Defy Medicine Without Dying

How ice baths, not drugs, are keeping me alive

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N63K2eRVorQ

Should we listen to medical doctors who prescribe drugs that don't cure disease?

Summary

• I've adopted several habits that some doctors say will kill me, but I'm not worried.

• Popular medical misconceptions with regard to heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, sex function, and skin cancer are keeping patients sick and dependent on drugs.

• Chronic illnesses originate in mitochondrial dysfunction and the insulin resistance that accompanies it. May daily ice baths are keeping my mitochondria healthy, despite the advice of online influencers who might say otherwise.

Why Aren't I Dead Yet?

Since I started posting about ice baths, health, and resilience, a number of seemingly well-meaning people have told me, out of what might be a genuine sense of concern for my well-being, that I am sure to being speeding towards an early grave. They have implored me to recognize that I'm doing several things that are proven to accellerate my demise.

These are the lifestyle choices that, according to my critics, will surely kill me:

• I refuse all vaccines. I will not take so much as a tetanus shot. No flu shots, no shingles vaccine, and certainly no mRNA COVID shot. I won't do it, and there's no shortage of popular medical doctors, politicians, and University administrators that insist without these vaccines I am certain to die a horrible death at the hands of some preventable infectious disease. When I was a child in the late 1960's and early 1970's, my parents kept all my vaccines up-to-date. My Father was a Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where Jonas Salk, MD invented the polio vaccine. This was a point of pride for my Father, and he never thought to question it -- not even when live polio vaccine from Cutter Laboratories caused ~40,000 infections, 200+ paralytic cases, and 10 deaths in 1955. By 1966, when I was born, he evidently figured all the glitches had been worked out, and I was injected with everything my pediatrician recommended, including the measles vaccine. At age 13, I got measles, anyway. That was when I first began to question vaccines.

  When I had kids of my own, I delayed their vaccines. My idea was that it made no difference if I waited a few years to give their immune systems a little more chance to develop, but when we moved to New York State in 2007, the schools weren't going to put up with it and I had my kids roll up their sleeves. It was later that I became anti-vaxx and it was Suzanne Humphries, MD book Dissolving Illusions (Humphries & Bystrianyk 2013) that convinced me. The data presented shows that it was civil engineering -- i.e., basic sanitation and environmental regulation -- that caused rates of infectious disease to shrink by 90% or more prior to programs of mass vaccination.
  

• I drink raw milk. I think raw whole mile is delicious, and I drink about a gallon a week. Many medical doctors and Twitter experts say this is dangerous, which is why it is illegal in many states (Aprea & Mullan 2022). They tell me that between the years 1993-2006 there were 1571 reported cases, 202 hospitalizations, and 2 deaths associated with raw milk consumption, that "raw milk is not inherently safe and carries a significant food poisoning risk with its consumption," and that "there is no evidence that raw milk has any inherent health or nutritional benefit (Lucey 2015)." There are two problem with the critics arguments: 1) Leafy green vegetables cause more food-borne infectious disease than any other type, being several times more dangerous than raw milk even after adjusting risk for consumption levels, but for some reason are not held to the same standard of safety as raw milk (Heckman 2019), and 2) none of the claims dismissing the gut microbiome benefits of raw milk are credible. When researchers in Ireland actually measured the effects of raw milk on the gut microbiome, they enrolled twenty-four participants with no history of raw milk consumption in a twelve week trial that added raw milk from a local dairy farm to their diets. As we might expect, researchers measured increases in the genus Lactobacillus in the gut at the conclusion of the study program (Butler et al. 2020). Because these bacteria are recognized as beneficial for immune system modulation, metabolism, gut health, mood, neurological, and cardio-vascular health, these researchers concluded that consumption of raw milk had health benefits via modulation of the gut microbiome that had otherwise escaped those scientists studying only the macronutrient effects of pasteurization.
  

• I practice daily ice baths in freezing cold water. I've already reviewed many of the popular criticisms of my daily ice bath practice in my article Critics of Cold Plunge, and you've probably heard or read about all the terrible things that are going to happen to me any day now. With total confidence, online influencers seem certain that my heart will stop, my penis will shrink, my adrenals will "burn out" (whatever that means), I'll prematurely age my skin and other vital organs, and if none of that kills me slowly, at the very least I will die of hypothermia or some other strange adverse reaction to the cold.
  

