, and meanwhile work on the actual root cause - core weakness - by strengthening everything around the area.

I know how this sounds. I’m a health policy type, not a crystal-waving shaman. And yet. I’m not saying this will work in all cases, just that it has been extremely helpful for me.

The Vision Thing

Another thing your mind does - it sees.

My vision was disability-grade for the first part of my life until I got LASIK in both eyes in my 30s. Fifteen years of perfect vision followed and I was super spoiled. Then a few years ago, the nearsightedness started developing again and getting a little worse over time. I refused to give in to this, and I would only wear glasses when it was essential in certain situations.

I also noticed that my vision wasn’t uniformly the same all the time. Better in the sun. Better outside, full stop. Better off screens. Some days, perfect at sunrise; some days, terrible. This was data that challenged the programming I’d absorbed since childhood: stronger prescription every year, nothing you can do, just keep buying new glasses like a good little patient.

I learned about the Bates Method, a series of exercises that helps improve your vision.

And I discovered an alternative, out-of-the-system neuro-optometrist who has put the Bates Method on steroids and, through intensive and consistent exercises that challenge and exhaust my eyes, is beating back the creeping myopia monster that would otherwise be coming for my vision. The philosophy behind the program is that it’s your brain that sees, not your eyeballs. Your eyes are merely the receivers of the signal, it’s your brain that organizes that signal. With practice, your brain can do a better job. Vision happens in the brain and the mind can train it.

I’m beginning to suspect we’re all Jedis in waiting.

I don’t share all these stories to engage in medical exhibitionism or to present myself as some sort of guru who doesn’t understand the agonizing symptoms you’re having. Sometimes the symptoms are so bad that you need some mechanical or pharmaceutical relief while you’re working on your Jedi mind tricks.

This is a work in progress for me too.

I rolled an ankle recently and was in such agonizing pain that I popped two Advils along with my homeopathic Arnica remedy. That ankle healed overnight - literally - and I won’t pretend it was all Arnica and not the Advil. (I have documented at length how dependent I was on Advil in my excruciating pre-menopausal years.)

Now, I’m not suggesting that you should meditate your way out of cancer or Alzheimer’s. Once you’re down the road of a serious illness, it can be difficult or impossible to overcome the system’s programming and take on an illness in a radical way, outside the system.

For most people, the time to swim isn’t when you’re drowning.

The fact is, many of us are deeply committed to dependence on the health care system, despite the evidence that it has failed to reverse the diseases that are actually killing most of us. Most people hit the urgent care or the doctor with every complaint, small or large, and do exactly what that doctor says, take every pill he prescribes, and undergo every procedure he orders. That’s what I did for most of my life.

But what we don’t often stop and consider is that this instant symptom suppression system robs us of the opportunity to let our bodies finish what they’re trying to do - more complete healing. Almost all medical systems older than a few hundred years - such as Ayurvedic, Traditional Chinese and homeopathic frameworks teach insistently that when we suppress symptoms, they burrow down into a deeper organ system than they started, creating more significant illness. Eczema turns into asthma, which turns into an autoimmune condition and similar patterns.

It’s also how we got to a state where half the population are medicated just to get through the day. One in four of us are on three drugs or more. And about a seventh of us are on five or more, according to the CDC. Even more heartbreaking is the impact on children - almost a third of school-aged kids now have a chronic illness.

We spend more on our failing “health care” system than any country in the history of humanity. A report put out by a Johns Hopkins research team (full disclosure, I’m also a co-author) revealed that almost half - HALF - of taxpayer money goes to health care programs.

Now some of us genuinely believe the system is the only thing keeping us alive - a drug cocktail, a surgery, a procedure that’s holding something catastrophic at bay. Those people are not my primary audience here. And they may well be right.

Maybe the drugs, radiation, surgeries, stents, amputations, dialysis and organ transplants really and truly have saved their lives, once the health conditions requiring those responses were well established in the body. Many of them may have a good case to make.

Then there’s another set of people who wrongly credit medical treatments for saving their lives, but their bodies are healing in spite of the system’s interventions. And their minds are just as powerful as all human minds are, which means that their bodies might be responding to all this intervention, in part, because of that belief. (I wrote about that phenomenon here.)

I’m not interested in taking medical treatment away from anyone, nor am I trying to talk people out of what they think is (and what might actually be) critically important medical intervention. No. Instead, the more appropriate time for a radical mindset shift is before the system programming and all its interventions have their clutches too deeply into us. Before we’re totally dependent, either by virtue of reality or perception (or both).

We don’t need everyone’s buy-in to save America from health care insolvency.

If even 10 or 20 percent of Americans chose to opt out of the system whenever possible (like for non-urgent, non-life or limb threatening situations), that might be enough to change the fiscal and clinical trajectory our country is on.

What do I mean by “opt out of the system?”

There’s a continuum of system involvement.

First, let’s stipulate that when you have a life-threatening emergency, you should seek emergency stabilization, of course. But on the other end of the continuum, for most health conditions that arise, you can seek methods for healing outside the system. And in between, there’s the harm reduction approach, where you use the system when necessary - but the least harmful version possible.

Here’s the playbook in three parts:

1. Prevent illness by living like a human. We have species-specific requirements for food, hydration, sleep, movement, sunlight, contact with nature, tribal connection and spiritual practice. In this way we can minimize the health problems that arise in the first place.

2. Treat non-emergency health problems outside the conventional system, whenever possible (we will cover alternative options in Part 2 of this series).

3. When you truly need conventional medical care for non-emergencies, get it anywhere but a hospital system (more on that in Part 3 of this series).

Step One: Live Like a Human

A lot of our health problems arise because we don’t want to invest time, money and energy into our health. We live in a quick-fix, outsourced-authority, comfort-forward culture where if something bad happens in our life, we want some expert to turn it around as quickly and painlessly as possible.

That means that we a) “medicate” our problems away - so we don’t have to feel unpleasant feelings or think unpleasant thoughts. We do this with food, booze, sex, and escapist entertainment such as social media, TV, video games, porn. When the results of this stress suppression come for us, we b) medicate the problems created by our previous “medicating” our problems - we want a pill, a surgery, a life-hack.

But we already know that things that matter the most and that are the most valuable in life require major investments of time, energy and money.

Most of us have already bowed to this reality.

We worked our asses off in school or by paying dues on the job to get to a place where we can reliably pay our bills and achieve financial security. That security is worth the sacrifices we made and continue to make.

Another example is parenting. Having children, while it starts in a pretty fun way, will absolutely destroy you in ways you couldn’t have predicted. And most of us would do it again without blinking, because there is no greater value than children, their success and opportunities and the joy of grandchildren. Also, the bragging rights.

Many of us place a high premium on eternal life too - as well we should - after all, it’s a hell of a lot longer than our earthly life, pun intended. Many of us sacrifice mightily throughout life to pursue spiritual growth and fulfillment - through our time, money, and self-denial.

So why do we think that something as valuable as our health should require less? Part of the answer is that we’ve been gaslit by the white coat religious cult that they are the priests and they are the experts and they have the magical elixirs and that no one else on earth has any wisdom, expertise, or authority over your health except them. This is dangerous voodoo that will get you an early death.

First of all, no doctor cares about you even a fraction of how much you care about yourself.

Second, as we’ve documented extensively in this space, many doctors do a lot of quackery.

• “Don’t worry about that myocarditis, sleeves up, mate.”

• “Just take hormonal birth control for twenty years and that endometriosis definitely won’t ruin your fertility.”

• “Eggs are definitely bad for you.”

• “Don’t give your toddler peanut butter or he’ll get peanut allergies.”

• “Fetal monitoring definitely is associated with better birth outcomes.”

• “This surgery is definitely better than placebo effect.”

And on and on with many other lies, damn lies and other statistics.

And God forbid you end up in a hospital, where very little improves and you’re lucky to escape better off than you came in, if you escape at all. People often ask me, having been lobbied by all the health care special interests during my time in government, who the biggest Bond villains are in health care. It’s the so-called “nonprofit” hospital systems, not even close.

Third, the business model is aligned against our own priorities.

Most doctors and all hospitals are paid only when sick people show up for a visit. While I’m not saying that your doctor is out to get you, the entire health care industry does better when you’re sick, you’re sick for life, and they charge you high prices to do stuff. But you want to be healthy, to get better quickly when you’re sick, and to pay less. So these sets of values are mutually exclusive - only one can win.

The good news is - you have WAY more power than you think to avoid some of the most common illnesses that steal your quality of life.

As I mentioned earlier, we have species-specific requirements for food (real, not fake, found in nature, un-poisoned), hydration (un-poisoned), sleep (7-9 hrs), movement (way more than you are now), sunlight (in abundance starting in the morning, without glass between you), contact with nature (frequent), tribal connection (daily) and spiritual practice (consistent).

These are not optional. They aren’t “wellness tips.” They are the operating requirements of the human animal. Neglect them long enough and you will get sick. Stay sick long enough and you will die early. The medical system will be delighted to help you do both, at great expense to you and your estate.

The MAHA movement, including its policy agenda, is largely focused on this. To be honest, if this were all we all ever focused on, I would still call that a major win.

I’m a work in progress here, so don’t feel judged. I still drink Diet Coke too much - though regular readers will be proud that I no longer keep it in the house. Getting to sleep on time is still a struggle some nights. And well, I like Nutella, Ben and Jerry’s, and pizza way more than I feel comfortable admitting.

But since changing my mindset to take radical agency over my own health, many things have changed in my life. My biggest win has been figuring out how to stay disciplined with workouts - a lifelong struggle until my late 40s. And we now only bring organic food into our house, so our toxic exposure has been dramatically reduced.

You will have your own struggles and your own wins. But the mindset is everything here. Recognizing just how much of our health is in our control and choosing to guard that health as one of life’s greatest duties will change more than just your health - it’ll change your life.

Nota bene: there are so many conflicting and contradictory messages out there about food, hydration, movement, etc, that when you start to try to take control, you will be confused and won’t know exactly which philosophy to adopt. All I can say is to just start with what resonates and makes sense to you. As you experiment and are moving forward, it’s ok if your approach shifts over time - expect it, even.

(If you want help sorting through the noise, that’s what I’m here for!)

Book A Visit

Nobody’s coming to save us from Washington, DC. There’s no revolution to be found in your insurance card or your doctor’s office.

The real revolution is the moment you stop assuming your body is broken and start asking what it’s trying to tell you. The future of American health care system depends less on what that system does next than on what each of us does tomorrow morning.

I once had a colleague on a Senator’s staff with whom I shared a daily ritual.

Almost every afternoon, one of us would appear in the other’s doorway with the same expression that addicts probably recognize in each other instantly: you wanna go?

And off we’d march, through the marble hallways or circling the Capitol grounds, coffee in his hand, Diet Coke in mine, to enjoy what can only be described as an emotional cigarette break.

We complained.

About do-nothing staffers. Cowardly senators. Misguided activist groups. Reporters too lazy to figure out facts. Agency bureaucrats subverting oversight. Consultants whose messaging lost elections, and Congressional leadership whose corruption made good faith negotiations impossible.

We were very smart, you see. Everyone else was the problem.

At the time, I didn’t recognize these walks for what they were. I thought we were “processing.” I thought we were blowing off steam. But really, we were getting high.

Blame feels fantastic. Especially combined with genuine human connection - blaming loves company.

Politics runs on this fuel.

In Washington, one of my favorite exercises during policy debates was a game I called “demagogue it.” We would sit around asking: how will the other side distort this policy? How will they twist our motives? What’s the most emotionally devastating version of this argument?

And whenever I wanted to kill a bill, I would take a provision from it and imagine the absolutely most extreme and craven use of that authority and write a talking point accusing the bill author of having only that intention all along.

This works to win arguments and elections because the human brain is built for victim stories.

We instinctively organize the world into heroes, villains, and innocents. The problem is that once you start seeing yourself primarily as the innocent victim in the story of your life, you’ve already surrendered your ability to be the hero.

At some point, I realized something disturbing about those afternoon complaint walks.

The stories my colleague and I told each other were changing me.

People would frustrate me during the day, and then during our walk I’d construct a whole psychological profile for them. They weren’t just misguided; they were corrupt. They weren’t just difficult; they were malicious. They weren’t just limited; they were fundamentally defective people standing in the way of progress, success, justice, truth, or whatever noble thing I imagined myself pursuing at the moment.

This “othering” made it harder to collaborate, to connect, to feed the higher part of my soul or the other’s soul. Which robbed me of the kind of happiness that outlasts the victories or defeats of a given moment.

Every explanation for why my life or work was difficult rested on someone else’s failures.

If only they weren’t incompetent.
If only they weren’t corrupt.
If only they listened to me.
If only they changed.

I was assigning myself too much power and too little power at the same time. Too much power because I assumed I possessed the wisdom to fix everything - if only everyone listened. But far more important - this mindset gave me too little power because I was outsourcing my own effectiveness, peace, and happiness to the vagaries of other people that I couldn’t control.

This all sounds very silly and petty in the context of politics, where it’s obvious that I wasn’t actually a victim of anybody or anything. The more serious question is what to do with actual victimization.

Because real evil exists. Real injustice exists. People genuinely betray, abuse, neglect, exploit, humiliate, and wound each other, intentionally and unintentionally.

Think about children, for example, who suffer traumatic abuse and are removed from their homes. Then they might spend years suffering further inside systems supposedly designed to protect them. By the time the time they enter actual safety at some point, they could have a thousand legitimate reasons to rage at the world.

And some of that rage is necessary.

One of the cruelest effects of childhood trauma is that children often assume everything was their fault. To heal, they have to learn the truth - they were the victims, not the instigators. But there is a danger waiting on the other side of that awakening.

Once someone puts on the victim identity, it can be very difficult to take off. It becomes a convenient explanation for everything: why trust is risky, why discipline is cruel, why relationships fail, why self-control is unrealistic, or why self-destruction is inevitable. Why selfishness is your right, and sacrifice is for suckers.

Victimhood moves from being not just about what we experienced, but rather, who we are - the organizing principle of our entire identity.

And once that happens, every challenge we face gets re-framed as persecution. Obstacles are personal affronts rather than problems to solve. Failure is someone else’s fault.

This is one of the reasons I think our culture is becoming psychologically fragile in ways that no amount of material abundance can fix. We are teaching people to interpret suffering almost exclusively through the lens of blame. Social media is largely fueled by this mentality - take a gander at your favorite feed - you’ll notice that most of what’s viral is victim mindset:

Who caused this?
Who’s responsible?
Who should pay?

Now, those questions matter sometimes, of course; civilization requires accountability and justice. But there is another question that, in terms of our own individual story, matters so much more:

What now?

The secret to all power, all happiness, purpose and achievement is in the question: now that these things have happened, what do I do next?

There’s a concept in The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership - a deceptively simple, but radical book - that I found particularly powerful. The authors distinguish between those who view life as happening “to me” and those who trust that life is happening “for me.”

At first glance, that sounds absurdly simplistic. Offensive, even.

Was abuse “for” someone?
Was betrayal “for” someone?
Was death “for” someone?

No. Not in the simplistic Hallmark-card sense that people sometimes mean when they say “everything happens for a reason.”

It’s obviously a theological matter, but we Catholics do not hold that God delights in suffering, that tragedy is inherently good or that death is always a gift.

But I do know that I know that I know this to be true: once something has happened, the only thing that makes any difference at all is what you do next.

That’s the difference between continuing in defeat and helplessness or becoming great. Nobody who wallows in the past, ruminates on the wrongs of others, or the devastating circumstances of the present has a future that is strong, bold, brave, heroic.

Don’t you want to be the one who overcame instead of the one who was ruined? The only person who can make that choice for you is you. Because nobody dictates what you do next, regardless of any circumstance, except you.

That’s true even in the darkest prisons, where control over others is the rule.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, writing about the Soviet gulags, and Viktor Frankl, writing after Auschwitz, arrived at the same subversive conclusion: there is a dimension of human freedom no regime can fully extinguish. Frankl called it “the last of the human freedoms” - the ability to choose your own attitude in any given set of circumstances. Solzhenitsyn observed that, even in prison, where every external liberty had been stripped away, some men became spiritually smaller while others became larger.

St. Maximilian Kolbe, a Catholic priest also imprisoned at Auschwitz, volunteered to die in place of another prisoner at the same camp. In a place engineered to reduce human beings to terrified animals, witnesses described him leading prayers and comforting other condemned prisoners as they starved to death together.

These men weren’t saintly, inspirational and heroic because they changed their circumstances. Their circumstances remained hellish. Their stories are still retold and inspiring today because they understood that, even when all powers and freedoms seem to be stripped, we still have one left: the meaning we make of our suffering. The name we have for ourselves - “victim,” “victor,” or anything in between - is entirely and profoundly up to us.

Most of us don’t have such a hard task in front of us - not even traumatized foster children or most other innocents you can imagine. Our task - and theirs - is usually much more mundane: to look at today - the day in front of us - and take 100 percent responsibility for what we do with it and how we respond to what comes of it. To recognize that everything about what this day means in the story of our life is 100 percent ours to determine. Even if we’re fired today. Even if someone hurts someone we love today. Even if we’re given a diagnosis today.

I used to objectify all the other drivers on the road as out to kill me, hinder me, wrong me, or otherwise try my patience. I looked at the cars as my enemies, obstacles to where I was trying to go. In other words, every time I got on the road, I was deep in victim mindset. If I was on a wide-open country road, with the windows down and the sun on my face, singing at the top of my lungs, I was happy and content. Anything that deviated from that utopia, I interpreted as a grievous injustice and infringement on my God-given dignity and I reveled in feeling offended.

After learning the “to-me” v. “for-me” framework, I decided to adopt the mindset that everyone on the road was there for me.

