I was probably about 7 when my dad who would have been 66 years old told me about medicine’s Holy Grail for the fist time.

When I reached medical school it was common sense to me and probably to many of my classmates. Still the professors promoted their brilliant holy grail with enthusiasm and force. It was not merely the best tool for discovering medical truth, it was the foundational tool.

When you hear it as a med student, the Holy Grail sounds about like this: “Ya gotta hold everything constant except that one variable you’re trying to test, otherwise you’ll never figure out what’s causing what.”

In the minds of the gatekeepers today, this one-at-a-time dogma has long been an assumption they wouldn’t think to question, something like the tyranny of macro-evolution arising from random mutations… a bad joke that a growing number of scientists see through and question at great expense to their careers.

Fortunately, a few medical gatekeepers seem to be re-thinking the holy grail now as the concepts of synergy arise within complex living systems as well as within complex disease-causing systems such as our modern milieu of pollution, fast food, sedentary lifestyles and multiple chronic legal addictions.

To see how the medical grail has overlooked the obvious for years, consider the thought model of an imaginary deficiency disease that causes chronic giggling.

Our imaginary people with this problem ingest only three nutrients: A, B, and C. These three work together synergistically for optimal health and the suppression of the endless giggling syndrome (EGS).

Synergy in this case means:

1. A and B don’t do their job so well without C.

2. A and C don’t work well without B.

3. B and C don’t work well without A.

4. The combined effects of A, B, and C together are greater than what you would expect if you could measure the effect of each alone and add them together. It’s effectively like this: 1+1+1 is greater than 3 because of synergy within a hyper-complex biological system.

But here’s the old-school approach to our Endless Giggling Syndrome (EGS) with a typical experimental design that’s blind to synergy…

Cohort 1: The MD’s take a group of gigglers and give them an excess of nutrient A while holding B and C constant at the recommended daily adult level.

Results? Giggling persists.

Cohort 2: They take a second group of gigglers and give them a boatload of B while holding A and C constant.

Results: Nobody stops laughing.

Cohort 3: They take a group of gigglers and give them a large dose of C while holding A and B constant.

You got it: the sniggering remains statistically unchanged when compared to the control group (which was Cohort 4, a group eating a “normal” diet that was decided upon, incidentally, by a political committee in the 1950’s).

So naturally the mainstream sour-faced MD’s conclude that A, B, and C are ineffective against chronic giggling.

The study is easily published in a top journal, and later another academic institution replicates it at great cost.

Finally it reaches the public and becomes the scientific dogma that enables the infliction of CGS upon countless generations. “Don’t listen to internet sources, only the trusted news outlets,” they tell us. “Taking A, B, and C supplements just gives you expensive urine.”

By now you see the Holy Grail’s experimental design flaw, right? How would you have designed the study?

Yes, with common sense, the disinfectant needed now in multiple ongoing academic misadventures and dogmas across various disciplines.

Common sense would add a fifth cohort of chronic gigglers to the design and give them a high dose of all three nutrients at the same time: A, B, and C.

Suddenly you’re one of the few people who understands this particular flaw in the academic approach to clinical medicine, so unlike typical academic gatekeepers, you can now understand why Dale Bredesen, MD, PhD, a man who has literally reversed Alzheimer’s disease in hundreds of patients using his complex protocol, deserves a Nobel Prize and a mega-sized research grant.

Like you, Dr. Bredesen understands synergy and knows how to design a meaningful experiment around it…

Alzheimer’s disease is not a simple deficiency disease like the imagined outbreak of chronic giggling syndrome.

Alzheimer’s has multiple possible causes which usually work together synergistically to reduce the number of living neurons in the temporal and parietal lobes.

The physiologic complexity of the systems and the overlapping effects of the neuron killers make it tough to categorize the known, though not yet widely accepted, causes of Alzheimer’s disease.