• I eat lots of dairy and animal fat. In addition to the raw milk, I drink a lot of heavy cream, eat tons of butter, eggs and lots of bacon and fatty cuts of beef. When I was a child, my Mother told me that eating too much cholesterol (eggs) and animal fat would be the death of me. She switched our family to corn-oil margarine, because some scientist at Harvard promised her it was healthier. She was wrong, and she died of dementia, all the while eating seed oils and refined carbohydrates. There have been several studies of the necessity of animal fat in the human diet to maintain good health. The most dangerous policies in public health was predicated on the "diet-heart hypothesis" propagandized by Ancel Keys, PhD. It was Keys that first suggested President Dwight Eisenhower's heart attack was due to excess animal fat in his diet, and not the six packs of cigarettes the President was in the habit of smoking every day. Since then, an enormous mythology has been maintained with regard to the dangers of a high fat, high cholesterol diet. The problem is that the opposite of Keys is true. For example, Stephen Cunnane, PhD points out that the brain is made from fish and animal fat. That is, fats are essential for healthy development and function of the human brain (Cunnane 2005). And in her book Big Fat Surprise (Teicholz 2014) author Nina Teicholz, PhD describes a massive apparatus for scientific fraud that was constructed to support Keys and his bogus ideas about nutrition. In the ten years since publication, more and more evidence has emerged that shows cholesterol and animal fat in the diet protects against heart disease.
  

• I will not wear sunscreen. Despite living in Phoenix AZ, I will not wear sunscreen. Most dermatologists think I'm death-by-melanoma waiting to happen, but the data I've seen disagrees with them. People who get more sunshine do sometimes have higher rates of skin cancer. However, those cancers are less serious and the higher sun-exposure people typically live longer than their screened and shaded counterparts.
  

Medical Misconceptions vs Mitochondria

In the six decades since I was born, a pattern of misconceptions has come to dominate medicine and damage health and life-expectancy in the United States. The institutions that are supposed to safeguard our health have instead perpetuated and popularized these misconceptions, and pharmaceutical companies have been profiting from them.

In every case, the amazing thing is that the accepted, unquestionable dogma taught in medical school follows the same pattern:

• a blood test or some other marker is identified that results in overdiagnosis of an asymptomatic disease, or the new disease name is given to a set of symptoms that seem related but mysterious in their origins,

• a drug is invented and approved that will not cure the disease, will not remedy the underlying cause(s) or risks, but might result in some modest improvement in the marker at the expense of other deleterious side effects,

• physicians will tell their patients there is no cure, and that they must remain on the new medicine for the rest of their lives,

• as the deleterious side effects accumulate, new drugs are prescribed to ameliorate new markers and symptoms that have only appeared because of the damage being done by the original prescription -- while nothing is done to alter the conditions that resulted in the markers or symptoms that were used to justify the original overdiagnosis,

• the cycle repeats and rates of prescription continue to climb, until the patient either loses their ability to pay, or dies.

Medical Misconceptions and Resulting Recommendations

Illness	Causal misconception	Medical recommendation	Real cause
Heart disease	High LDL cholesterol, high ApoB, high	statins	mitochondrial dysfunction
High blood pressure	idiopathic, high salt, old age	diuretics, calcium channel blockers, ACE inhibitors	mitochondrial dysfunction
Type 2 diabetes	Genetics, obesity, lack of exercise	metformin, GLP-1, insulin	mitochondrial dysfunction
Erectile dysfunction	Heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes	PDE5 inhibitors	mitochondrial dysfunction
Low testosterone	Genetics, old age	steroids, hCG	mitochondrial dysfunction
Benign prostatic hyperplasia	Genetics, old age	alpha blockers, 5-alpha reductase inhibitors,	mitochondrial dysfunction
Skin cancer	Sunburn, sin exposure	chemical sunscreen, shade	mitochondrial dysfunction

Heart Disease

The medical mythology of heart disease is that it results from a narrowing of blood vessels resulting from an accumulation of plaque resulting from excess cholesterol. The standard recommendation to prescribe a statin to reduce blood serum cholesterol levels. This mythology is the direct descendant of Key's fraudulent diet-heart hypothesis, and it fails in several respects. First, people with what is considered "high" LDL cholesterol typically live longer. Second, there is no reliable relationship between total LDL cholesterol levels and heart disease. Third, it is not LDL cholesterol per se that causes plaque in the arteries, but the glycated fraction of that cholesterol. Glycation happens during blood glucose spikes, when a glucose molecule attaches itself to some other molecule in the bloodstream. The glycated molecule is altered in form and function by the attachment. Consequently, we can see that heart disease results from insulin resistance, and its underlying mitochondrial dysfunction, not from cholesterol.