I started repeating a mantra: “everyone deserves acceptance.” Your mantra might be different - that was just the one that helped me. It changed my relationship with driving from one of frustration to one of embrace. If I was held up, I had more time for podcasts, audiobooks, prayer, or singing the Indigo Girls at the top of my lungs like I did in high school. I found that I started welcoming traffic or slower speed limits because I got more “me time” in this mindset. Traffic, delays, distance - they were no longer happening to me, they were happening for me.

My work building health plans for employers tests this “new Katy” every day: firing insurance carriers, PBMs, and quarterbacking a million vendors, daily fire-drills, vendor mishaps, client concerns, and a fifth of the economy trying to burn down my business model. A few years ago, I was operating on the sleep deprivation and low-grade fight-or-flight that the victim mindset bathes in. I told myself that this is why I was successful - the only way - I was the only consultant that cared this much and so that’s why clients should hire me.

When I intentionally renounced the victim mindset, I started recognizing that everyone was doing their best in an imperfect business. I recognized that the real value I delivered for my clients wasn’t perfection but rather, sophisticated problem-solving built on trust - a commitment that the problem can and will be solved, that solutions will appear. That the work our team performs is wrapped in love for our client’s workforce like we love our own family. And that I couldn’t control everything that happened to our clients, but by changing my own mindset, I could relax emotionally - knowing that whatever came at our team every day, we would face it with best-in-class commitment, collaboration, and service. Victory doesn’t always look like the bumper sticker I’d like it to be, but I see more and more of it every day.

One mindset creates anxiety and paralysis. The other creates agency and purpose. Which one feels like where you’d like to live?

That doesn’t mean the second mindset hurts less. In fact, it often hurts more initially, because it forces you to relinquish one of the ego’s favorite narcotics: righteous helplessness.

Victimhood is seductive because it relieves us of responsibility. If my failures are someone else’s fault, then I no longer have to confront my own fear, laziness, cowardice, bitterness, pride, impulsiveness, or lack of discipline.

I can remain exactly where I am forever and call it justice or fate.

But there is no real power there. There is only permanent dependence on the repentance, apology, punishment, or transformation of other people. And if your peace depends on that, you are handing other people the keys to your nervous system.

When bad stuff is happening, there’s no way out but through. Nothing will change what happened, whether just now or long ago. The only choice we have is what we do next. If we blame someone for why we can’t do this or that next, then the only result is that we’ve disempowered ourselves. There’s no winner there. You haven’t won the argument. You haven’t been vindicated. You haven’t gotten back at them. You’ve only hamstrung yourself. You’ve only let the people who hurt you yesterday continue to ruin your today and your tomorrow.

The older I get, the more convinced I become that the secret to life is largely a head game.

The victim mindset is low vibration (the same frequency as shame and fear) and I choose not to waste time there anymore - it doesn’t serve me or anyone else.

That’s why the victim mindset is so spiritually corrosive. There’s nothing remotely inspirational about it - especially to yourself. It’s a salve to the bruised ego, but at the price of actual change.

Even when your grievances are legitimate - especially when they are - building your identity around them guarantees that the people who harmed you continue their power over your life long after the original injury occurred.

Meanwhile, life is moving on.

Your children are growing closer or more distant.
Your marriage is either deepening or eroding.
Your gifts are being developed or buried.
Your body is aging.
Your time is running out.

People who choose radical agency, who focus only on their own responsibility and their own contribution in every situation, their own next step, no matter what came before, are fabulously dangerous and subversive.

Those who believe they can alchemize suffering into wisdom or purpose become invincible. Ungovernable. Mastered, yes, but only by themselves, to serve their own goals and highest ends.

Where are you falling into a victim mindset?

If I do my own inventory, it’s probably social media and body image. When you identify your traps, you’re already halfway there. Start naming the people and circumstances who are to blame for those areas of your life. Then, take a few long, deep breaths, close your eyes, and ask yourself:

“Recognizing who and what my ego wants to blame, nonetheless, what do I do next?”

Your highest self will whisper the answer.

Be brave!!

We recently observed World Homeopathy Awareness Week.

What the bleep is homeopathy, you ask? Good question.

It’s a wild, wonderful world of medicine that you’ve probably heard of, but never quite known what it is.

But before we get into what it is, let’s set the stage a bit.

Conventional medicine is based on the premise that our bodies respond best to biochemical inputs - drugs, food, mechanical intervention like surgery.

But you already know that there’s more to the story than that.

Conventional medicine sometimes admits it too - MRIs are based on identifying resonance patterns using big magnets on the body, for example.

Women’s menstrual cycles seem to sync up in ways that science hasn’t figured out.

Tuning forks interact with each other - strike one and an un-struck fork across the room will start to vibrate. Move the fork into the 6-foot energy field that surrounds a human, and the sound will actually change.

Water is one of the most responsive substances on earth to resonance and frequency. Play a tone next to water, and then examine it microscopically - the molecules have arranged themselves into amazing patterns.

One of the most radical sciences being conducted today is the work of water researcher (and whisperer) Veda Austin.

She places petri dishes with thin layers of water on top of photographs or paper with words on them, or plays music for them, or even directs thoughts at them. And then she throws the petri dishes in the freezer “with the peas and carrots,” as she puts it. The water flash-freezes into designs that actually reflect - sometimes in creative and wild ways - the influence that was given. Sometimes the frozen design mimics the picture it was in contact with. Sometimes it answers a question. It’s wild. And thousands of people have been taught Veda’s technique and are replicating it around the world.

What does all this have to do with homeopathy?

To many people, the word “homeopathic” is simply a synonym for “holistic” or “natural” or “alternative,” as in - pursuing homeopathic care instead of or in addition to taking prescription drugs or getting surgery.

But homeopathy has a very specific meaning relating to a very specific scientific framework.

Homeopathy is the science of how the frequency, resonance, and energy of a thing interact with water, how the water takes on that energetic footprint and carries it into our bodies to address symptoms or conditions that are also caused by the thing.

More than two centuries ago, a German physician named Samuel Hahnemann (n. 1755) had grown increasingly unimpressed with the bloodletting and mercury poisoning that his profession called “treatment.” (Raise your hand if you can relate.) He began paying the bills by translating medical texts.

He was translating a book by William Cullen about cinchona bark (the source of quinine) and its usefulness for malaria. Cullen speculated its effectiveness was due to its bitterness and tonic effects on the stomach. Hahnemann didn’t buy it and decided to perform an experiment.

He took cinchona bark himself as a tincture - not in the form it was used as a medicine, but in high doses heated in alcohol the way tinctures are made. After a few days, he developed symptoms that were a lot like malaria: fever, chills, weakness, palpitations, throbbing headache. The symptoms came on in waves - similar to the cyclical waves of a malaria episode.

His imagination was sparked.

Hahnemann’s hypothesis was that “like cures like.” He speculated that substances that cause certain symptoms in large doses in healthy people are actually nature’s perfect remedy (in very small doses) for healing those symptoms in sick people.

He went on a frenzied bender to “prove” a bunch of remedies - systematically dosing himself and other healthy volunteers with every substance he could find. The volunteers would dose themselves with a form of the substance - powders, infusions (like tea), extracts and tinctures - and record exactly which symptoms developed. These detailed “symptom profiles” included not only physical ailments of the body, but emotional, psychological, and personality changes.

Once the symptom profile was developed, Hahnemann and his disciples started treating patients with similar profiles. The problem was that the patients’ symptoms often temporarily intensified. He took that to mean that the remedy was working, but too aggressively.

So he began diluting the substances in water and alcohol. He wasn’t trying to make the medicine weaker; he was trying to make it gentler. But he discovered something amazing - the medicines actually worked more effectively and more quickly - the more diluted they became, but without any of the harsher effects.

Each dilution was accompanied by vigorously shaking the container, or striking it, so as to get the substance’s essence into the water. Over time, this process rendered less and less of the measurable substance and more of the frequency or resonance of the substance in the water.

Hahnemann called this process “potentiation” - the idea that a substance’s energy or essence became more powerful the more it was diluted.

Carrying these liquid remedies had some practical distribution problems. The liquids were hard to dose properly, and each remedy had a bunch of different dilutions to be used based on the specifics of the patient’s case. Since each remedy had such a unique symptom profile, and there were hundreds of remedies, Hahnemann realized that carrying around a bunch of liquid jars didn’t make sense. They could easily degrade or break, and it just wasn’t practical.

So he took the technique that was commonly used to deliver medicine at the time - sugar pills doused in a liquid medicine - and he used them for his own remedies.

He doused each pellet with the diluted remedy and, voila, he had little vials of dozens of doses that were much easier to schlep around.

The pellets were also much easier for the patients to take. They could put a few under the tongue until they dissolved, or crush them in a glass of water and drink a few sips.

Babies and toddlers, and even pets and livestock, could get the doses in their water or crushed over their food. Even crops riddled with pests or fungus could be treated by crushing the pellets into the water sprayed on them.

The name of Hahnemann’s framework was Greek for “similar” (homoios) and “suffering” (pathos) - based on the “like cures like” foundation. His disciples grew as the remedies’ undeniable success became more and more recognized. He published his first paper in 1796, and homeopathy spread to the elites of Europe at first, much preferred by patients to the brutal techniques of conventional medicine of their day (and our day too). Hahnemann eventually moved to Paris and gained broad acclaim in the early 19th century.

In the U.S., homeopathy was widely adopted during the same period, with the American Institute of Homeopathy - one of the first medical societies - founded in 1844. By the late 1800s, there were more than 20 homeopathic medical schools, over 100 homeopathic hospitals, and thousands of homeopathic practitioners.

Embraced by European royal families and the wealthiest American families, homeopathy enjoyed legitimacy and scientific credibility and, in many areas, the use of homeopathic medicine rivaled or even exceeded conventional medicine. Homeopaths were reported to have lowered mortality rates during outbreaks of cholera, yellow fever and typhus.

In other words, homeopathy wasn’t fringe, and it wasn’t “woo.” It was mainstream - a parallel medical system.

Until, of course, the same villain that went after naturopathy - the medicine of using natural methods (such as nutrition and herbs) to restore health - turned its sights on homeopathy: Big Oil.

The Rockefellers and Carnegies got together to fund medicines derived from petroleum byproducts, in league with Big Chemical, led by Bayer. Bayer was gearing up to marry the conglomerate that manufactured the gas for the Holocaust’s slaughter, but they also led the way at turning petroleum-based products into standardized “medicines” that could be patented.

(When I say “patent,” you say “profit.” Patent! PROFIT!)

Many of these medicines were merely snake oil, and a good number of people were used to the more affordable homeopathic remedies and herbal naturopathic remedies, but nature can’t be patented as easily. So the Bigs put out the Flexner Report in 1910, which got wide acclaim for trashing all the medical schools where the curricula and treatments being taught weren’t “standardized” according to pharmaceutical and biomedical laboratory-grade standards endorsed by the Carnegie Foundation and funded by the Rockefellers.

They also funded what was then a small organization called the American Medical Association, and helped it grow and discredit all types of medical doctors and schools that didn’t follow the pharmaceutical model.

Within a few decades, most of the homeopathic and naturopathic medical schools had closed. Medical licensure boards emerged in states, using their power to discredit and muzzle these practitioners in favor of their white-coated, pharmaceutical-prescribing version of medicine that we all know so well today.

And yet. Even as homeopathy was pushed out of medical schools and hospitals, it never disappeared from law.

In 1938, the FDA’s founding legislation explicitly recognized the U.S. Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia - giving homeopathic remedies formal recognition in the U.S. regulatory system that still exists today.

(This is thanks to Senator Royal Copeland, a homeopathic physician, who fought to protect homeopathy from the pharma mafia. Wish he were still around today).

Around the world, homeopathy is the second largest medical system after conventional medicine. Countries such as India formally recognize homeopathy, and there are hundreds of homeopathic medical schools there and hundreds of thousands of practitioners. In the UK, homeopathy has been used by the royal family for generations, and it is still respected there, as well as in France and Germany.

If homeopathy were as irrelevant as its critics claim, it wouldn’t have survived for more than 200 years, spread across continents and embedded itself in national health care systems.

Homeopathy isn’t fringe - it’s global, and in some countries, it’s just called medicine.

So How Does It Work?

Typically, homeopathy is not looking to suppress symptoms. It views symptoms as your body’s effort to do something important. Fever is the body’s attempt to speed something up - metabolism, circulation, immune activity - and to restructure water molecules in your system. Inflammation is designed to create a watery environment - since healing often occurs in fluid environments - to summon the body’s tools of healing to the scene of the crime, and also to create an internal cast that cushions the injured tissue while it recovers. Pain protects that cast - by keeping you from moving it while it’s doing its job of healing.

Homeopaths will tell you that their job is to help your body move through that healing process, including any symptoms with more ease and speed than it otherwise would.

The remedies interact with what Hahnemann called the “vital force” - the dynamic intelligence that animates the body and coordinates its response to stress, injury, degradation, and threats. In today’s modern assault on all things human - our indoor, fluorescent-lit existence, low-grade (or not-so-low-grade) fight-or-flight, poisoned food and water, and disconnection from the sun, from the earth, from God and from our tribe - our vital force is often anemic at best.

Homeopathic remedies are designed to engage the vital force by exposing it to the energy or resonance of some unexpected substance that stirs it up and recruits it back into action of healing and maintaining homeostasis - the perfect balance of health.

Testimonies abound of patients struggling with infertility, autism, eczema, snake bites, sprained ankles - and every other possible malady that nature contrives - being improved or mitigated under the influence of a homeopathic regimen. (NOTE: this is not medical advice, and the wonderful thing about homeopathy is that it doesn’t interfere with conventional medical care that you can obviously and many times should obviously seek as well).

The wild thing is that when a homeopath is called to the scene, very often, the remedy chosen first heals things that the body/soul/vital force actually considers more important than the symptoms that are annoying the patient.

My own story is similar - I engaged a homeopath to help with some minor but persistent symptoms, and it turned into a months-long series of remedies that unlocked massive healing of my wounded femininity (which I’ve written about quite a bit here and here), before ever getting around to the symptoms that started the process. My body-mind intelligence knew that was a far bigger priority, and it was right.

So Naturally, The FDA is Trying to Cancel Homeopathy

As I described above, homeopathy has technically been recognized in U.S. law since 1938, but in recent years, that protection has started to erode.

In 1988, FDA laid out a framework whereby it recognized homeopathic remedies as drugs that technically should go through the regular drug process (involving expensive safety and effectiveness trials and extensive FDA review and oversight), BUT that the agency would choose to exercise its enforcement discretion instead, and embrace a posture of non-enforcement. The guidance stated that the remedies could avoid enforcement if certain criteria were met - namely that they were listed in the U.S. Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia, they weren’t mislabeled, contaminated, and didn’t claim to heal serious conditions if sold over-the-counter.

This wasn’t perfect, but it was a reasonable stand-off. But then the Obama FDA, starting in 2015, held hearings about whether homeopathic remedies were “safe,” had sufficient “evidence,” and were labeled properly. By December of 2017, the Trump FDA - right under my nose as the White House policy lead for FDA - replaced the 1988 framework with a new regime.

I note for the record that I did not receive this guidance in draft form as part of a formal review process, and I damned well should have for such a significant policy change. More deep state shenanigans.

In any case, the 2017 draft guidance declared the remedies unapproved drugs, with a priority to go after and shut down those remedies that were targeted for serious conditions (like cancer), vulnerable populations like the elderly or infants (the ones most likely to benefit). In other words - the priority was the remedies that are most likely to interrupt Big Pharma’s profit drivers: blockbuster cancer drugs and the Medicare patient pool.

FDA finalized this guidance and withdrew the 1988 “safe harbor” policy in 2019 - after I had left the White House.

Advocacy groups like Americans for Homeopathy Choice argue that this new framework isn’t outright criminalization, but more of a slow squeeze. Because once you declare homeopathic remedies to be unapproved drugs requiring approval, then you’re forcing billion-dollar clinical trials for remedies that can’t be patented and barely make a profit.

I would argue that homeopathic remedies are still legal, ever since 1938. But now the FDA is going to decide if they’re “risky” and come after the ones they feel like coming after.

But let me point out the absolute farce:

There is no active ingredient left in most homeopathic remedies.

(Remember the dilution, and the shaking, and the dilution some more, and then more shaking, on and on until there’s only the “essence” of the thing and not the actual thing left in the water?)

So how can water with no active ingredient, dropped onto a sugar pill, be dangerous?

It can’t. This is why homeopathy is so safe for use. Pregnant women can use homeopathy. Newborn babies. People taking a bunch of prescription meds - water and sugar don’t interact with other drugs.

This has been the basis of FDA’s whining about labeling - they argue that any claim that there’s actually a substance in there is a lie. And that any claim that it treats a disease is therefore also a lie. Because it’s sugar and water.

So they can hardly then complain that these products are somehow “risky” at the same time.

FDA needs to pick a side - either these products have some active ingredient in them with a risk profile, which requires safety studies, or they don’t, which requires caution about marketing claims. But you can’t demand BOTH safety studies to prove the effectiveness of some active ingredient AND caution about marketing claims because there’s no active ingredient.

The truth is, at most potencies that are used, such as 12C, 30C or 100C, the dilution is past what’s known as Avogadro’s number, 6 x 10²³, which is the threshold dilution of a substance after which there is considered to be unmeasurable/untraceable substance left. For lower-level potencies such as 1X (where the substance is 1/10th of the liquid) or perhaps even 10X (where it’s 1 part per ten billion), I might understand a risk-based approach. But most homeopaths are using the C remedies or even greater dilutions, and the over-the-counter, first-aid type remedies are almost always those levels. So maybe FDA just needs to wake up and put the kibosh on the deep state.

If you’ve made it this far, you might see that homeopathy is not what most people think it is. And you might be asking yourself: why have I never heard any of this before?

Because once you start to understand how homeopathy works - and even more importantly, how to use it - it’s glaringly obvious how incomplete our current model of health really is.

