INSIGHTS | 19. Ray Peat - Part I

Ray Peat is a Professor of Physiology with an almost cult-like following. Not for religious zealotry, per se, but rather his opinions on the causes and remedies to illness.

Photo by Michal Matlon on Unsplash

Ray Peat is a PhD in physiology, and a fascinating figure that is followed by people who have some overlap in their ideas about health. We entertain the sort of assumptions that get us into trouble with the medical industrial complex.

Assumptions that, for example, would lead us to advise against giving experimental gene therapy to pregnant or breastfeeding mothers.

Inject the Pregnant | Fiat Medicine

Similarly, there are some who are trying to understand health and physiology from unorthodox and more harmonious perspectives. There is a growing field of medicine, called integrative medicine, which aims to unify our understanding of the physical world to provide guidance on how to lead a healthy life.

I think one of the core, even if fringe, leaders in this school of thought is Ray Peat.

The first of Peat’s article that I read blew my mind, so to speak. The clarity of thought and unification of known medical phenomena signalled that I had stumbled upon a revolutionary physiologist. Or, at the very least, an evolution of more traditional understanding.

While I learn from Peat’s work, I will be extracting and synthesizing his views & assertions.

For those interested, his work is available here: Ray Peat

Physiology

One of the first articles you will find on his website is a critique of modern physiology. In my estimation, he rightly directs the attention to the elephant in the room.

Understanding of human physiology is so reductive, haphazard, and incomplete that it rather frequently reaches for abstractions and intangibles to account for certain observations. The foundation of mainstream physiology is simply incomplete.

This physiological mythology has made possible a practice of medicine in which ‘genes’ and ‘a virus’ are regularly invoked to explain things that can’t be remedied…

The nature of genes and viruses are the two major revelations of my recent investigations into the foundations of infectious disease.

Although understanding genetics is important, it is nowhere near as important as we are led to believe, and further…its role in disease is more often than not, speculative.

So, it comes as no surprise that the second ‘explanation’ often used to plug the holes in our understanding of disease are viruses - essentially packages of genetic code.

Since the ‘discovery’ of the first ‘virus,’ virologists have spent the last 60 some years trying to blame increasingly more disease states on viruses.

One of the more common illnesses often blamed on viruses is cancer. I have written on this before, and you can check out the work of others like Peter Duesberg or Sebastian Powell.

Do viruses cause Cancer? | Virology Series

Peat’s view on physiology:

Physiology should be understood in terms of its geochemical setting, because otherwise basic definitions will be built up in the belief that life is discontinuous from its physical environment, separated by membranes, and maintained by the expense of energy mainly to preserve gradients across those membranes; while in actuality the chemical energy released by living substance is spent in renewing structures, and the gradients are mainly passive physical-chemical consequences of structure.

The first half of that statement illustrates a problem I have been struggling with within our modern medical framework:

“…basic definitions will be built up in the belief that life is discontinuous from its physical environment…”

That sentence-fragment gets at the heart of the problem within western medical thought. The idea that there is a clear physical distinction between you, your cells, the microbes on you, the earth you walk on, the cosmos and the other lifeforms that share the earth with you.

The reality is blurred.

Where do you end and the microbe on your skin begin? Where, exactly is this boundary?

Does this boundary you have imagined somehow protect you from interactions with that microbe? Do the respective machinery of both lifeforms ever interact? Exchange information? Does their input and output impact one another?

There are some who think this reductive view is an appropriate way to think about life, but if you pause for a moment and place this perspective in the totality of human understanding - it is the outlier. It isn’t even a powerful perspective, in that it doesn’t account for much of our observations.

On the contrary, it generates more problems than it solves.

The latter half of Peat’s above sentence can be understood more completely with the vital work of contemporary physiologist Gerald Pollack.

In this interview, Pollack breaks down his understanding of the role of water in physiologic life. If you find his ideas interesting, you can find a much more comprehensive (and very easy to understand) explanation of how this model accounts for cellular life in his book Cells, Gels and the Engines of Life. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and may do a review of it at a later time.

Cancer & Disease

Since the 'discovery' of the cell, modern medicine has aimed to reduce health & disease to the function of the cell. Peat suggests that this mode of thinking is a rather ancient one - growing out of the Platonic view that there are timeless pervasive 'forms' of reality, which is where our attention should be focused.

This perspective took hold as chemistry evolved, and the discovery of elementary particles allowed us to construct the building blocks of life with as much objectivity as we subjectively deemed appropriate.

Over time, the cellular basis of disease replaced the idea that illness resulted from imbalances in bodily 'fluids' or humors. An idea that has been elaborated for centuries, if not millennia, as in the tomes of Tibetan & Buddhist medical thought.

From the perspective of Modern Medicine, cancer arises when a single cell undergoes sufficient mutations that allow it to proliferate & spread unencumbered. This framework puts the physician in the role of a mercenary - tasked at finding every single copy of that cell, wherever it may be within the body, and destroy it.

Doctors find cancerous cells by:

• sticking cameras down your through, up your butt and in your lungs

• ordering radiologic imaging, which often requires the intravenous administration of heavy metals or inject radioactive tracers, in the case of nuclear imaging

• invasive procedures or full-blown surgery aimed at obtaining a tissue sample to study under a microscope

Then, treatment for cancer is some combination of:

• surgery, or mutilation, depending on your perspective

• Toxic chemotherapy, radiation, or radioactive tracers all of which have a single purpose

  • kill the cancer cells before killing you - side effects be damned

• and more recently, they have brilliantly decided to vaccinate people against cancer…which doesn’t work

All this is not surprising, as the framework used to understand cancer is not that different from infectious disease (based on germ theory). The aim in both cases, is to expose you to drugs that kill some life in hopes to kill the intruder, without killing you first.

One of my mentors would half-jokingly say about infectious disease training:

"If you can't kill the bug, kill the host!"

Even if you think this to be an unfair characterization of the field of infectious disease, it is certainly appropriate for the practice of oncology.

Whether by chemicals, radiation, or mutilation - parts of your body are sacrificed to rid you of the tumor.

Once it is accepted that cancer is a systemic disease, and that a tumor…is something more than a collection of defective cells, very different therapeutic approaches can be considered.

In the next part, we will explore the details of Peat’s framework for disease, inflammation, and cancer.

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