High Blood Pressure

Another word for high blood pressure is hypertension, and it is the most important medical contraindication to cold plunge therapy. Almost all cases of hypertension are idiopathic, which means that doctors don't know what causes it, so they make some hand-wavy gestures to poor genetics, poor lifestyle choices including insufficient exercise, and reach for their prescription pad. Untreated high blood pressure can be dangerous. The problem is that the clinical standard for what constitutes "high" blood pressure has been changed so that more and more patient will meet the standard justifying a prescription, whether they'd benefit from the prescription or not (Welch et al. 2012).

There is no drug that will cure high blood pressure. The drugs all treat the symptoms, not the cause... which makes sense since doctors don't know the cause.

One thing we can be certain of is that salt does not cause high blood pressure. In fact, limiting salt intake fails to reduce blood pressure and can instead increase insulin resistance (Petrie et al. 1998). This video from Ben Bikman, PhD explains:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJMF6I6NYNY

Brigham Young University Professor Ben Bikman, PhD describes the research that shows limiting salt intake will not remedy high blood pressure.

Type 2 Diabetes

I've written several articles about Type 2 diabetes, its origins and the dangers of the current standards of care, like metformin. Just like with High blood pressure, doctors consider Type 2 diabetes to result from a combination of genetic and lifestyle factors. The diagnostic criteria typically involve measuring fasting blood sugar, or a glucose tolerance test. When blood glucose is too high, doctors will diagnose Type 2 diabetes.

The problem is, even before full-on Type 2 diabetes, the patient has been experiencing insulin resistance, which means that their pancreas is producing extra insulin just to maintain regular blood sugar levels. That is, the problem is not the blood sugar, per se. It's the excess insulin. The most popular medications to treat Type 2 diabetes are exogenous insulin and metformin. Although they will reduce blood glucose levels, they make the more dangerous problem of excess insulin even worse.

Erectile Dysfunction

My Ice Bath for Better Sex explains the mechanisms that result in vasodilation and the critical role of mitochondrial function in supplying a man's penis with sufficient blood to maintain an erection. In fact, erectile dysfunction is often considered the first clinical marker of insulin resistance, because they both originate in dysfunctional mitochondria.

Again, there is no drug that cures erectile dysfunction. The PDE-5 inhibitors (sildenafil, tadalafil, vardenafil, etc.) temporarily overcome insulin resistance in the endothelial cells that line blood vessels, allowing the mitochondria to produce sufficient NO to signal relaxation of smooth muscle tissues that would otherwise restrict blood flow. They do nothing to resolve the underlying causes of the mitochondrial dysfunction.

Low Testosterone

In my article Why Is Testosterone So Low? I describe the mechanism by which at all sex hormone synthesis originates in the mitochondria. It is on the inner membrane of the mitochondria that an enzyme called P450scc converts a cholesterol molecule into a sex steroid called pregnenolone, and all other sex hormones are downstream of it.

The dominant medical opinion is that low testosterone is the inevitable result of aging. That is, most doctors will tell you that there's nothing you can do if your total testosterone is dropping, except take steroids that they now call Testosterone Replacement Therapy (TRT)..

As you've by now come to expect, TRT does not cure low testosterone or address its underlying cause(s). It will boost blood serum levels of testosterone, and can improve quality of life in the patient, but also accelerates decline in the body's capacity to synthesize its own testosterone, leaving the patient dependent on the drugs for the rest of their life. Fortunately, therapies targeting mitochondria can also restore total testosterone levels to healthy, robust levels typical of young adults.

Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia (BPH)

You probably know the story of the prostate specific antigen (PSA) test result that scared the crap out of me and motivated me to get serious about ice baths. Because an elevated PSA is associated with an increased risk of prostate cancer, for a few months in my early 50's, I was convinced I was going to die young.