And more than that, you step into a completely different relationship with your body, your health, and your family’s care. One that is less dependent, less reactive, and far more intuitive and self-directed.

Behind this paywall, I’m going to show you what that looks like in practice - how to find a homeopath, what happens in a session, how remedies are chosen, what the course of treatment generally involves, and how to begin using homeopathy yourself for first aid and everyday situations. I’ll also walk you through how to get involved in protecting access to this kind of care, starting with supporting Americans for Homeopathy Choice.

Nobody is coming to save your health.

Paid subscribers get the play-by-play for how to incorporate the hidden treasure of homeopathy into your life, and use it to take back your health - and your family’s - from the people who were never going to fix it for you.

Let’s get down to brass tacks.

When Should I Use Homeopathy?

Read more

Hey Everyone!

I’m trying something new today.

is a coach, educator, and author who has spent years thinking about what it takes to raise a son in a culture that has largely forgotten how. He is also generous, thoughtful, and willing to answer hard questions head-on, which is why I sent him seven of them.

You may not agree with every line and, of course, that’s okay. Given the disastrous breakdown in family structure, and the screen-ification, pornification and weed-ification of our environment, there are no easy answers for how to navigate this kind of soul-crushing, vitality-draining, degenerate culture.

One area we didn’t touch on was the impact of economic factors - mass immigration that competes for our sons’ jobs, the flight of manufacturing to Mexico and China forcing those without college degrees into waiting tables instead of high-paying union jobs, and inflation that makes buying a car or home much more difficult than it was for we GenXers.

My husband was born in Italy and he speaks often about how European adult children often live with their parents indefinitely because there is no affordable housing or fair-paying jobs, and interest rates keep everyone in real estate their family has owned for generations. Are we turning into Europe? There are still affordable cities in the U.S., but an economy that forces children to leave their hometowns and never return, permanently severing young parents from the family structures that make economic survival and children’s flourishing easier is not quite the American Dream as advertised. And is it only getting worse as AI’s devastation is only starting to transform the job market?

Or maybe this is all just sophisticated excuse-making, with my maternal empathy undermining the hero’s journey for my son and everyone’s son. Unclear. But the need for the father’s voice to push the bird out of the nest and learn to fly has never been more urgent.

What I love about this piece is that Travis said “yes” to a real conversation, and that is exactly the kind of exchange AllBetter is down for.

Read it. Consider it. Argue with it. These are the dialogues we can’t afford to stop having.

But first - a note from Travis:

I recently had the opportunity to work with . While most people who seek to tap into my expertise throw softballs, Katy did not. She fired questions at me like Nolan Ryan fastballs: precise, relentless, and impossible to dodge. I had to think, dig deep, and work harder than usual to respond.

I loved every second of it.

Her insight and creativity are extraordinary. While I asked questions that required reflection, she responded with a beautiful, experiential art form that revealed her depth and perspective. You can check out that article here. She has a rare ability to challenge while inspiring, to push you without making you defensive, and to make even the most difficult conversation feel electrifying.

As part of our effort to understand the world we are trying to improve, here are her questions and my answers. This is the kind of work that truly matters.

Enjoy,

Travis

The Interview:

1. Is it too late for a family that is in the classic masculinity death spiral - they’re letting their early-20s son live in their basement while he works a minimum wage job he doesn’t like and doesn’t respect himself, and he smokes weed and plays video games - is it too late for them to turn things around and there’s no other option but to just kick him out? If the answer is yes, are there situations where the answer changes (trauma history, mental illness, suicidality)?

Short answer is yes. It is too late for parents to have a marked impact on a young man if he’s already at that stage. The most formative time has certainly passed. There is good news, thankfully. Massive and meaningful changes are still possible. The difference is that a young man is going to have to choose to make changes on his own.

Though the active parental influence has largely gone away, the passive and lasting influence remains. The teaching of right and wrong, the boundaries, the structure, the worldview, they’re all still in there. This is the time when he must go out into the world and try his own version of life (maybe that’s what you taught him, maybe he wants to try his own deal) and see if his worldview works. He will make mistakes. The more rebellious among us will make LOTS of mistakes. This is good! Those mistakes are how we learn the right and wrong of the world. The structure of our culture. The boundaries of life.

Men are built genetically to conserve their energy for battle. This is why men are so good at ‘vegging out.’ If things are easy, men will want to enjoy that, since battle can pop up at a moment’s notice. This being the case, forcing the lethargic young male to leave the nest and make his own way is the only answer here. Unless your long-term plan is to have him at home indefinitely, he’s got to go. It’s better if it’s his idea, but it’s necessary either way. (note #3 below) He must undertake the hero’s journey, for better or for worse. To some extent, you’re hindering that by providing comfort. And that’s regardless of underlying factors.

2. There seems to be a resurgence of young conservative families arguing for keeping their sons in the home in young adulthood rather than the tough-love, kick them out, sink or swim approach we all used to take. Do you think that’s wise, dangerous, a countercultural cope, or excuse-making?

I rarely give my opinion on topics like this, but here I agree wholeheartedly with the research. Parents are keeping their sons at home, and the reason is not the sons. It is the parents.

Modern parenting has swung so far toward comfort that it has lost its balance. Everything is softened, cushioned, and extended. The kind of firm, fair fathering that once pushed young men toward independence has faded so much it is almost unrecognizable. In many cases, parents are choosing what feels easier emotionally instead of what actually prepares their children for reality.

Because yes, independence is hard. Work is hard. The world will knock you down. But that is not new. The same parents enabling this situation did not grow up living indefinitely in their own parents’ basements. So what changed?

At some point, good parenting requires discomfort. When there is nothing pulling young people forward, there has to be something pushing them out. That tension between challenge and opportunity is what drives growth.

You can run toward something, or you can run away from something. Historically, young people have done both. They move toward opportunity and away from stagnation. When neither force exists, they stay exactly where they are.

That is not a failure of the child alone. It is a failure to launch, and the launchpad matters. Tough love is your savior here. He won’t like it, but you don’t need his permission to want your home back. He will thank you when he has his own family.

3. Given that fatherlessness is so epidemic now, what do you recommend to the single mom with sons to help them get “fathered” and mitigate the damage? The answer used to be Boy Scouts, but…

Go back to the Hero’s Journey and look at step four. A boy does not become a man on his own. He is shaped by men who demand something from him. It starts with his father. That is the standard setter. Later, the world reinforces it through other men or institutions like the military, police, or fire service. They do not coddle him. They correct him.

That is where alignment happens. When his actions match his values, he becomes dangerous in the right way. Focused. Disciplined. Reliable. When they do not, he turns into a contradiction. All talk, no spine. He knows what is right and still avoids it. That kind of man stays stuck, blaming everything except the gap between what he says and what he does.

Now remove the father.

You do not get the same outcome. You get confusion. You get delay. You get a young man who has never been forced to carry weight, never been checked hard enough to grow. The data backs it, but you do not even need the data. You can see it. Direction drops. Discipline drops. Accountability disappears.

This is where people get uncomfortable, so they lie about it.

A single mother cannot replicate a father. Not with love. Not with effort. Not with sacrifice. Those are not the same thing as pressure, example, and authority from a man who has already walked the path. When that is missing, something critical is missing. That gap does not magically fill itself.

And yes, choices matter. Removing a father from the home is not a neutral act. It is a decision with predictable consequences. Pretending otherwise is not compassion. It is denial.

If the damage is already done, then the only option is to patch the hole with whatever structure you can find:

· Male coaches who demand discipline

· Male teachers who do not lower standards

· Male clergy who hold the line

· Male neighbors who correct behavior

· Uncles who step in and stay consistent

· Older brothers who force accountability

These are substitutes, not solutions. They can help, but they cannot fully replace what was supposed to be there from the beginning.

And let’s be honest about one more thing. Mom’s new boyfriend is not the answer. It is instability. It teaches confusion, not discipline. It creates more problems than it solves. And the statistics on Sexual Assault from a step parent are staggering.

None of this is complicated. Hard truth rarely is. If you remove structure, you get chaos. If you remove accountability, you get drift. If you remove the father, you make the path harder and the odds worse.

You can ignore that. A lot of people do. Reality does not care.

4. What is the most powerful thing a mother can do or say to her son at age 10? 15? 20?

At ten years old, a boy needs a few simple things. I love you. You are safe. I believe in you. That is the foundation. To some extent, this is the best mothering for the duration of his life.

After that, words start to matter less. What he watches matters more.

How his mother treats his father becomes one of the most important lessons he will ever absorb. Not what she says about respect, but what she shows him every day. Boys do not learn relationships from lectures. They learn from patterns.

By the time he reaches high school, the concrete is hardening. At that point, his father becomes the primary model for masculinity. Not theory. Not slogans. Behavior. Discipline. Restraint. Responsibility. Whether the father is perfect or not does not matter. The example is still being taken in.

And the mother is still teaching, whether she realizes it or not.

Because how she treats the father becomes the blueprint. That is what her son will recognize as normal. That is what he will tolerate. That is what he will expect from a woman later in life.

Respect shown becomes respect expected. Disrespect shown becomes disrespect accepted. You do not get to opt out of that lesson. It is happening whether anyone acknowledges it or not.

5. What are your thoughts on the decline of sperm count worldwide, reportedly half what it was in 1970 and dropping by one percent a year? Causes? Solutions?

I have read the work of Dr. Anthony G. Jay, and none of this is coming out of nowhere. Hormonal imbalance is part of it. A culture that centers everything around comfort and approval is part of it. Plastic plays a role. Hormonal birth control in the water supply is a factor. Sedentary habits and garbage diets are part of it. Fatherlessness is the biggest part of it.

And here is the reality people do not want to admit. None of these exist in isolation. They stack. They reinforce each other. Weak inputs create weaker outputs, and then people act surprised by the result.

You do not get strong, disciplined, grounded men out of an environment that avoids hardship, rejects structure, and replaces standards with excuses. That is the bad news.

The good news is even simpler, and it is why there are no real excuses left. Every single one of these factors is, to a large extent, controllable. You can fix what you eat. You can move your body. You can reject passive consumption and build something instead. You can seek out discipline, even if it was never given to you. You can find male mentors, even if your father was ejected from your life.

None of that is easy. That is the point. The environment may be working against you, but it is not absolute. At some point, it comes down to a decision. Stay shaped by it or start pushing back against it.

6. I recently wrote an article on the effects of school on young men. Do you think boys should go to school? If so, what kind? If not, how should they learn whatever you think is minimally necessary?

I’ve written lots of articles on this myself, as you know. My degrees and much of my adult life are rooted in education. I am not guessing about this. I have seen it up close as a teacher, coach, school board member, and mentor.

There are school structures that engage boys, challenge them, and actually produce results. Not just for boys, but for girls too. The difference is they demand something. They build discipline, ownership, and competence instead of managing behavior and calling it success.

Look at what Apogee Schools is doing. Look at Matt Beaudreau. He is proving, in real time, that boys respond when expectations are high and excuses are not tolerated. I’m proud to know this guy. He’s crushing it, and public education is ignoring him right into their own obsolescence.

So this is not a mystery. It is a choice.

Public education, as it stands, is outdated and heavily tilted toward compliance over challenge. It rewards passivity, punishes risk, and then wonders why boys check out. Call it what it is. It is a system that has been softened to the point where many boys do not recognize themselves in it.

And when boys disengage, people blame the boys instead of the structure that failed to reach them. At some point, that excuse falls apart.

There are models that work. There are people doing it right. The only difference is they are willing to step outside a system that refuses to adapt.

And for the young man who did not get the fathering he needed, this matters even more. Because now he is not just learning academics. He is trying to build a foundation that should have been laid years earlier.

That is a harder road. But it is still a road. The question is whether he is placed in an environment that demands he walk it, or one that quietly lets him sit still.

When it comes to what a man actually needs, hoping he “figures it out” in a culture that avoids discipline and rejects structure is not a plan. That is neglect. Boys are no longer guaranteed the guidance they once had. Habits, standards, and real-world skills are no longer absorbed by osmosis.

That is why I wrote my second book in 2022, Ideal Man: Reviving Masculinity. It is a direct, comprehensive guide of time-tested habits every young man should pursue. Clear expectations. Real standards. Practices that build competence, discipline, and self-respect.

This is not optional. The young men who embrace it will separate themselves from the drift of entitlement and passivity. Those who ignore it will continue to struggle in a world that rewards readiness, not excuses.

7. What is the role of spirituality on the development of men? Is the answer different if the question is religion instead of spirituality? Is there a danger of feminization of faith on the souls of men?

No man can reach his potential without something larger to serve. It is built into him. Purpose beyond self is what shapes action, discipline, and endurance. Without it, strength becomes aimless and drive becomes frustration.

There is a clear difference between faith and religion, and that distinction matters. My own experience in this area may be unusual, but I own it. It has shaped me, and I am proud of it. I even recorded on this solo some time ago, exploring that tension.

Spirituality is personal, but its effect is universal. When a man aligns his actions with something greater than himself, everything else (habits, choices, resilience, etc.) falls into place. Without it, all the skills and discipline in the world remain partial, unfocused, and incomplete.

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Final thoughts

Thoughtful discussion is how communities actually think. Travis showed up, answered every question without flinching, and gave us something real to work with.

Thank you, Travis, for the generosity of a full-throated answer.

Now it’s your turn. Tell me where he’s right. Tell me where he’s wrong. Tell me what I missed. Tell me what you think of this format. The comments are open.

Thanks for reading,

Katy

I am grateful to for publishing my latest piece for his audience. Travis’ work is deeply paternal - part coach, part drill sergeant, part philosopher, and all with the heart of a lion. I commend it to all of you. This article was born of questions he sent me after reading my article on boys and young men. His questions were about cultural/societal issues related to women, modernity, feminism and such. They were reasoned, linear, logical… masculine. My answers, try as they could, showed up markedly different, as this article. Thanks, Travis, and hope you all enjoy the reprint!

Visit Travis Neville Author Here

“EARTH, SWALLOW ME WHOLE.”

The 13-year old had been dancing in her basement to a Go-Gos record, cranked up to 11, holding her hairbrush-microphone, singing her heart out (as one does) - fantasizing about adoring crowds, wishing they could be as radiant and famous as she was, and singing along to the words they’d memorized.

And then she heard it. The snickering. She froze at the sight of their laughing faces. And then, they ran away to tell the world.

The neighborhood boys - the meanest ones - had been watching her performance. The basement window near the ceiling was ground-level outside the house, and provided a perfect view into her daydream.

Little did she know that one day she would sing in acappella groups and recording studios, dance at salsa conventions in Puerto Rico, get paid to sing at weddings and funerals and professional sports matches. She never could have imagined that she’d give keynotes, appear on podcasts (what are those?), or fly on Air Force One. That she would be confident in her own skin one day, with nothing to prove.

No. All she knew was that the entire neighborhood was laughing at her now. Her cheeks on fire with humiliation, the sweat beads forming on her forehead, she searched for any closet she could curl up into and never emerge again.

“Earth, swallow me whole!”

Up to that point in my life (you knew it was your humble correspondent, right?), I had already learned pretty well to suppress the girlish tendency to twirl in pretty dresses and coquettishly cry out “look at me!”

I blamed my body for why that universal feminine instinct had to be smothered.

I was pudgy. I had fat cheeks and freckles. Thin, mousey-brown hair that, without the spiral perm I was sporting, would have been neither curly nor straight. And even if I looked cute in girly, pretty clothes, which I didn’t, there weren’t any such clothes in a decade filled with neon colors, shoulder pads and stiff raised collars.

I wasn’t nearly the ogre that I thought I was, I mean, apart from the perm. But after years of being picked last on the team, called fat, never being the object of anyone’s junior high crush, I had concluded that being feminine wasn’t in the cards for me. No one would ever stop at the sight of my beauty, climb up a castle tower to rescue me, draw his sword to defend my honor, bring me flowers, buy me diamonds, or any number of other things I thought happened to girls who were better at being girls than I was.

So I took whatever feminine impulses nature had cruelly planted in me and I tied them up and shoved them down into the cellar of my soul. I only took them out for a walk (or a dance) when I was alone (or so I thought) in the cellar of my house with the Go-Gos.

And that’s how I found myself curled up in a shame-spiral that day. Because boys had seen me trying to be feminine. Twirling prettily in a sparkling outfit on a stage that only I could see. Receiving the admiration of crowds conjured up only in my mind.

And that was the last of her that anyone ever saw again. Feminine Katy.

The cope had already started before that moment, of course - be smart enough or funny enough to distract anyone who might otherwise be tempted to make fun of or reject me for not being good enough in the feminine ways. Now the cope was all there was.

It didn’t help that all of society was out to kill the feminine too. This was the era of Gloria Steinem and Geraldine Ferraro, of Sandra Day O’Connor and Margaret Thatcher. Anything men could do, we could do better. The war on womanhood in my basement was merely the micro to the macro narrative playing out around the world.

Femininity was weak. Femininity was vulnerable. Femininity was dangerous. Femininity went underground - in my life and in the culture, for the next few decades.

Other girls played things differently. I thought I was ugly, so I went the direction of suppressing the feminine so that it wouldn’t get crushed by rejection.

Other girls went the other way - putting a stake in the heart of their own femininity by distorting it into crass materialist promiscuity. Perverting the icon of Woman as the pursued and desired beauty, baring their bodies, taking fleeting comfort in the boners that followed and outwardly scoffing at the idea of lasting love the way a soldier would on R&R in the red light district.

Whether it was the solitude of my camp or the abortion rate of the other camp, all of us rejected and reinvented womanhood in ways that felt safer than actually embracing our femininity and offering it up to the world where it could be rejected or violated.

And so, femininity was dead.

But this week every year, we are reminded that not all dead things stay dead.

There were signs of life that tried to emerge.