Here’s a grouping of etiologies that may help you see what’s going on and remember some of them…

1. Toxins such as heavy metals, a few specific and extremely common mold toxins, many industrial chemical toxins, insecticides and the herbicides like glyphosate found in Beyer’s (formally Monsanto’s) Roundup that is used on GMO crops which were Intelligently Designed by humans to survive high doses of the Roundup poison (a binder of iron, manganese, zinc, and boron) so the plants can bring the toxin to your dinner table in copious quantities, sometimes having been sprayed after harvest to prolong shelf life. Ugly, but TRUE.
2. Metabolic issues like early insulin resistance (prediabetes) due to chronic carbohydrate overload (the rule in North America, not the exception), type 2 diabetes, and obesity.
3. Smoldering chronic infections like Lyme disease, Herpes simplex, chronic sinusitis, oral infestations by certain bacteria, and various microorganisms involved in the “leaky gut” syndrome (aka small intestinal bacterial overgrowth or SIBO).
4. Chronic inflammatory imbalances (not just lymphocyte infiltration, pathologists) that overlap with all the other categories and also include a few odd things such as gluten sensitivity, (both in the duodenum and systemically apart from any gut symptoms of “sprue”).
5. Deficiencies such as low oxygen saturation at night due to sleep apnea, COPD, and even subclinical pulmonary conditions (get a cheap device to check your oxygen saturation at night, this is a common and unrecognized problem!), vitamin D deficiency due to low sun exposure relative to the color of your skin (us white devils need less sun, people of color need a lot more), lack of omega 3 fatty acids (DHA and especially EPA, a powerful natural platelet inhibitor found in cold-water fish oil and produced by healthy human endothelial cells), a lack of type-4 sleep (these are the precious moments when the glymphatic system of the brain opens up and allows the toxic cellular metabolic wastes to flow out of the neurons and glial cells and travel to be cleared from your body by the liver and kidneys), low amounts of the hormetic stress upon skeletal and cardiac muscle by physical exercise (couch potato syndrome), low amounts of blood glucose during the night due to over-doing a vegan ketogenic diet without adequate protein and fat intake (my own personal super-stupid mistake several years ago), low levels of hormones such as testosterone (the golden hormone that has suddenly become pure evil in Western schools), estrogen (usually after menopause), and sometimes melatonin in older folks (if you take it, try for a low physiologic dosage of melatonin because the common higher dosages may reduce your dopamine and serotonin baselines and ruin your motivation to do things, a symptom of depression).
6. Vascular problems like atherosclerosis of the carotid arteries and the Circle of Willis (caused mainly in the US by chronic carbohydrate toxicity, aka the average American diet) and defects in the blood-brain barrier (with many causes and several associated diseases involving neurotoxins and inflammation entering the brain from the blood).
7. Genetic predilections, such as homozygous ApoE4 and multiple other single mononucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). The effects of a single ApoE4 gene seem to be readily avoidable. Even two copies (homozygous) have been effectively dealt with, we’re told by Dr. Bredesen.

Despite the entrenchment of medicine’s useful but fatally flawed habit of setting up experimental designs around the Holy one-at-a-time Grail, Dr. Dale Bredesen continues to make steady headway in his journey toward saving the human race from Alzheimer’s disease.

This monster disease begins at least 20 years before symptoms bring a person to the doctor. That’s why it’s a good thing that a young person like you has read this boring post to the end. Kudos.

And that’s why you need to get started in your 30’s or 40’s changing your lifestyle while it can make the greatest difference for you in your later years when you will be able to spend  some of  that Bitcoin you bought while you were young and uncharacteristically wise. (Yes, I own Bitcoin, but I’m older so I won’t be a billionaire like you may possibly become if you’re young and buy the dips, then hold.)

Dementia of various types as well as Alzheimer’s dementia are extremely common today. If you’re a US American, you’re at risk just because of our pollution, the way we build our homes with mold food (dry wall), and our carbohydrate-heavy lifestyles.

Dementia is one of the most horrible paths to what we call “death.” Don’t take the wide road.

But if you’re young and can’t help yourself, or you’re old and it’s too late to change, I have to say, death here is almost certainly the beginning of a life somewhere else, either within or beyond this amazing wonder we call our Universe. So don’t despair. Life goes on and takes us each with it. It’s a virtual certainty.

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Synergistic Love,

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD

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