But that fear wasn't enough to convince me to go to my urologist. I probably didn't have cancer. Probably, I had what's called benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) which means my prostate was inflamed, but not cancerous. Doctors don't know what causes BPH and there are no drugs that will cure it. I cured mine with my daily ice bath practice.

Skin Cancer

Most dermatologists still advise their patients, and especially those with pale skin, to avoid the sun. Because I'm one of those blue-eyed, melanin-deficient people whose ancient ancestors were shaped by life at the edges of the North Sea, and there's a family history of skin cancer on my Father's side, I've been cautioned to protect myself against the ravages of the sun.

Yet, I live in Phoenix AZ. It's the sunniest, hottest city in North America, and I refuse to wear sunscreen. That's because the research on the dangers of UVB radiation has nothing to do with sun exposure. Any experiment using a tanning bed does not represent solar insolation. When UVB is isolated from UVA and infrared wavelengths, exposure is dangerous to the skin. However, that's not the way the sun works. At dawn, the first rays of the sun are in the infrared portion of the spectrum. As the sun rises above the horizon, it adds UVA. Finally, near its zenith, when the path through the atmosphere is shortest, UVB is added to the spectrum. There is no such thing as UVB from sunshine without infrared, too. Infrared protects skin against UVB damage.

Despite that protection, as a child I used to get bad sunburns at the beginning of the summer. What I've noticed in my 50's is that since I minimized seed oils in my diet, my skin tolerates way more sun exposure -- even in Phoenix AZ -- than it ever did before.

How To Not Die?

Health influencer Bryan Johnson, who made billions in cash transfer apps, coined the marketing phrase "Don't die" to advertise his efforts to extend his lifespan. According to Johnson himself, he does not do cold water immersion therapy and he has no plans to add it to his longevity repertoire. Instead, he favors more complex therapies like getting blood transfusions from his son, a stack of supplements, and hyperbaric oxygen therapy. I think I saw on Instagram that he recently added sauna. While the medical doctors would consider me scandalous, by the standards of most biohackers, I'm no better. I don't take rapamycin, NAD+, cleanse my blood, sleep in a Faraday cage, fast for three days, or do High Intensity Interval Exercise.

Never mind if my insulin sensitivity is excellent, my total testosterone is well above normal, and my inflammation markers are non-existent. By both the standards of the medical and the biohacking community, I'm a failure as a health-and-wellness influencer and you should never follow my example.

I'm an engineer. I build machines. I don't give medical advice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyvVtzhBfKM

This series of three minute lectures from my ice bath describes the insights I've gained from researching and writing about health and wellness in the last year.

References

• Aprea G, Mullan WM. Raw milk: benefits and hazards. InDairy Foods 2022 Jan 1 (pp. 19-46). Woodhead Publishing.

• Butler MI, Bastiaanssen TF, Long-Smith C, Berding K, Morkl S, Cusack AM, Strain C, Busca K, Porteous-Allen P, Claesson MJ, Stanton C. Recipe for a healthy gut: intake of unpasteurised milk is associated with increased lactobacillus abundance in the human gut microbiome. Nutrients. 2020 May 19;12(5):1468.

• Cunnane SC. Survival of the fattest: the key to human brain evolution. 2005.

• Heckman JR. Securing fresh food from fertile soil, challenges to the organic and raw milk movements. Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems. 2019 Oct;34(5):472-85.

• Humphries S, Bystrianyk, R. Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History. 2013.

• Lucey JA. Raw milk consumption: risks and benefits. Nutrition today. 2015 Jul 1;50(4):189-93.

• Petrie JR, Morris AD, Minamisawa K, Hilditch TE, Elliott HL, Small M, Mc Connell J. Dietary sodium restriction impairs insulin sensitivity in noninsulin-dependent diabetes mellitus. The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. 1998 May 1;83(5):1552-7.

• Teicholz N. The big fat surprise: why butter, meat and cheese belong in a healthy diet. Simon and Schuster; 2014 May 13.

• Welch HG, Schwartz L, Woloshin S. Overdiagnosed: making people sick in the pursuit of health. beacon press; 2012 Jan 3.

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About the Author

Thomas P Seager, PhD is an Associate Professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University. Seager co-founded the Morozko Forge ice bath company and is an expert in the use of ice baths for building metabolic and psychological resilience.

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