I was drawn to beauty like a moth to a flame. When I first moved to Washington, I used to sit on the steps of the National Cathedral after work each day and play my guitar by a fountain like it was Woodstock. That impulse reached full flower as I was drawn into Catholicism by its beauty - the stained glass, the candles, incense, the Latin, the martyrs. I was so entranced by the beauty of a group of nuns in their bright blue veils, I became one of them for a few years, thinking that if I put beauty on the outside of me, the inside might improve as well. It didn’t take.

When I returned to my life in politics, it felt so familiar and comfortable. Walking around again in the Hart Senate Office Building felt like returning to the high school in your home town.

By that time, I was a “leader.” I was Management in any office I worked in. I made a lot of decisions, hired, fired, had an impact, made a difference. I declared the wars. I negotiated the peace. My career was a battlefield that felt familiar but always unsafe. I was still the little girl who wanted someone to protect her. Every woman is.

A lot of talk these days centers around women like this. We get scolded for letting our ovaries wither while we recklessly and selfishly push our careers to center stage.

But that’s not at all what we’re actually doing - not most of us.

We’re not prioritizing career over marriage and motherhood. We didn’t choose to be single. We’re just trying to pay our bills while we desperately - DESPERATELY - search for and hope for Prince Charming to come save us. Not all of us admit this openly. But we all admit it in our hearts. If we had found him at 19, 25 or 35, most of us would have dropped our careers in a flash and followed him to the ends of the earth.

Being raised with feminism in our blood and on our lips, sometimes by our parents, but always by the culture, we had fortunate opportunities to become good at things that are useful in the economy. That freedom made it easier to pay those bills when Prince Charming was dallying. So we advanced. We got raises, titles, PhDs. We weren’t doing it because we preferred this path. We were doing it because we were good at what we did and it paid the bills and you’re not going to turn down promotions and opportunities when no one else is offering to pay your rent.

Some fields are easier to advance in without becoming a warrior. Most aren’t.

As women advance: more responsibility, more demanding problems, bigger egos everywhere, more on the line, vicious competition, higher stakes.

It all translates to warfare.

Every workday - at a certain stage in a moderately successful career, usually between age 30 and 50 - is a battleground. Whether it’s sales or science, the stock market or social media - all jobs have an adversarial or competitive edge. That’s the nature of the modern workplace.

To continue providing for ourselves, women have to succeed in this battlefield. As we succeed, we take on the nature and culture of battle: jaded, profane, calculating, cynical, shrewd, results-oriented, single-minded, competitive. You know, like men.

The longer this goes on, the more we repel actual men. It doesn’t help that half of us are on birth control just to control the agonizing hormonal chaos twisting our uterus every month and the other half are on birth control to make sure that the soul-crushing hookups each weekend don’t destroy anyone else’s life but our own.

These are lives unfit for human women.

Women are not made for battle. Even if we’re good at it.

I am very good at battle, as my resume attests. I’ve lived on the cortisol-spiked fumes of warfare for most of my adult life. Most successful women in traditional careers have. By “traditional career,” I mean leaving home each day, toiling under fluorescent lights in a sterile, beige, impersonal, climate-controlled box of sameness, competing for accolades, accomplishments, sales, awards, advancement, money in a professional culture built for and by men, generations ago. Even in workplaces where women outnumber men, they still operate under the rules and rituals built when men were the primary ones living and working this way. This is not how human females flourish.

• The rush we feel when we win at work? Cortisol.

• The panic we feel when we lose at work? Cortisol.

• The racing heart at the sound of the alarm in the morning? Cortisol.

• The to do list scrolling as we try to get to sleep? Cortisol.

Elevated cortisol was my boyfriend.

Many of us succeed, appearing to thrive, in these workplaces. We sit in traffic before the sun rises and after the sun sets, and we tell ourselves stories, real or imagined, about necessity, scarcity, pride, passion, contribution, intellectual satisfaction.

The story behind those stories? Security. Solidarity. Purpose.

We don’t have security the way biology intends - through a community of men who defend us, provide for us, look at us with wonder, and stabilize our crash landings.

We don’t have solidarity the way biology intends - through a community of other women who co-create beauty with us, who validate our feelings, who rub our backs and understand us.

We don’t have purpose the way biology intends - through a community of children who take us outside of ourselves, make us laugh until we cry, who give us a reason to live and a reason to die.

That’s the security, solidarity and purpose of femininity - only through community with men, other women, and children. Isolated femininity trying to operate in the world built for men - even if it’s populated by half or more women now - is not safe. It’s not welcome, it’s not productive or polished or predictable or useful.

And that threat, that not-so-low-grade fight-or-flight - that’s why our bodies are falling apart, from sleep deprivation, insulin resistance and inflammation (guess what triggers glucose release into the bloodstream? Cortisol.) That’s why a quarter of us are on SSRIs. Why almost a million of us get abortions every year - a fifth of our babies.

It’s not safe to be feminine in a world without men. And it’s not safe to be feminine in a world built for men. So we’re not.

By the time we partner up with men, the fight-or-flight is just our personality, and he can’t make us safe or happy. That’s why divorce rates are so high - and why most divorces are initiated by women.

RIP femininity.

Even when I got those things, albeit late in life - a man to defend me and crash my waves on, children to get out of bed for - I was a professional man for most of the day. So the femininity still didn’t really take.

I didn’t realize any of this - cortisol was my constant friend, drug, fuel, bestie - even after I had escaped the battleground of my political career, and was building my business from home in my yoga pants where I should have been safe and self-assured.

And then my business coach, the ethereal Marissa Levin, grabbed my attention and called me out. She said that every single word that came out of my mouth was based in fear.

She demanded that I use different words if I wanted to have different thoughts and create different outcomes. That was the beginning of the end of the walking dead.

Which brings us back to Easter.

I started realizing that even when I should have been safe - no more White House battles, no more lonely dinners for one, no more single filer tax returns - I was still coasting on cortisol fumes.

Cortisol withdrawal was a long and fraught process. It required a hard look at how I sought safety and why. The root cause? What I expected was a festering corpse of femininity inside my soul, with a masculine boss-bitch costume trying to cover up the stench.

That’s when my logos had to make a decision. Was I going to roll away the stone and look at the fetid, putrid fruit of a half-century of rejection and fear and self-hatred?

“But Lord, already there is a stench because he’s been dead for four days,” says the ever helpful Martha to Jesus in the Gospel of St. John. Or four decades, in the case of my feminine soul.

St. John. You know - the same guy who starts his story with this:

This is the Logos, literally the mind or intellect - in whose image we - man, woman, masculine, feminine - are so fearfully and wonderfully made. If that Logos can raise the dead and it made our own logos, what might our own logos be able to resurrect?

So I started to push that stone one small bit at a time. I used a variety of methods - online programs, coaches, books, retreats, nature. I cleaned up my body - diet (push), movement (push), toxins (push), sleep (push), sunlight (push).

That journey cleared some cobwebs in my biology enough that my logos could start to speak life to my psychology. The need for control (push). The fear of intimacy (push). Viewing money as a scarcity (push). Approval-seeking (push). Victim-mindset (push). Rejection of intuition and feminine knowing. (push)

Eventually, the stone was rolled away enough for me to notice that there was nothing rotting in there at all. Just the folded up man-suit I had worn in a previous life as a security blanket.

My logos had done the impossible.

There’s still a long way to go before the stone is completely rolled away. I swear like a sailor. I argue with my feelings. I’m not as quick with kindness for myself or others. Menopausal weight gain feels like punishment and less like feminine rhythm. I dread birthdays because, “old,” rather than “wise.” I occasionally fall into viewing events as happening to me instead of for me.

After all, I’m just a lowercase logos. Some things require an assist from the Uppercase Version.

For my brothers who love the feminine and would like to see more of her, then be a rock. Affirm and draw out her femininity by making her feel cherished and secure. Give her time and space to nurture beauty, not worry about money, look at the sun, play with babies. Tell her she’s gorgeous (like once an hour). Look at her in wonder like you mean it. Bring her flowers at least once a week. If it won’t bankrupt you, buy her diamonds. Don’t whine about manicures, throw pillows, bird-feeders and essential oils. Remember, she spent the past few decades internalizing that beauty and mysticism and bonding with nature were frivolous at best, and dangerous at worst. Don’t pile on.

And for my sisters, if Feminine-You got stabbed in the heart and shoved in the trunk of the car of life, let this Resurrection season give you a reason to hope. She’s only mostly dead.

I bet if you turn on the Go-Gos and grab a hairbrush, you’ll see some signs of life.

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Most medical professionals have never seen physiological birth.

That’s birth without any medical intervention (such as membrane sweeps, immobilization, fetal monitoring, induction, augmentation, epidural, coached pushing, or surgery, among other things).

Think about that.

The people who define “best practices,” who write the guidelines, who tell women what is safe and what is dangerous, who decide when your body is “failing” and when your baby needs to be “rescued” - most of them have never actually witnessed birth functioning the way it is designed to function.

They have only ever seen birth inside a system that is actively interfering with it. And then they have the audacity to call that version “normal.”

The truth is that birth is not a medical event.

It is not a pathology or a condition to be managed. It is not a problem to be solved. Mammalian females are exquisitely-constructed gestating and birthing ecosystems that The Science, as it pretends to be in the U.S., utterly fails to improve upon.

Birth, as nature designed it and when nature controls it, is a biological process - hormonally orchestrated, neurologically precise, exquisitely sensitive to environment and perception.

It is also, inconveniently, something that works best when you leave it the hell alone. Which is exactly what modern obstetrics is structurally incapable of doing.

You already understand how this works

Imagine you are trying to poop.

You know exactly if you can hold it, for how long, and if it’s time to head to the toilet. You know if you need to push or just relax. You know how long to push and when you’re done. Your body often naturally constipates when you’re traveling a lot or when it’s impossible or inconvenient to poop. Your autonomic nervous system - the same system making your heart beat, stabilizing your temperature, monitoring your oxygen saturation - is driving this bus and you rely on it every single time.

And then suddenly, three people in scrubs walk into the bathroom.

They close the door behind them. They start explaining that pooping can be dangerous, that sometimes people hemorrhage or tear or have “complications,” and they just want to keep you “safe.”

They hook you up to monitors, they bring in brighter lights and beeping machines. You can’t sit in a squatting position anymore but you’ll have to poop on your back in bed. They tell you when to push. Then they tell you not to push yet, it’s too soon, you might “swell,” you might get hemorrhoids.

Every few minutes, someone puts on gloves and checks your butthole to assess how things are progressing. They start talking to each other about you. If you object to all this, they roll their eyes a bit and sigh heavily and explain condescendingly, “You’re not progressing.” “We may need to intervene.”

How is your ability to poop going?

Gone. Immediately.

Now, swap out the poop for an orgasm - another brilliantly organized feat of biology and neurology, subjected to these same interventions.

Exactly.

And birth is vastly more complex, more hormonally sensitive, more neurologically dependent than either of those processes. But this is how we do it.

And then when we can neither poop nor orgasm nor birth under such conditions, we thank GOD the “system” was there and rescued us from this dangerous failure of our broken bodies.

That sometimes, on rare occasions, pooping can become complicated and require medical intervention, does not thereby render pooping a medical event more broadly. Similarly, birth can, in rare situations, require medical intervention, but that doesn’t mean it’s a medical event more generally.

The physiology we keep interrupting

Here is what birth actually is: a hormonal symphony.

Oxytocin builds in waves, creating contractions that are rhythmic, responsive, and adaptive. Beta-endorphins flood the system, altering consciousness, dulling pain, pulling the woman out of her analytical brain and into something older, deeper, more primal. At the end, catecholamines surge and trigger the fetal ejection reflex - a powerful, involuntary expulsion of the baby.

This process depends on a very specific neuropsychological state: privacy, safety - including safe people. No strangers, not even most beloved family members, no one watching, evaluating, observing, asking you questions, or shining lights in your eyes. No artificial lights, no uncomfortable environments, no restriction of your instinctive movements.

Because the moment you feel watched, assessed, judged, your neocortex lights up, your stress hormones rise, and the entire process can stall. Even one fluorescent light can cause cortisol to rise.

Cortisol turns off oxytocin.

This is not controversial biology. This is how mammals work. All of them.

And since cortisol turns off oxytocin, with all the prenatal fearmongering and medicalizing, all the induction for “safety” and monitors just to make sure baby is “ok” - what might the effect on cortisol be?

The conditioning starts long before labor

Let’s walk through what we actually do to women, because this is where the system stops being merely counterproductive and stupid and starts being abusive.

The conditioning starts long before labor.

From the moment a woman gets pregnant, she is pulled into a system of surveillance: appointments to make sure “everything is ok.” Measurements, compared against what’s “normal” without any mention of how frequently ultrasounds are off (A LOT), how wide a variation there is in “normal” for every possible metric you can imagine.

Everything framed around risk. Everything framed around what could go wrong.

You aren’t asked about what your intuition is telling you - the whole system is designed to train you to ignore your intuition and to submit to the worst substitute for it ever - epidemiologically irrational metrics where the evidence base is upside-down. (And that evidence base originates from births that have been in the system. It’s like trying to understand animal behavior and health only using animals in a zoo.)

You are told what to worry about. You are taught, over months, that your body is a liability. That your baby is in danger. That safety lives outside of you, in machines, in experts, in protocols.

And the tools we use to reinforce this are not even particularly reliable.

Ultrasounds - which women are told are precise, authoritative, definitive - are off-base all the time. Even under ideal conditions, ultrasound estimates fall within 10 percent of actual birth weight only about 60–80 percent of the time. Early ultrasounds can be accurate within about a week, but accuracy counterintuitively goes out the window for the ultrasounds performed closer to full term.

Even the ghouls at the OB/GYN trade association admit that gestational age estimates can be off by enough to affect induction rates later. Forty-week due dates are treated like deadlines but they’re really mid-points. Half of all babies, when left to their own devices, show up later than that, and one in five of them wait until 41 weeks and beyond.

But the system does not tolerate variation.

So what happens? At 38 or 39 weeks - before many babies are even ready - women are told it is “safer” to induce.

• “Your hips are too big for the baby’s head” (which we probably measured wrong, as we usually do) - because nature is just that stupid.

• “You’re old and we need to control what’s likely to be a disaster and have the surgeons ready.”

• “Your placenta is starting to deteriorate - or it will in a week” (because disintegrated placenta kills a lot of babies, oh wait…).

• “Your baby is breech” (even though almost all babies move a lot and can reposition for birth, so their position a week or even days before birth is not dispositive).

And a bunch of other made-up nonsense according to a model that treats deviation from the average as pathology.

So we take a baby who might naturally gestate for another two, three, even four weeks - which is a massive percentage of its total development - and we evict it early.

Then we act surprised when things don’t go smoothly. And women leave the hospital convinced and grateful that the system saved their baby or themselves from the complications it created.

How it starts: the cascade of interventions.

Induction - it sounds benign, helpful even, we’re just “getting things going.” What it actually means is that we are overriding the body’s timing, precisely attuned to a million metrics that nature has been monitoring outside the view of human consciousness.

We are forcing the body into a process that nature’s regulators - the mother’s hormones - are not ready for. And then we have to compensate for that. If the waters break on their own, that used to mean something. It meant the symphony was starting. All the instruments were tuned up, the musicians with full attention to each other and the Divine Conductor, with their sheets of music turned to the same page.

But instead, we force the violin section to start while they’re all still standing around getting their violins out of the case, and force the rest of the musicians to scramble to catch up - some of whom may never even arrive.

And the clock starts. “Your body has X hours to perform or we intervene.” (Usually 12. Even though 20-25 percent of women naturally don’t start labor after 12 hours.)

Why? Because the system cannot tolerate waiting. After all, the doctors get paid the same thing whether you labor for six hours or sixty. That math doesn’t work.

Waiting on Mother Nature is inconvenient, unpredictable, and costly (for them).

Chemical Assault Replaces Physiological Surrender

So then, we “augment.” In other words, cue more of the drug they probably gave you for the induction: Pitocin - Big Pharma’s counterfeit for oxytocin, which induces intense uterine contractions (and a zillion other things known and unknown).

Actual oxytocin is released in pulses. It rises and falls. It is responsive to feedback. It is part of a complex loop between brain, body, and baby. It also shuts down when cortisol spikes - this is so that mom’s labor stops if a bear is nearby and she might have to run. Isn’t nature brilliant?

Guess what also causes cortisol to spike? Fluorescent lights, a bunch of strangers, beeping machines, thirst and starvation, being pushed around, fearmongered, monitored, and not being in control of the most important thing your body has ever done - and a million other things that happens the minute you enter the hospital.

So, for many, many women, that cortisol spike and the oxytocin suppression signal that your body knows something that our system doesn’t know or refuses to acknowledge. You’re not safe here. This isn’t normal. You’re not ready. Your baby isn’t ready. This isn’t what your body wants. Labor can’t happen right now.

Even if your birth started naturally, half of first-time moms aren’t moving fast enough for the hospital’s or doctor’s convenience, and receive Pitocin. For first-time moms who were induced in the first place, almost 70 percent get Pitocin, because, of course, their bodies were even less ready than those whose waters had broken before the Pitocin.

Pitocin delivered in this way is not the same as your body’s oxytocin - it’s a fire alarm interrupting the hormonal symphony. It floods the system and creates contractions that are stronger, longer, closer together, and completely unregulated by the body’s own feedback mechanisms.

It is, quite literally, an assault.

Those contractions can be so intense that they reduce oxygen flow to the baby. Now the baby shows signs of “distress.” Now we are in an emergency - that we manufactured. At the same time, the mother is in agony, because these are not physiological contractions. Real labor is intense enough - counterfeit labor is something else entirely.

Enough of this Symphony Business

So of course she begs for relief. And of course the staff encourages it. “Would you like to be more comfortable?” is the usual question.

At this point, after hours of synthetic contractions, who wouldn’t? So she gets the epidural. Now she is numb. Now she can’t move the way her body normally would - to help position the baby properly, to allow her muscles to work their magic, to direct her energy and breathing in all the right ways, both intentionally, as well as simply intuitively. Her natural oxytocin, which is responsive to what’s going on, has been replaced and blunted. Her cervical dilation slows.

Now she can’t feel what her body is doing. Now the labor slows, because movement matters, position matters, feedback matters. Her blood pressure slows, which can deprive baby of oxygen. Meanwhile, the Pitocin is keeping contractions faster, harder, closer together, stronger but less effective. Baby can’t adjust, move around, re-position properly because of less oxygen and getting pounded by the walls constantly closing in on her like the trash compactor in the first (and best) Star Wars movie.

So now we have “failure to progress.” “Fetal distress.” More Pitocin, get this baby moving faster. More urgency. Beeping going off. More fear, more cortisol. More things going haywire in mom. You know what comes next.

Thank God for the Surgeon Who Saved My Baby’s Life

C-section - presented as lifesaving. Thank God we were at the hospital! Thank God that doctor was so good. Thank God baby survived (thank God indeed for that).

There’s no time to tell her that it will destroy the baby’s microbiome, or that the lifelong health of babies born by C-section are worse. That it’ll hurt her future children because she’ll forever be deemed “high-risk” for vaginal birth, and coerced into C-section again and again. That it will distort and impede the postpartum hormonal magic so critical to mother-baby attachment, baby’s development and mom’s recovery. That it will lead to worse outcomes in her future pregnancies. We just tell her it’s essential, it’s non-negotiable, it’s right now. Because somehow, nature just breaks a sixth of the time and babies can’t come out, apparently.

Twice as many babies than that actually are born by C-section because for every emergency version, there’s a non-emergency, elective C-section scheduled in advance by choice. Combined with the “emergencies,” fully a third of all births are deprived of nature’s brilliant protection.

Before Everyone Loses Their $@*% on Me

Sometimes, c-sections are truly lifesaving, such as the extremely rare situations that have quite clear signs and presentations which help facilitate intervention if they occur. Ironically, the system which treats every birth like these emergency situations often fails in these cases. With uterine rupture, a mother knows that something is wrong most of the time (if she’s conscious and not anesthetized with an epidural). The pain changes dramatically. The contractions often stop, she usually comes out of her limbic brain and tries to explain that something is wrong. Perversely, the infantilization and disrespect of women in hospitals often ignores these signs, or the interventions (like an epidural) hide them until it’s too late. And it’s not without horrific consequences.

The window for intervention once rupture occurs is incredibly short - 10 to 18 minutes. Six percent of babies experiencing a uterine rupture don’t survive. Delayed diagnosis is associated with worse maternal outcomes - meaning more transfusions, more hysterectomies, more women leaving that table permanently diminished.

This is what it looks like when the system fails at the one thing it actually exists to do - and it happens inside the same cascade of interventions that potentially caused or contributed to the problem. Uterine rupture, for example, occurs in 3/100,000 of births with no prior c-section, but that risk is increased 9.5 times with augmentation with Pitocin and almost 11 times with epidural. Uterine rupture isn’t the only deadly emergency that industrial birth produces.

Many (Most?) Emergencies Are Created by Intervention

Cord prolapse is extremely rare, and dramatically increased by the cascade of interventions. Cords are designed to withstand pressure, twisting, squeezing, tension, and only extremely rarely do they break, unless of course, the body is acting in ungodly, unnatural ways that the cord was never meant to withstand, such as Pitocin overdose. “Membrane sweeps” early in labor are a key risk factor, where doctors shove their fingers through the cervix and try to physically separate the membranes holding the baby from the uterine wall. Characterized as just “helping get things moving,” this is excruciating, and dangerous as hell. It introduces infection, and lets the fluids rush out and the cord fall downward when the baby is still positioned high in the uterus and not where he would be when waters naturally break (with head down, sealing the cervix so the cord can’t prolapse).

Even mechanical obstructions such as placenta previa or transverse positions have pretty clear signs and also are extremely rare. Ironically, many women are told that they have previa or are previa-adjacent at some prenatal ultrasound and this starts the emergency vibe unnecessarily. Placentas lying low get pulled upwards as the baby grows and the uterus expands, and especially, as the cervix opens and the uterus contracts. True placenta previa that prevents natural, uninterrupted birth, is quite unusual, but many women are put into the high-risk (and high-revenue) c-section assembly line based on foolish early “diagnosis.” That c-section then becomes the final step in a chain reaction that never needed to start.

Silly Wabbit, Instincts Are for Other Mammals

All the mother’s inner knowing - the most powerful instrument we have in birth - when things are wrong, when things change, when something is off, or something hurts - badly - in a different way than labor - gets shut down. It’s shut down mechanically by the anesthesia in her spine. But it’s also shut down by the culture of the totalitarian bureaucracy that is industrial birth - the most misogynistic system on earth. She is treated like she is barely sentient and whatever she feels doesn’t matter anyway. She’s condescended to, patronized, dismissed, with mock sympathy and feigned powerlessness to change “protocol,” “for her safety.”

Like she is a hysterical child who needs to be managed. Talked over. Corrected. Coached. Positioned. Starved. Dehydrated. Told when to push. When not to push. Probed and sexually violated, over and over and over again. Measured. Monitored. Managed. Her instincts are not just ignored, they are actively suppressed.

So she is trained out of it, long before she ever arrives at the hospital. And by the time she is in labor, many women have been so thoroughly conditioned that they no longer trust themselves at all.

They’ve outsourced all their instincts and knowing about how to care for themselves and baby, how to trust their bodies, how to assess their own health, how to protect their autonomy so that nature works well in delivery - all of that is drilled out of them during the prenatal visits, the tests, the measurements, the toxic glucose tests, and so forth. They turn outward - to the monitor, the nurse, the doctor, the protocol, the system. They hand themselves over because they’ve been trained to fear birth as a medical emergency that doctors are in charge of. To do anything else is reckless, irresponsible, selfish, stupid, dangerous.

The Illusion of Control

And then there’s fetal monitoring. Continuous electronic fetal monitoring - the belts, the machines, the constant tracking. Women are told this is essential, that it keeps the baby safe, that it helps detect distress.

What she is not told is that decades of evidence have shown that continuous fetal monitoring does not improve outcomes for normal pregnancies. But it sure does increase intervention.

It keeps women on their backs, it restricts movement, it produces ambiguous data that is frequently misinterpreted, and leads to constant interruptions as the damned things are forever moving out of place and raising alarm bells at the nurses station. And of course, it leads to more C-sections. Which means it’s not just useless, it’s dangerous. And totally standard - required even - because it gives everyone the illusion of control.

The fact is that no birth is risk-free, and a hell of a lot of those risks are created or increased by our “best practices” in hospitals. Birthing outside the system also has risks, such as in the case of a rare true emergency that can’t get to the hospital in time (though this could be mitigated by choosing a birth location that is close to a hospital).

The only choice a mother has is which set of risks she’s assuming, not whether she’s assuming them.

The Most Unintentional Saboteur

And the fathers - can we talk about the fathers?

Because they are victimized too. Charitably and respectfully, men know absolutely nothing about birth (see my awe-inspired post on what men do know and their many wonders). Why would they? Why should they?

They have been told their entire lives that birth is dangerous and doctors save women and babies. So when the system starts talking about risk, about safety, about what could go wrong, labeling the woman who is the only reason they get out of bed as high-risk, or geriatric, or diabetic or whatever, they go into high-protection mode.

And then they become gentle, but effective enforcers and underminers of mom’s brilliant inner knowing.

“Maybe we should just do what they say.”

“I don’t want anything to happen to you or the baby.”

It sounds loving, and protective. But it’s fear - born of what they don’t understand and can’t control. Birth is wild. It’s not something he can save her from. That kind of helplessness, uselessness, impotence is exactly the kind of feeling that makes a man want to die or shrivel. It’s unbearable to experience. He knows that this baby has become more important to her than life, than him, than anything, and that if she’s not happy, successful and alive at the end of all this, nothing will ever be the same.

So he understandably pushes her further out of her own power - the autonomy, wisdom and intuition that makes mammalian birth “safe and effective,” and deeper into submission to the system. At least if something goes wrong in the system, it won’t be because he failed in some way.

But it’s the system that renders him useless and impotent, not nature.

Nature has a critical job for Dad to do, protecting the perimeter of her birth space from interruption or intervention so that physiological birth can unfold in its brilliance.

We’re Doing it Wrong… And It Shows

We look at the outcomes and we pretend they are inevitable. We have one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the developed world. We have a C-section rate that has climbed far beyond what global health authorities consider appropriate. We have women leaving birth traumatized, or anesthetized so much they don’t even notice. We have babies separated from their mothers within minutes of being born.

And we say this is the safest way.

What it is is the most convenient way for the health care providers and the facilities involved. This is why C-sections on women who showed up to deliver vaginally are 27 percent less likely to occur on weekends or evenings and are far more likely to occur mid-day rather than off-hours, even for supposed “emergencies” like shoulder dystocia (often not actually dystocia, but whatever).

Putting women on a 12-hour clock after their waters break and then insisting they start Pitocin by playing the dead-baby card if they don’t - that makes everything run smoothly for everyone involved. I mean, except mom and baby.

A likely more important reason than convenience for the cascade of interventions, however, is far more crass. Drugs, procedures, and surgeries pay way better than standing outside a closed door for 72 hours while a mom and baby surrender to nature’s brilliant design.

Burn the Witches!

And when women start to notice this - when they start to question it, or opt out, or choose something different - the reaction is immediate and vicious.

Media hit pieces against the most vocal among them. Moral panic. Worst-case scenarios presented as the norm. Entire communities smeared as reckless, dangerous, irresponsible.

This is not new - this is how all convenient, lucrative systems respond under threat. Because that is what this is.

If birth is reclaimed as belonging to women, as controlled by mothers, as untamed and beautiful as a lioness, if emergency care is only given for, you know, emergencies, then there are a lot of losers in the status quo system.

And that can’t be allowed.

It has to be discredited. Ridiculed. Shut down.

The dirty little secret is that industrial birth has never been about safety. It’s about control.

If you’re tired of being managed, measured, and handed back your own instincts in a paper cup, you’re in the right place. If this made you furious, good. Just remember paid subscribers keep the fury funded.

Oceans are such wise teachers. They immediately communicate reality - that you are small, that life is dangerous, wild, adventurous, exhilarating, peaceful and soothing, all at once. A few days in front of one has provided the opportunity to observe some truths about humanity - our soul, our purpose, our nature.

Specifically, boys and young men.

I’m not sure I believe in school for boys. Boys can be taught to read and do basic math without going to school. Everything else can be learned through curiosity and imitation and necessity and internal drive. Otherwise, their souls die.

Boys are meant for adventure. For doing crazy, dangerous $@%#. For potty jokes and testing the power of their arms and legs and endurance. For competing until they pass out. For running wild, as fast as they can, after a wave or a seagull or a bug. For playing games over and over and over again.

They are made to imitate men.

This is their education, for better or worse (choose wisely, women). Boys are built to watch and beg to try and do it themselves and participate. How to hook the bait, how to spool the fishing rod, how to shuffle the cards, how to stay standing on a moving boat.

They want to do it. They want to try. When they fail, they want to be shown how not to fail by a man (not a woman).

When they’re out of control, as they tend to be, they respond primarily to a man telling them so, honestly, sternly, sometimes a little too frankly for a woman’s taste.

This is the animal kingdom.

Young men are being killed by our culture and its norms.

My state, like many states, makes cannabis available everywhere in all ways and places. Not your granddaddy’s weed, at 15% THC. These are synthetically manufactured 85% THC oils and products, infused with endocrine-disrupting fragrances and flavors, burned directly into the lungs and, from there, changing the brains, spirits, and organs of our young men at a scale never seen in human history.

Their drive, their ambition, their adventurous souls are being snuffed out by these toxic levels of “sedative,” in the name of something “natural,” “plant-based” and “just like a beer” to help relax and deal with the pressures of modern life.

As young men, the boundless energy and curiosity, adventure and out-of-control-ness - so innocent and adorable at five or seven years old - are still in there, often manifesting as intense emotions, anxieties, hyperactivity, destructive tendencies.

These are now problems needing cures, control, suppression - they don’t serve them well in prison school or their mindless, entry-level jobs where they’re supposed to behave, sit still, conform and obey.

Minimum wage in hyperinflationary metropolitan areas makes it nearly impossible for a young man to get ahead, or even to pay today’s bills. Saving, investing, owning - those are so out of reach and imagination that he doesn’t even dream or plan for them.

And yet.

Young men can still emerge from the vaping, gaming, minimum-wage grinding basement of their lives into the sunshine of a coastline that offers an enticing challenge, wave after crashing wave.

Their desire to conquer and master nature, whether by paddleboard, fishing line, or fire pit, dribbles out hope that the man they’re meant to be has not been altogether suffocated.

Monosyllabic communications turn into complete sentences. Zombie visages can melt into smiles like a sunrise. Disinterest in others can turn into coaching, correcting, ribbing, connecting.

With no one else to engage with, he can turn to the little ones as playmates.

Will he go too far? Will he be too harsh? As he cajoles the scared little girl into the ocean, as he picks her up to bring her to his playground, he doesn’t force or coerce. She cries. He puts her down and lets her make her own choice.

The masculine dignity that is both powerful and kind is in there. It’s been in there, waiting for the rhythms and majesty of nature to blow away the cobwebs of the modern poisons on the soul of man.

I say to the parents out there: it is worth being totally different. It is worth being annoying and weird. It is worth protecting the influence of nature (outside of them and within them) on your sons.

Keep them away from fluorescent lit prisons run by adults who don’t love them, and populated by children you don’t want them imitating. This is not the way they should spend the majority of time that the sun is up.

Keep their bare feet on the ground, and their eyes squinted at the sun, their hair stringy from the rain, their fingernails dirty. Tell them stories around a fire, read them books born of adventure, teach them to use dangerous tools and do dangerous things. After a certain age, let their fathers and brothers and uncles and grandpas be their heroes and helpers and primary teachers of most stuff.

Humans are not built for gaggles of little boys to be caged behind a desk or sitting still in a circle, raising hands and repeating canned answers asked by a kind-faced woman who shares no history with them. Who wasn’t there at their birth or who doesn’t see through the dirt-smeared face to admire the heart of a lion that only comes out in private moments.

Manhood is scary as hell. It requires risk and failure and humiliation. Anyone sensible, if left to his own devices, will seek to avoid that hard stuff, or medicate the anxiety of it with escapist screens or psychoactive chemicals - drugs, booze, ultra-processed food. That is obviously much, much easier than becoming a man.

(Nota bene: A nagging woman criticizing all this as it happens in front of her doesn’t change the trajectory, it only intensifies his impulse to hide from his birthright.)

Put a bunch of “peers” facing the same terrors and pressures together and see new heights of slavery and destruction caused by the worst habits metastasizing, ritualizing into elaborate self-justification schemes, unchallenged by reality or wisdom.

Humans are not built for armies of teenaged boys and young men to be isolated with each other, building their subcultures of misunderstandings, misplaced values, and mind-numbing habits. They’re meant to run with the men, and the little boys, in the sun and the rain, and to build things, to learn things that are useful, to teach those things to the younger ones, with their muscles and minds engaged.

As they read and watch and learn, those who are destined to pursue more formal education will emerge. Most already reject “higher education” as neither high nor educational in the things that matter or that give them a reason to get out of bed.

Over time, imitation and experimentation become skills, initiation becomes apprenticeship, and play transforms into something that some might call work, but that he calls a purpose. That something - it makes him useful and interesting to a woman, and eventually indispensable to her and the little ones who start the cycle of wonder all over again.

That feeling of being useful and needed and admired - that is the jet fuel for the masculine soul.

Many of us women know this, but we don’t know how to draw it out from what seems like an already-crushed soul of a son, a brother, a husband, a father. All we have on offer seems to come out as judgment.

And so I offer this to my sisters: you control the family schedule.

Take them away from school and “jobs.” These prisons will wait, even if they say they won’t. Even if these places threaten bad things if you do it. They are the bad things.

Bring them to the sun. To the mountains. To the water. To the woods. It may take a few days or longer for them to emerge. Which will annoy you. Be patient.

Do things that require their help, their muscles, their hands. Ask them to take the little ones into nature for a few hours, as a favor to you. Let them make all the decisions about what that looks like. Do your nails while you bask in the sun or rock on a porch or gossip with your mom. Be happy.

You are the writer of their destiny. You are the maker of worlds. You are the mother of men.

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Everything that happened to my dying sister in that hospital was legal, standard, and indefensible.

She’d been in her local hospital for the past week. The giant tumor overtaking her pelvis had become unbearable with the weak pain management by her oncologist. So she went to the nearest ER and was admitted.

(Obviously a failure of medical oncology here, but that’s an article for another time).

She also happened to have a massive, radical surgery planned for the following week. They had already surgically bypassed her cancer-ridden colon in favor of a “stomach poop bag” as she called it. But this new surgery was going to go in to get the tumor out “for good.” Her bladder, uterus, vagina, cervix would all be removed in the process. Her confident surgeon said “we’re going for the ‘cure’ on this one,” so we were all hopeful.

(Obviously a failure of surgical oncology here, in imposing their wishful thinking on patients and loved ones, but that too is an article for another time.)

She would need to be strong to get through that.

Since she couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep and was fading quickly under the pain, she had made the rational choice to spend the week before her surgery in the hospital having her pain actively managed, and IV nutrition provided so that she could rest and prepare. It made some perverse sense in our degenerate system.

At the time, I was President Trump’s lead health advisor on the White House Domestic Policy Council. My career had been in health policy and public health. So I was a pretty informed and aggressive competent patient advocate.

The inpatient admission was largely a fail.

The meds were never adequate to manage her pain, there was never a doctor available to adjust them, the interventional pain specialist couldn’t come over to do the nerve block until most of the week was over - so she wasn’t resting. She was constantly interrupted by useless and unnecessary vitals checks (we can monitor the vitals of astronauts from space. What the hell with the interruptions?). Beeping. Announcements. Fluorescent lighting.

What she desperately did need - competent and timely pain management - was always too little, too late.

Her big surgery was taking place at the flagship facility of the system she was in, about a half-hour away. We assumed she’d be transferred the day before or the morning of, by ambulance. Two days before, we were informed she was going to be transferred that evening. I objected: by the time we arrived, the real doctors would be gone for the night, the transition wouldn’t be great, she’d had such a bad week already, and had only just gotten the nerve block that allowed her to rest.

Why not put off the transfer as long as possible? “Well, there’s a bed open now. We can’t guarantee that there will be a bed right before her surgery and if not, we’ll have to cancel her surgery (that she’d waited months for).”

I didn’t buy it.

They could transfer her straight to the surgery check-in the morning of and then she’d be admitted inpatient right after. They could transfer her early in the day tomorrow. There was no need to risk a bad transition for such a fragile patient who needed to rest. I called my sister’s surgeon, and her on-call colleague called me back. She assured me it would be fine - my sister’s pain meds wouldn’t wear off and would be managed - she’d make sure of it.

The ambulance was delayed and it was now the dead of night. I called her back pleading that she intervene - why couldn’t this wait until the morning when the hospital would be bustling with full clinical staff? She was mad at being awakened and implied I shouldn’t call her again.

What happened next was the worst night of my life.

My sister had many bad nights in her short life, so I can’t say if this was the worst for her, but if not, it was close.

The ambulance ride was unbearable. But that would likely have been true no matter when it happened. On arrival, there was no bed available in the surgical unit where she was supposed to be admitted, so they stashed her in some empty corner of the neurology floor.

To say the transition went badly would be an understatement.

There was no continuity of care. Nobody knew anything about her when she arrived. There was no doctor anywhere to be found. There were no pain meds. She might as well have been dumped at a bus stop.

She was screaming in agony, begging me to do something.

The nurses were apologetic but powerless to deliver an actual prescriber of any sort to the room. There was only one hospitalist in the entire building and he was busy in the ER. For hours.

I found this out because, like a crazy person, I literally ran from floor to floor of the entire hospital, trying to find an oncology or surgical wing where they knew how to manage pain. I went to every single nursing station demanding someone with prescribing power - crying, desperate, enraged, frantic. I was about 5 seconds from having security called on me.

None of it made a damned bit of difference.

I finally retreated back to my sister’s bedside, since, if she was going to suffer so much, the least I could do was be there and hold her hand. While I waited, I tweeted my rage, tagging the hospital. I called the chief lobbyist for the American Hospital Association - a wonderful human and longtime friend of our family - to try to get hold of the hospital’s leadership.

A few hours later, the doctor was freed up and prescribed the first pain meds my sister received in eight hours.

Early that morning, I stepped out to make some calls. When I came back, it was clear that that some of my overnight tweeting and networking had gotten through. The on-call surgeon I’d spoken to - she of the broken promises - and various hospital suits, were all crowded in my sister’s room. I was too broken and filled with white-hot fury to even speak.

If one of the most “powerful” health officials in the country couldn’t save a patient from this malpractice, what possible chance does anyone else have?

Hospitals don’t just torture us at the end of life - their mediocrities and incompetencies are on full display at the beginning of life too.

Last year, my daughter was due with her third baby.

She’d been induced with her first two babies, and so when her water broke naturally, she panicked. What does one do, when labor starts on its own, dear God in heaven?!

We showed up at the hospital about an hour later at 3 cm - the same dilation she’d been days before at her last prenatal visit. The right thing to do? Send her home to labor naturally until things got real. That’s what they used to do, decades ago. But then babies might accidentally, you know, come out without the hospital cash register dinging in the background.

So, instead, they strap her in. First the IVs. Why can’t she feed and hydrate herself? She’s completely healthy. Oh right, because the c-section rate is so disgracefully high in this country that they starve laboring women for hours and hours on the not-so-off chance that they end up in surgery.

Then the fetal monitor which, despite our ability to land on the moon, is completely beyond our powers to keep in place on a big belly. Constant interruptions because the stupid monitor strap has moved.

Why do you need to monitor? This is a low-risk, no-drama situation.

“It’s protocol.”

What is the evidence of fetal monitoring improving outcomes rather than hastening the imposition of dangerous interventions?

Blank stare. “It’s protocol.”

What if she refuses?

“She can’t. It’s protocol.”

No really, what if she refuses?

“She can’t deliver here.”

So she can just walk out of here?

“Well, we’d have to call CPS.”

Ah yes, the CPS card.

And so, like clockwork, the cascade of interventions began. First, of course, since she wasn’t actually in active labor (remember the 3 cm?), she was just sitting there for a few hours while nothing happened. Taking up a bed. Unacceptable.

Time for “augmentation.” That’s when they jack you up with pitocin - a synthetic counterfeit of the natural hormone oxytocin that is responsible for regulating uterine contractions to correspond with the rest of the hormonal symphony present in physiological birth (which no L&D doctor or nurse has ever actually observed).

Pitocin, unlike oxytocin, doesn’t wax and wane with the needs of the bodies involved, and instead just asserts itself aggressively and immediately. Unnatural, shocking, and unbearable contractions start within 30-60 minutes. Not the natural kind that gradually grow and build on each other, productively moving the baby when the rest of the body is ready.

My daughter was no exception. And so of course, the epidural.

The vast majority (like 80-90 percent) of women given pitocin end up with an epidural - almost 25-50 percent more than those not given pitocin.

Epidurals stop or slow the contractions. And often the baby’s heart rate. Failure to progress. Fetal distress. So then, emergency c-section. See how this works?

I’m sure it has nothing to do with how the hospital makes more money if they can move women through the process in 12 hours, ending with a (dangerous, expensive) invasive surgery, and on to the next lady. Rather than sitting with a mother’s labor for the 48-72 hours it might naturally take under the oxytocin-suppressing hospital conditions.

Every mammal on earth retreats to dark, enclosed, solitude to birth their young.

That is the optimal environment of safety that signals their hormonal symphony to get to work. Any bright light, interruption or the slightest stress (caused by observation of others, noises in the woods, etc) causes cortisol to spike. Cortisol shuts off oxytocin. Uterine contractions slow or stop until the animal is safe again.

So you can imagine the cortisol/oxytocin impact of bright, fluorescent lighting, beeping, constant interruptions, monitoring, observation, and an entire culture built around fear-mongering this process as a medical, life-threatening emergency.

No wonder we have the highest, most disgraceful, most scandalous c-section rate of any nation on earth. Babies don’t come out easily under these conditions.

In my daughter’s case, that wasn’t going to happen. That’s why I was there.

Even still, after my granddaughter was born without a c-section, the shenanigans continued.

Mom and baby were moved up to a different unit at 1:00 am, naturally exhausted and wanting to just snuggle and sleep. The new nurse comes in with a clipboard and insists on explaining how we need to keep track on this complex chart of the timing and amount of each poop and pee drop, each feeding, for how long, on which boob, and we have to make sure there’s no feeding the baby within an hour of the three-hour glucose heel-prick, and on and on.

The nurse was actually surprised and butt-hurt when we told her, politely, to buzz off.

We will not be doing your chart-tracking. We will not be following your instructions. Leave us alone until morning.

They did not comply. That night was so miserable for my daughter, with the beeping and lighting and constant interruptions, she got no rest. In the morning, she had decided that it was neither good for her nor her daughter to spend another night there. Even though the hospital revenue model “protocol” demanded two nights.

Thank goodness I had warned her about the CPS card before they played it, or she might have buckled in shock. But she was prepared, and I was never so proud as when she stood her ground. We left that afternoon.

They did call CPS. Because, of course they did.

My daughter swatted that away later, but the totalitarianism of the mindless, and often dangerous hospital rituals knows no bounds.

Every family has these stories, to our nation’s great and calamitous shame.

My father’s heart condition means my family has spent many, many hours, days and weeks observing the bureaucratic banalities of a Soviet-style system:

• Patient menus and cafeterias with nothing but processed, pesticide-soaked offerings. Heart patients are forbidden to order steak but required to consume “heart-healthy” concoctions riddled with seed oils, sugar, petroleum-based food dyes and refined carbs.

• Windows locked to exclude fresh air, unfiltered sunlight and the healing sounds of birds and rustling leaves.

• Dehumanizing prison garb for patients that strips them of their dignity, warmth and comfort.

• Protocols written by lawyers rather than humans, such as “fall prevention” implemented as heart-attack-inducing alarm-blaring and stern ninnying from nurses, when a grown-up dares to rise from a bed.

• Disrupted rest in the form of hourly vitals checks, beeping machines that alarm if a tube twists wrong, fluorescent lighting that can’t be fully turned off.

• The pretense of clinical oversight without the presence of actual clinical oversight. Armies of scrub-wearers constantly circling, but disempowered to adjust prescriptions and dietary orders, waive senseless protocols, and otherwise exercise discretion. This is particularly egregious in the off-hours, when it’s not uncommon for a facility to have one clinical decision-maker onsite.

• Revenue-driven and convenience-driven protocols such as drugging or cutting a baby out of its mother prematurely, or transferring medically fragile patients overnight unnecessarily.

• Death-by-hospital:

  • Between 44,000-98,000 preventable deaths per year.

  • A maternal mortality rate more than twice the average of developed nations - four or five times the rate of many of our peer nations, as well as 25 percent higher infant mortality than the average for developed countries. (OECD)

  • Almost 2 million hospital-acquired infections per year, killing 100,000 patients. (CDC)

In short, this is a business model that should be burned to the ground. It is unfit for human participation. It is incompatible with health or healing.

Hospitals do not provide health care. They’re where you go when health care has already failed.

They monetize and capitalize on our extinction-level chronic illness rates. They invent reasons for their own existence, such as convincing the world that mammalian birth is a medical emergency. They have to threaten you with the government stealing your children just to keep you there.

There is an important caveat here: mechanics.

When you have a bullet in your belly, a third-degree burn, or a bone sticking out, you need a skilled mechanic waiting in the OR next to the ER. When you’re having a stroke or a heart attack, an American ER is just the place to be. When one of those patients doesn’t make it, you want their organs transplanted into someone who might, waiting in the OR down the hall.

There might be a few other use cases I’ve forgotten, but by and large, that’s it. The rest of the giant compound sitting on multiple acres of tax-free real estate is just a profit center of misery, selling a false sense of blue-lit security.

The life-saving, acute services that are valuable are not profitable. They cannot be made profitable.

They require an expensive crew of high-skill labor, cutting edge technology, the most expensive forms of ground and air transport, with 24/7/365 access for a catchment area that does not produce enough of these needs each year to recoup costs.

The rest of the hospital complex has been created to subsidize it.

Growing year over year, the amount of high-cost stuff done to sick people is where the profit is. Stuff that doesn’t have to be done in a hospital. Stuff that turns out worse when the abusive culture of a hospital is infused into patient experience.

When ten people with broken bodies arrive at an ER after a multi-car pileup, the protocols and procedures must be rigid and enforced, because there’s no time and no room for error. This is the theory behind military discipline, whether in Fallujah or your local trauma bay - where the stakes are so high and the crisis so kinetic.

But that culture of top-down authoritarianism loses all appropriateness and perspective when the stakes are routine, such as elective surgeries, cancer palliation, birthing babies. Nonetheless, the culture created for the trauma context infuses the entire complex so overwhelmingly as to inhibit or reverse healing and health rather than protect it.

Not to mention the cost.

What cannot be sustained will not be.

Fortunately, technology is emerging just in time to save us from these totalitarian bureaucracies we call “health” systems.

Increasingly, the hospital is being unbundled into solutions that are based at home, where value is rewarded in the form of greater dignity, comfort, nourishing food, incandescent lighting, and peace and quiet (or the health-promoting chaos of grandkids and goldendoodles). This model promises to produce better outcomes than the overpriced, Soviet-style hellscape we’ve been tolerating.

Decentralized solutions and vendors are now able to bill your health plan for true hospital-level care in the home: IV antibiotics, oxygen, imaging, daily physician oversight. Tools like continuous glucose monitors, Holter monitors and cardiac patches, and wearables like Oura rings turn episodic vital-sign snapshots into continuous streams of data. We’re even starting to be able to do imaging with handheld devices at home. Home-based lab draws are already becoming mainstream.

Tele-ICUs, at-home monitoring, virtual-first care models, predictive algorithms that detect deterioration before crisis - all of it is overthrowing the hospital-based religious cult that has us cowed in our paper gowns with our butts hanging out.

Right-sizing hospitals to true emergencies and intensive rescue will destroy their business model. It will preserve the least profitable services and replace the most profitable ones with more efficient, more humanity-compatible models in the home and community where healing is far more likely and affordable.

Policy-makers will need to decide what that means.

Maybe if we’re not subsidizing the behemoth, tax-exempt compounds charging facility fees for routine care, we’ll be able to more generously subsidize the urban and rural ERs that are struggling to keep their doors open.

This transformation can’t happen fast enough.

Between the predatory collections and billing practices I wrote about in my last piece, and the soulless torment of fragile patients like my sister, the world would be better without the vast majority of what hospitals are inflicting on us every day.

But dismantling a failing system requires more than my white-hot fury.

It requires reimbursement reform that stops cross-subsidizing bureaucratic sprawl.

It requires site-neutral payments that end the incentive to drag routine care into the most expensive square footage in America.

It requires regulatory relief that allows hospital-at-home models, independent surgical centers, community birth centers, home birth attendants, and virtual-first care to compete on equal footing.

And it requires political courage. Hospitals are usually the largest employer in every congressional district. Protecting their current business model is not the same thing as protecting patients.

We do not have to accept the ungodly status quo as the price of modernity. We do not have to confuse bureaucracy with safety, or institutional control with care. Systems built by human beings can be dismantled and rebuilt by human beings - this time around dignity, autonomy, and actual healing.

All Soviet empires must fall.

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My name is Katy, and I’m a Diet Coke addict. (Hi Katy).

True confessions time. I’m a naturopathic doctor. People ask me for health advice, and they’re not expecting the kind they get from an MD — the kind that says, “well, it’s zero calories so it’s better than regular soda.” From me, they expect something more along the lines of, “if your great-greats didn’t drink it, then it’s not fit for humans.”

And to be honest, I DO say that. Even about Diet Coke. Especially about Diet Coke.

After all, it messes with your gut, your brain and probably your metabolism in ways I tell other people to avoid.

Like a big fat hypocrite, I coach people to stay off the stuff the way a grizzled, toothless meth-head threatens to shoot his dealer in the head if he tries to sell to his sister.

For me, it started young.

Origin Story: A Generational Curse

My grandmother, all 4 foot 10 inches of her, was surgically attached to her glass bottles of Coca-Cola.

Her addiction transmitted seamlessly to my dad. With his heart condition and his waistline battleground, doctors gave him the business in his mid-40s or so.

His solution was to swap out the fridge inventory with Diet Coca-Cola.

I was twelve.

In high school, once I started to drive, I’d stop at the 7-11 on the way to school and arrive with a 32-oz Big Gulp full of heaven every morning.

Ah Yes, the Trauma Bond

It wasn’t just the morning 7-11 stop, I learned to love it all day. The sound of the can opening, the fizzy pouring over ice, right before the battery acid burn down my throat — if the Balm of Gilead had a sound, that’s it.

They say that the first step is admitting you have a problem and you are powerless to stop.

Many times over the years, I’d give it up for Lent in a fit of penitential zeal, and would last a few weeks before I weakened. (My resolve was not helped by going hog-wild on Sundays when Lent is quasi-suspended.) Surely, Jesus wouldn’t ask for permanent surrender, right?

When my little sister died a gruesome, protracted death from colorectal cancer in 2019, I made a solemn vow: that sure as hell wasn’t gonna happen to me. And so began my health journey.

The sobering facts about aspartame and the desire to embrace a more Earth-Mama identity gave me the impetus to ditch the “fridge cigarettes” (as a friend calls Diet Coke in an attempt to shame me into quitting). And I did quit. Well, at least at home anyway.

The problem was, I was away from home quite a lot, and my permission structure made it a nice treat when I was out and about. Every day.

The point is, I never really went cold turkey.

And so I’d slide back into relapse. With a sheepish tone, I’d ask my long-suffering husband to grab a 35-can pallet at Costco. Or five.

I’d tell myself that I was gaining too much weight on the kombucha that I had used to replace the fizzy acid zest. Or that I would just have one or two a day. And other lies.

Before I knew it, I was going through a pallet in less than a week, drinking no other liquids, even at night. Even first thing in the morning, the way I had in college.

So this article is an intervention for myself and maybe for you or someone you love.

Friends don’t let friends get hooked on Diet Coke.

Here’s why.

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Aspartame: Whispering Sweet Nothings

Let’s start with the obvious villain: aspartame.

It’s the king of all “non-nutritive” sweeteners, as they’re calling them these days. The human trials have fairly robustly failed to show that aspartame is going to kill us. They do however seem to suggest that it might kill animals, so that’s not great.

The obvious concern, cancer, seems to be intensely dose-dependent and overblown – for most people. The WHO only classifies aspartame as a Group 2B cancer risk, meaning that you have to hit twelve cans a day to approach the danger zone. (Granted, these are the same people who blamed COVID on eating bats.) But still, I’m just saying that certain heavy users (cough, not it, cough) maybe ought to be concerned.

So if it isn’t going to kill us, at least not that easily, what’s so bad about aspartame?

Aspartame acts as a domestic abuser showing up with flowers but depriving us of consistent support and nourishment.

Our brains evolved to associate sweetness with incoming energy (calories).

With aspartame, the sweetness arrives but the calories don’t, creating a reward-prediction mismatch in the brain. What was supposed to be the feature might actually be a bug.

In animal and mechanistic studies, decoupling sweet taste from calories can create a disconnect between the sensory signal and the expected energy procurement.

When that mismatch happens repeatedly, the neural systems involved in appetite regulation may adapt in ways that increase subsequent sweet-seeking. Bottom line: you end up craving, and therefore likely eating more sweet foods — taking in more calories, not fewer.

Musso et al. (2017) demonstrated a proof-of-concept version of this phenomenon in biology’s favorite lab rat: the fruit fly. They described a “caloric frustration” effect, where exposure to non-nutritive sweeteners altered mental learning about sweetness and increased motivation to seek sweet foods.

Broader reviews of sweet taste, reward pathways, and energy balance (e.g., Murray et al., 2016) suggest this mechanism is biologically plausible, even if the size and scope of the effect in humans remain uncertain.

This tracks for me.

Since my most recent relapse onto the all-Diet Coke hydration plan, I’ve noticed that my cravings for carby sweets have jacked up to eleven, with increasing intensity. It reminds me of a car’s seatbelt warning that starts gently, but turns into a screeching schoolmarm if your disobedience continues.

Your body is saying: “Listen honey, if you’re going to put out an amber alert for calories, I’m going to send the national guard to kick in doors until we find them.”

While randomized control trials tend not to show increased diabetes, obesity or other metabolic chaos among aspartame users, the observational studies do show an association. Back in epidemiology school, we learned to conclude from that sort of paradox that there’s usually a related third factor not being captured in the observational studies. This factor, called a confounder, is associated with both the outcome (obesity/diabetes) and the exposure (aspartame).

“Experts” (since COVID, I always put that word in quotes) have suggested that the people drinking aspartame are the same ones that are already at risk for metabolic problems because they are overweight or have some other risk factor.

My theory is that one confounding third factor could be the amber-alert-for-calories phenomenon that’s driving the apparent relationship between aspartame and metabolic risks.

Caffeine: Thirst that Lies

Caffeinated drinks, when they become your primary source of hydration, have a few subtle effects worth noting. In regular caffeine users, the classic diuretic effect is largely blunted — your kidneys adapt, and you’re not actually flushing out more fluid than you take in.

What does seem to happen, however, is that caffeine contributes to dry mouth and altered thirst perception. You can feel parched even when your body isn’t meaningfully dehydrated. In that sense, Diet Coke starts to behave like a self-licking ice cream cone: a drink that temporarily relieves dryness while nudging you to take another sip.

It’s almost as if Coca-Cola intended to create an addictive beverage that makes you think you need more when you don’t.

The Battery-Acid “Hit”

There’s something undeniably refreshing about that biting, acidic hit. You addicts know what I’m talking about.

Diet Coke is to my taste buds and brain what a good exfoliation is to my face: it wakes things up, makes me feel kind of amazing for a second, and distracts me from whatever stress, boredom, or anxiety might be driving the bus.

I notice I throw back the most cans in the middle of stressful, frenetic days - when I’m busy, keyed up, and don’t like the way frustration, overwhelm, or fear feel in my body.

Better medicine would probably be a few deep breaths, some sunshine, singing Copacabana out loud, or some other low-tech nervous-system hack.

But It’s 99% Water, Right?

Coca-Cola’s manufacturing process for Diet Coke starts with heavily filtered municipal water, often using reverse-osmosis–style purification.

Minerals are then added back, not because Coke cares about your nutrition, but to stabilize the chemistry and ensure it tastes the same everywhere in the world.

That means that if Diet Coke becomes my primary — or sole — source of hydration, I’m opting out of whatever modest but real contribution mineral-rich water can make to electrolyte balance and acid buffering.

While most essential minerals come from food, water as our primary hydration still provides a steady background supply of minerals that support nerve, muscle, and acid–base balance. Replacing that with a highly acidic, essentially non-mineralized beverage may not cause outright deficiency, but it’s also not neutral.

This may be why I’ve developed leg cramps and accelerated dental erosion since my latest fall off the wagon.

The dental piece, at least, is not controversial: Diet Coke has a pH around 3, squarely in the range known to erode tooth enamel with repeated exposure – more acidic than most drinking water and comparable to vinegar or citrus juices.

At home, our drinking water comes from a nearby mountain spring (findaspring.org), filtered naturally through the Appalachians and picking up calcium, magnesium, potassium, silica, and other dissolved minerals along its path to my jug. Its pH is typically close to neutral.

I’m starting to think that swapping that out for an acid-washed soda all day long may be an exercise in lifelong low-grade demineralization.

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Aluminum. Microplastics. Repeat.

I drink most of my Diet Coke from aluminum cans poured over ice.

Modern cans are lined with plastic to keep the aluminum from leaching into the drink. That lining is now marketed as “BPA-free,” which is comforting in roughly the same way “natural flavors” (like MSG) or “low tar” (still tar) once were.

Heavy consumption can creep toward a meaningful slice of what regulators call the “safe” weekly intake threshold. And that’s on top of the aluminum dosing we’re already getting everywhere — food additives, processed foods, deodorant, and the near-universal use of aluminum cookware. Each source looks trivial in isolation. Together, they form a low-grade, always-on exposure that never quite trips an alarm.

But aluminum isn’t inert filler.

At higher or chronic exposures it interferes with bone mineralization and nervous system function. Regulators will tell you this still falls within “safe” limits, but those limits are built for averages, not for outliers who stack exposures day after day, year after year, like life-long Diet Coke-heads.

BPAF is Still Plastic AF

So about that BPA-free lining of the can. “BPA-free” does not mean bisphenol-free. BPA is just one member of a larger chemical family, and Coca-Cola won’t say whether their cans are lined with BPA’s cousins — like BPF, BPS, or even BPAF (yes, that’s real).

As endocrine-active compounds, they’re up to the same estrogenic shenanigans as BPA. They can interact with hormone signaling — often weakly, inconsistently — which can be hard to suss out when we’re all already reeling from hormonal chaos from so many other sources. Add in the growing evidence that these cans shed microplastics, and what you’re left with isn’t a single obvious toxin but a background hum of chemical interference accumulating over time.

When regulators assure us that all of this falls “within safe limits,” it’s worth remembering how those limits are set. They’re rarely derived from independent, long-term human data on cumulative exposure. More often, they emerge from industry-funded studies, negotiated risk thresholds, and regulatory frameworks designed to answer a narrow question: Does this cause obvious harm quickly enough to justify restriction?

Regulatory capture doesn’t require bribery — it just requires that the bar for action be set high enough, and the definition of harm narrow enough for commercial expediency.

Now I like the current commissioner, but the FDA is not your mom. And all these approvals happened before his time anyway.

FDA exists to decide what companies are legally allowed to sell — not what you should be using as a hydration strategy.

So yeah, Diet Coke is terrible for you. And me.

Whaddya say we try to shake this thing?

The Case for Cold Turkey

Stick with me.

I tried super-tart kombucha to recreate that SHAZAM you get from the first few sips of Diet Coke. The SHAZAM, yes. The metabolic fix, nope.

Kombucha still has sugar (or fructose), still has caffeine, and still clocks in at 50–70 calories. Swapping a sweet, caffeinated drink for a slightly less-sweet, less-caffeinated drink doesn’t fix the metabolic signaling problem. It just puts a probiotic spin on it.

The keto and carnivore crowd are right about one thing (and many other things too): sugar needs its own 12-step program. Its grip reminds me of trying to extract our teenage son from the Dave payday loan app (how is that kind of predatory usury even legal?).

I’m increasingly convinced that Diet Coke is making it worse by keeping the sweetness craving roaring all day.

So here’s my plan:

• Carbonate my mountain spring water with a SodaStream

• Splash with lime juice at first, less over time

• Lots of ice for the refreshing blast

If quitting a “zero-calorie” “diet” drink is the price of appetite mastery, I’ll pay it.

Goin’ cold turkey.

I’ll report back.

You are and always have been your primary care provider.

It doesn’t matter whose name is on the intake forms, who you call when you’re sick, or how elite your doctor is. Nobody cares about your health more than you (okay, maybe your wife does — I see you, bro).

You’ve lived in your body every minute of your life. You notice subtle changes. You run pattern recognition. You test hypotheses. You already act as the world’s leading expert on your own body.

As we discussed in last week’s article, the placebo effect is one of the most powerful drugs on earth. It works through a three-part cocktail: healing rituals, safety signals, and, most important, trusted authority.

If you accept that you are the most consistent authority on you, you can unlock the rest of the cocktail. Not by rejecting medicine, but by reclaiming agency.

Although the materialist “experts” try to deny knowledge found outside a medical journal, both they and you already rely on inner knowing every day — anticipating danger in traffic, smoking out a teenaged daughter’s lies, knowing that you don’t need to quit your job, you just need to sleep more (or vice versa).

What if you intentionally honored this reliable expertise as part of your healing plan?

And what if you took the other elements of the placebo effect — healing rituals and reassuring safety signals — and crafted your own treatment protocol?

You can tap into your own placebo power, no matter if your illness is anxiety, chronic pain or cancer. There are no guarantees, but the placebo effect is your best leverage in The Art of the Heal.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Your Placebo Playbook may not be the entirety of your plan. There is an important place for conventional medicine for many of us.

Write Your Own Prescription: Intentional Rituals That Signal Healing

When we enter a hospital and go through the rituals of intake, surgery prep, kind welcomes from nurses, stripping of our worldly garments, and hooking up to machines, our subconscious mind is receiving the message that help has arrived and healing is on its way.

That signal is often where recovery begins.

Research on “sham” surgeries shows that people can heal even when the procedure itself does nothing — because the ritual of undergoing what seems like a surgery is good enough for your subconscious mind.

That’s the power of the healing ritual.

When you receive care in a medical facility, you take time out of your work day and your routine schedule, and you do something different. People on chemo or dialysis have very different rhythms in their daily schedules, because they’re following those healing protocols.

To activate the placebo power in your own life, you too need intentional disruption: something that feels like a treatment protocol, even if it’s non-medical.

Important caveat: this is not to say that healing rituals must become your full time job. Live like someone who is healing, but not necessarily like a full-time patient whose identity is wrapped up in a disease label.

Healing rituals are prescriptions you write for yourself, and can include a number of the following evidence-based elements:

• A major dietary shift — whether plant-based, ancestral, keto, carnivore or something else — signals that there’s a new sheriff in town to your body and can turn on healing almost better than anything else. If it’s real food that can be found in nature, rich with nutrients and free of poisons, it’s a win.

• Move outside. Humans were made to move about in nature. Only sick or dying people didn’t and our ancient subconscious wiring interprets indoor sedentary days as a death sentence. No matter how serious your symptoms, find a way to move, even a little, outside. The benefits are overwhelmingly documented.

• Community and connection. We’re pack animals and we die without a tribe — fact. Loneliness is the new smoking. Facebook friends don’t count – find ways to be in person with other humans, especially ones that support you and make you laugh.

• Personalized practices. Consider any other ritual that resonates deeply with you. There’s a podcast or influencer for every biohack out there, so be discerning, whether it’s a sauna, grounding, supplements or tea. Close your eyes and ask for guidance. If it feels like medicine and you believe it’s beneficial, your body is more likely to believe you.

  
  Next: How to switch off the stress physiology that's blocking your healing—and the questions most doctors expect you not to ask.

Safety Signals: Soothe the Lizard Brain and Restart Healing

The autonomic nervous system — our lizard brain — has one toggle: “safe” or “unsafe.” It only switches on healing when it feels safe.

Placebo research teaches us that treatment delivered in hospitals works partly because the environment signals safety — smiling staff in special uniforms, calming spaces, the sense that you’re in good hands.

Many of us live with the toggle permanently switched to “unsafe,” and that fight-or-flight stress physiology, often originating in childhood, underlies many pathologies:

• Shallow breathing

• Increased heart rate

• Increased blood pressure

• Hypervigilance, pupil dilation

• Circulation changes drawing blood away from extremities toward vitals

• Adrenal hormones blasting through the body

• Glucose and fatty acids flooding the bloodstream

• Digestion practically stopping

• Detoxification shutting down

• Fertility functions turning off

This sequence, designed to outmaneuver a grizzly, is at the root of many disordered processes that can turn into chronic inflammation, pain, tumors, or autoimmunity.

That’s why one of the most important elements of your placebo protocol is to replace (or supplement) the safety signals that we get from being in the medical system with our own set of safety signals.

Create a daily safety protocol from the menu below or your own alternatives.

Meditation or meditative prayer has a physiological effect in the short and long term that has been exhaustively documented. The studies show that personal prayer is more effective than intercessory prayer by others at a distance. Focus your sessions on breathing, trust, and love, rather than pleading, demanding, or negotiating.

Interrupt the obsessive thoughts that take over when we’re struggling with illness. This is a hard-wired survival adaptation designed to help us escape the grizzly. But it’s the opposite of a safety signal and it turns off healing and keeps stress physiology on high alert.

The practical way to rewire that unhelpful thinking is to create a custom set of safety distractions and practice implementing them every time you catch yourself spiraling, or even at the first hint of negativity.

My favorite is singing all three verses of Copacabana, preferably with dancing and acting out the lyrics. I also love wrestling on the floor with my dog. An abbreviated version is picturing my dog adorably bouncing through a meadow, sharing her joy for thirty seconds with my eyes closed and a smile on my face (smiling actually cues the parasympathetic nervous system to relax you).

Lose the SVU. Purge your TV time of all dark, crime/procedurals or anxiety-inducing thrillers. Remember the story of public intellectual Norman Cousins who recovered from a crippling, life-threatening condition with comedy TV and belly laughs. Faithful readers will have noticed that The Princess Bride and Parks and Recreation references make regular appearances in my writing, because, well, they make me happy.

Bullet out your blessings in a daily gratitude log. It may sound cliché, but the research on the impact of gratitude on health is rock solid. It dials down inflammation, insulin resistance and immune suppression caused by fight-or-flight.

Treat your symptoms as a message, not a betrayal.

Most of us understandably just want some white-coat to do something and make our symptoms stop. But our bodies are ecosystems that are part of nature, and nature never randomly goes on the blitz or breaks. Nature adapts.

Symptoms are the check-engine alert that our subconscious mind is sending our conscious mind through our body. Paying a mechanic to turn off that alert without doing anything else is counterproductive in the extreme.

Don’t shoot the messenger. Cultivate curiosity rather than contempt toward your symptoms. Ask yourself:

Sherlock those symptoms — they might be signaling a toxic exposure, nutritional deficiency, a battery depletion related to sleep, sunlight or nature deprivation, repressed anger, self-devaluation, trauma or childhood pattern.

Symptoms and illnesses can often expose situations in our life that have to change. They might be the way our subconscious mind is telling us to cut the crap, lose the deadweight, break free from toxic people, situations, or jobs. Sometimes the most powerful placebo is taking a tangible step away from whatever is sucking our life-force. In this way, we’ll look back on our illness as an incredible gift.

Watch your language, as your mother would say. Speak about your condition as a “healing phase” and your symptoms as “healing signs.” Call yourself a human and not a [fill-in-disease] patient.

Avoid taking verbal possession of your disease: “my cancer,” “my asthma,” “my bum knee.” If you’re part of an online group that identifies primarily as victims of a certain disease, run.

What About Trusted Authority?

White Coats Are Consultants. You’re the CEO.

We’ve been through how to establish the healing rituals and safety signals. But your subconscious mind won’t trust those rituals and signals enough to actually heal you if it doesn’t trust YOU.

You can’t trick your subconscious mind or lie to it. You have to provide evidence in order for the mind to believe enough to change.

Trusting in yourself as a wise expert authority therefore becomes the foundation of the placebo effect. But most of us don’t trust ourselves — we’ve been conditioned to trust the white coats above all else. As the placebo literature demonstrates, much of the power of a doctor’s orders to initiate healing comes from that trust we have in the doctor, and sometimes less from what was actually ordered.

We must reclaim our own confidence in order to dissolve that victimization vortex or reverse the hex of a scary diagnosis or doomsday prognosis.

Here are some hacks to build trust in your own expertise and power.

1. Trust your gut. Your intuition is guiding you every day. But so often we ignore that little voice inside. That email you know you shouldn’t send. The weird vibe you’re getting from your teenager. The inexplicable sense that this is the year to replace the roof.

   Scripture speaks of a logos – the Greek word for the immaterial and powerful mind that lives in all of us and is connected to the absolute Logos that created everything. If you’re made in the image of an omniscient God, then your intuitions might be far more worthy of attention than you think.

   Set an intention to obey your intuitions, starting right now. I’ve never regretted doing so, and have regretted many times that I didn’t. Honoring your inner wisdom signals to your brain that you’re not a victim, you’re a BOSS.

2. Log your wins. I like coupling those I’m-grateful-for bullets each day that we talked about earlier with a few more bullets of daily wins. This provides evidence to your subconscious mind that you are crushing this healing business.

   Maybe it’s that you got through two verses of Copacabana today. Maybe it’s that you didn’t murder your brother-in-law. Maybe today you downed one less Diet Coke than yesterday (that one’s for me). Maybe it’s that you got three minutes of sunlight before the cold made you want to cry and run inside.

   The point is, you’re honoring your own agency. That converts to placebo-powered greatness.

   

3. Honor the white-coats as useful mechanics. Doctors have useful but limited tools — drugs and surgery, for the most part. Receive their orders or recommendations as offerings to be evaluated.

   You are not there to be infantilized, shamed, fearmongered or otherwise under their thumb. Good doctors will position themselves as supporting players on your team, rather than as the coach.

   For the others, your attitude of disinterested observer of their recommendations — rather than groveling peasant — can be disorienting and may cause unpleasant reactions.

   Bless their hearts.

Grit your teeth and ask:

• What are the data and literature behind your recommendations?

• How many cases have you seen with my similar symptoms and history?

• How often do you perform the procedure you’re recommending?

• What is the absolute number, percent, and nature of successes you’ve had with your recommended protocols?

• What is the duration of the relief the protocols provided to your other patients?

• What do you know about the root causes of my symptoms?

• What was the improvement rate in the placebo group in clinical trials of your recommended protocol?

• How much greater was improvement in the treated group compared to the control group — in other words, how much of the treated group’s improvement was likely attributable to placebo?

Your secret weapon here is the ability to thank the doctor for the suggestions and promise to take them under advisement.

And then walk away.

Not because you’re going to do nothing. But because you’re going to consider the doctor’s offering as part of a larger menu of placebo-powered options. Because you’re the BOSS.

You don’t have to be rude — this role reversal can sometimes be primarily a mental shift, especially when your doctor is a decent human.

But this shift is a powerful message to your subconscious mind that you are the trusted authority, recruiting and quarterbacking a variety of consultants and subject matter experts to your team as they present their offerings, opinions and tools. The team might include doctors, holistic practitioners, nutritionists, pastors, family members, the bowling league, puppies, comedians, among others. All have healing powers that might be right for you.

You get to choose the tools that resonate with you. You leave the rest, because you are your primary care provider.

The Secret Ingredient

You’ve trusted in your own authority and prescribed yourself healing rituals and safety signals. That’s the placebo playbook. Well, almost.

There’s one last thing — vision.

Scripture teaches that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1).

When the placebo effect works, it’s because the patient envisions that the package of healing rituals, safety signals and submission to trusted authority are going to work.

The superpower here is your own imagination. Create an intentional daydream.

I don’t mean just closing your eyes and repeating some mantras.

Instead, concentrate your attention on imagining how it will feel to be healed.

Name those emotions — the freedom you’ll feel, the things you’ll do when you’re healed. Let yourself bask in the joy, the delight you’ll take in health, the time you’ll get back and how you’ll spend it.

This can be as little as doing this for 30 seconds every time you go to the bathroom — using that throne time to feel all the healing feels, smiling the whole time, visualizing your life.

It can also be an hour-long guided meditation or a week-long retreat. I like to write out this vision, record myself saying it and replay it regularly, using an app like Think Up. The details are all up to you.

But don’t skip it.

Your immaterial mind — like the divine Logos whose image it bears — lives outside of time and space. Your subconscious mind does not know the difference between what’s happening tangibly in space and time and what’s just taking place in your imagination. It experiences them both as equally real.

So sing at the top of your lungs.

Binge Parks and Recreation, Blades of Glory or Monty Python.

Snuggle with a dog or a cat or a husband or a toddler.

Build in all the chicken soup you can — the nutrient-dense kind and the for-your-soul kind.

Listen to the doctors and evaluate their offerings with detachment.

Honor your symptoms with curiosity and patience.

And let the placebo-powered healing begin.

You're here because you believe healing belongs to you, not the system. Please consider sharing this publication with one person in your life that needs to hear that message.

Epilogue: Just to prove I mean it…

Imagine this: the most powerful drug isn’t locked in a pharmacy — it’s sloshing around in your skull: free, refillable, and with zero adverse effects (except maybe too much hope).

I’m talking about the placebo effect, that sneaky Jedi mind trick. But what if we could unpack its secrets and bottle it as an essential element in our own healing?

Back in epidemiology school, one of the most memorable things I ever learned was that the biggest modifiable predictor of people quitting smoking wasn’t family, fear, or government-funded PSAs — it was a doctor telling them to.

That’s the power of trusted authority.

We’ve turned modern medicine into a religion, with priests in lab coats prescribing penance, and prognosticating doom or salvation.

Doctors have an unmatched level of trust in society, and with that trust comes power and authority. We believe they know what they’re talking about. We believe that their protocols will work.

But what if the secret sauce behind the healing they deliver isn’t the protocols but the belief itself?

The placebo effect isn’t just woo-woo — it’s hard evidence that your mind can change your biology. That expectation can trigger your body to make its own opioids for pain relief, tweak immune responses, and heal arthritic joints.

By “bottling” it — harnessing expectation, meaning, emotion, and context – you can take significant power over your prognosis.

Early caveat: I’m not doling out medical advice here, and medicine absolutely has its proper place. If you’ve got a bullet in your belly, a bone sticking out, or a tumor blocking your colon, there’s nowhere on earth I’d recommend being more than an operating room in the U.S. If your organs are shutting down from sepsis, antibiotics are critical. If your kidneys have failed, I want you on a home dialysis machine at night.

But for a lot of the rest: we’ve ignored a massive lever that science keeps demonstrating matters way more than you think.

The evidence is wild.

The Science of Placebo – Your Mind’s Underground Lab

Placebo isn’t “fake healing” — and it’s not just the idea that pain or disease is “all in your head.” It’s your mind turning on your biology’s inherent adaptive capability.

You even have a built-in pharmacy–

• Dopamine boosts for mood,

• Endocannabinoids (your body’s own medical marijuana),

• Endogenous opioids for pain (without the criminal record),

• Oxytocin for calming and safety signals, and on and on.

Your mind can also work against you – snarkily called the “nocebo” effect – where you believe you’re given a poison or a curse, and your biology responds in kind.

A diagnosis can also be a nocebo, acting like a hex, and a prognosis as a sentence, locking in a bleak despair that tanks clinical outcomes and accelerates disease progression.

If all this sounds too “woo,” consider a more familiar example.

You’re walking home in the dark. You hear someone’s footsteps approaching a little too fast from behind.

Nothing has happened to your body externally. No attack, no words exchanged. But your mind is now in overdrive, and fight-or-flight physiology is switched on. Your heart rate quickens, your breathing shallows, your circulation changes, digestion stops, detoxification stops.

Because of your mind.

Your mind is the single most powerful influence on your biology. And it’s beyond your brain.

Your brain is processing the sound waves from the footsteps, to be sure. But it’s your mind that gives those footsteps the “unsafe” meaning that turns on the stress physiology.

This time of year, many of us reflect on the Incarnate Word becoming flesh.

The Greek word for, well, “Word,” used in this context is Logos, which connotes not so much the spoken word, but rather the intellect, the rationality, the system of coherence and meaning, the thoughts — aka, the mind.

Christians believe that we’re made in the image of God, and that, through that Logos, all things were made.

Well, if the Logos of God creates all physical reality, and we’re made in the image of that Logos, then it makes sense that our own logos has a creative power too, even if only a shadow of the divine version.

Indeed, the science suggests as much.

Consider a type of research called “sham surgery” trials.

In these studies, one group receives the standard surgical procedure while the placebo group undergoes a “fake” one: they’re wheeled into the OR, put under anesthesia, given an incision, subjected to some trivial poking and prodding, then sewn back up — without the actual standard surgery ever being performed.

The results will blow your mind:

• A 2002 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that sham knee arthroscopy improved pain and disability as much as real surgery.

• A 2009 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed the same thing when testing vertebroplasty (cement injection for painful osteoporotic fractures) v. sham surgery: no difference between actual surgery and fake surgery.

• A 2014 systematic review of randomized, sham-controlled trials, published in the British Medical Journal Open, found that across 55 trials, 75 percent showed improvement in the placebo (sham) arm, and more than half showed no difference between the real procedure and the sham.

• A 2015 systematic review of randomized, sham-controlled trials, published in the British Medical Journal Open, found that across 39 trials, the placebo effect (as measured by post-sham improvement) was on average 65 percent of the benefit of actual surgery. For some procedures, like weight loss or pain surgeries, it was well over 70 percent of the benefit.

Consider spontaneous cancer remission.

Many people think of cancer remission as something that only happens via chemotherapy, surgery, or radiation. But Kelly Turner’s best-selling book Radical Remission – a compilation of hundreds of unexpected remission cases – documents that in real life, people sometimes recover in ways that conventional science can’t yet fully explain, and that mindset, meaning, community, and lifestyle often figure prominently in their stories.

Are we measuring the wrong treatment?

The placebo effect is not just doing nothing and getting better by chance. The placebo effect is doing something and getting better because of it.

The common factor between both groups in placebo-controlled trials is that both the treated group and the placebo group believe something good is happening.

When a placebo-controlled trial is run, and there appears to be, say, 30 percent improvement in the treated group and 30 percent improvement in the placebo group, the typical interpretation is that the treatment doesn’t work, because there’s no difference between the groups.

But nobody ever talks about what IS working, which is the absolute wizardry hiding in plain sight.

It’s not that the treatment doesn’t work. It does work, 30 percent of the time.

The “treatment” is the healing ritual of: submitting to trusted authority, entering an institution that is respected by society as being built to heal. It’s taking off your worldly garments and adornments and putting on the classic patient gown. It’s getting caring attention from smiling nurses, buoyed by glossy photos and testimonials in the hallways, the placards thanking rich and important donors who valued this place enough to fund it, and all the other reassurances that this is the way. “You’re in good hands.”

It’s not that the surgery didn’t work. It’s that everything else about the healing ritual did work.

Your Biology Listens to Your Mind

Some have suggested that the placebo effect is just in your head and that your body isn’t really being affected. Your mind is just tricking you into thinking your pain (or nausea or some other symptom) is better without actually changing your biology. Apparent improvements are merely coincidental and the placebo effect is simply the name for what would have happened without intervention.

This theory is belied by the evidence.

The intervention is actually essential for the placebo to work. Doing nothing often doesn’t work. (And let me state again for the record that this article is not an endorsement of doing nothing.)

When you take out the ritual and its trusted authority and context, and you don’t get good results, that doesn’t disprove the placebo effect, it proves it. It shows that the experiences we have and the meaning we place on them are what change our biology. It does not imply that spontaneous healing would have happened without all that context.

When it comes to chronic illness or pain, there’s nothing spontaneous about healing.

Our minds and our beliefs and the meaning we ascribe to things say “jump” and our biology says “how high?”

A 2009 meta-analysis by Satin et al. found that depression was associated with a 25 percent higher risk of cancer mortality.

This is purely associational, meaning that we don’t know which comes first — the depression or the cancer progression and death. The nocebo effect would suggest it’s both. A cancer diagnosis is depressing. Biology is listening to the hopelessness and anxiety of that depression. The cancer grows, in part, as a result, which causes more depression. And the interplay continues, until death.

One of the strongest proofs that the placebo effect is real biology — not our minds playing tricks on us — comes from experiments using a drug called naloxone.

Naloxone is what ER doctors use to reverse opioid overdoses; it blocks the brain’s opioid receptors. In placebo pain studies, subjects are told they’re receiving a powerful painkiller but are actually given a saline injection. Many experience real pain relief anyway.

The placebo doubters would say that the degree of perceived pain is just driven by mind tricks, not by actual biology. But here’s the kicker: to test that theory, researchers conducted the study as normal, observing pain relief from the placebo injection. But then they gave the subjects naloxone along with the placebo. Their previous pain returned. The only thing naloxone does is block opioid receptors, which means the placebo had triggered the brain to release its own morphine-like chemicals. When naloxone was added, those endogenous opioids were blocked and the pain relief ended.

By the way, even when patients know they’re getting placebo, the placebo can still deliver.

Ted Kaptchuk’s work at Harvard Medical School’s Program for Placebo Studies (yes, that’s a real thing) shows that these so-called “open-label placebos” (where you know it’s fake) still reduced IBS symptoms, chronic pain, cancer-related fatigue, and even improved treatment retention in drug addiction trials.

What if medicine’s “magic” is mostly placebo in fancy packaging?

Population-level data on cancer treatment is sobering:

• A landmark 2004 analysis (Morgan et al.) found cytotoxic chemotherapy contributed only two percent of 5-year survival in adult solid tumors – most gains were not from chemo but rather from surgery, radiation, or natural history (including placebo effect or chance). That suggests that huge amount of the positive clinical trial results before FDA approval might have been placebo.

• A 2022 review, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, of hundreds of oncology drugs (including targeted and immunotherapies) showed median overall survival benefit of under three months.

• A similar review two years later, published in The Lancet Oncology by Huseyin et al. showed that only a third of new drug indication approvals that were approved using surrogate endpoints like tumor shrinkage demonstrate clear survival advantage of any time at all.

• A 2024 review by Liu et al, in JAMA confirmed that, when cancer drugs given “accelerated approval” by the FDA, usually by observing less meaningful endpoints rather than reliable survival data (usually in a rush to speed “cures” to patients rather than waiting on so-called “red tape” at FDA), it turns out that fewer than half the drugs later show any survival benefit, even after years of follow-up.

Nonetheless, most cancers that are “treated” – even with these weak-sauce or overly toxic chemo drugs – are more likely to go into remission than “untreated” cancers. In other words, the process of undergoing cancer treatment is more effective than the controlled trials of the chemotherapy itself would predict.

Doctors swear by the cut. Sham trials whisper: “Hold my scalpel.”

Accelerated approvals based on non-meaningful clinical end-points? Over half fail to confirm actual benefits later. White-coats have way less monopoly on expertise than advertised.

We’ve shredded the myth that healing is pure mechanics or pharmacokinetics.

Now the juicy part: real people who bottled this power and flipped the script on grim diagnoses.

Plus the exact steps to start hacking your own mind today.

Ready to uncork the placebo potion? It’s for those serious about agency.

Real Stories of Bottled Magic – Outliers That Teach Us Leverage

Data points are cold. Stories are fire. These aren’t guarantees — they’re proof of what’s possible when you bottle expectation and ditch nocebo spells.

One of the most famous placebo stories in the medical literature comes from a 1957 case report by physician Leonard Cobb. A cancer patient named Mr. Wright had terminal lymphosarcoma, orange-sized tumors, days to live.

He begged for a drug known as Krebiozen, despite his physicians’ skepticism. Within days of taking it, his tumors reportedly shrank dramatically. He was discharged and went into near-miraculous remission.

Shortly thereafter, Mr. Wright read news stories that Krebiozen was showing itself as ineffective and he became convinced that the drug wouldn’t really work. His tumors reappeared and he was deteriorating rapidly.

His clever physician, Dr. Cobb, told him that a new and improved version of Krebiozen had just been released and he administered this drug (actually a saline placebo). Mr. Wright’s tumors regressed again, his symptoms improved, and he rallied for several months. Later, the American Medical Association formally denounced Krebiozen as ineffective. When he heard this news, Mr. Wright lost belief entirely and he died shortly thereafter.

Modern placebo researchers cite Mr. Wright — not because his story is typical — but because it illustrates something uncomfortable:

In 1964, journalist and public intellectual Norman Cousins faced a dire diagnosis: ankylosing spondylitis, a crippling spinal disease for which he’d been hexed with a one-in-500 chance of recovery. Perceiving that the hospital’s rigid protocols, toxic food, stressful lighting and noise, and loss of agency were hurting him rather than helping, he checked into a hotel nearby.

His sympathetic doctor monitored him as he dosed himself with high levels of vitamin C and — most famously — prescribed himself daily marathons of Marx Brothers films and Candid Camera episodes.

Against all expectations, Cousins steadily healed, regained full mobility, and lived another 26 vibrant years. His story, first printed in a 1976 New England Journal of Medicine essay and later expanded in the bestselling Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient, reminds us that joy, humor, and an active role in our own healing can be true medicine. Cousins is a forceful demonstration of the power of agency, intuition and trusting in your own expertise.

Honest synthesis: These are stories and not guarantees. They demonstrate the power of your mind as leverage — perhaps the most important leverage — over what your body does next.

Back to our friend walking home in the dark. What if his pursuer suddenly calls out in his teenaged daughter’s voice, “Dad, wait! Slow down!”

All the biological threat-response he had turned on would immediately switch off and endorphins of relief and love would flood his body as he turns and welcomes this surprise encounter of his daughter with delight.

What if we translate that process into a longer version of a health journey, where the footsteps are symptoms of a fearsome disease? And what if instead of the daughter’s voice, our own voice and daily practices create a healing ritual that communicates to our subconscious mind and body that everything is ok and happening for our good?

How to Bottle It – Your DIY Mind-Pharmacy

Bottling placebo isn’t passive — it’s active hacking. Start here, backed by science:

• Reframe threats: See symptoms as healing signals from your subconscious mind to your conscious mind, using your body as the messenger (fever as immune activation, insulin resistance as a sign of stress response, inflammation as a rest request).

• Cultivate expectation: Daily visualization or mental rehearsal of a future healed state. Feel the heal of tomorrow today. Your subconscious doesn’t know the difference.

• Build meaning & social nets: Social connection is life. Release toxic emotions. Forgive to slash stress hormones.

• Ditch nocebos: Reject the hex of a scary diagnosis or doomsday prognosis. These are just words doctors use to match up symptoms and lab numbers with a certain drug or procedure from their short list of limited tools. Shift identity from “victim” or “[disease X] patient” to “resilient agent.”

• Amplify with habits: Concoct significant healing rituals to communicate to your body that you are a trusted authority (such as meditation), going to special places designed for healing (like exercise in a gym or nature), administer healing elixirs (such as food-as-medicine, certain teas, supplements, and so forth).

Doctors won’t script this — it threatens their authority. But you can brew it daily.

The Placebo Revolution

We’ve been sold the lie that healing is just mechanics: pills, protocols, and scalpels.

Science keeps shouting the truth: your mind is the ultimate bootleg pharmacy, serving up its own opioids, dopamine, and sometimes even miracles on demand. Bottle it with raw expectation, deep meaning, and unapologetic agency, and watch the white-coat nocebo empire crumble.

In the next post, we map out a more detailed Placebo Playbook: how to become your own Primary Care Provider, recruiting and quarterbacking white-coats and other consultants to your healing journey like a BOSS.