We’re All One Crisis Away From Taking Unlicensed Research Peptides—Asterisk

For health hackers, the risk is not experimenting.

“Unfounded and reckless” is how Dr. Eric Topol described the use of gray market peptides in a recent New York Times article. In some cases, I have to agree. (“You’re taking a drug without knowing what it is?”) But the implicit message in his statement, and in numerous recent articles critical of self-treatment with GLP-1s, is that deferring to the medical establishment is safe by definition, and everyone who steps outside the protections of the system does so in disregard of the danger. I would love for the former to be true, but reality has disappointed me.<br>For my whole life, I’ve had a set of nebulous symptoms no one quite knew what to do with. Eating protein or fiber left me feeling like something died inside me. I had the immune system of a toddler in day care and the energy levels of an attractive woman in her second-to-last scene in a Victorian novel. When I complained, mainstream doctors would test me for three things and throw their hands up if all the tests came back negative. Some people are just meant to spend 11 hours a day in bed, I guess.<br>So I tried alternative practitioners — people who use the words “integrative,” “functional,” or “naturopathic” on their websites. These people always advertise themselves as seeking and curing root causes rather than playing whack-a-mole with symptoms like mainstream doctors. Sometimes, this worked just like I wanted — a nutrition-focused psychiatrist paid attention when I said that drinking soda made protein and fiber more tolerable and proposed I had low stomach acid, a condition that is easy to test for and treat.1<br>For a while I hoped this was my magic cure, and it did help a great deal, but I still didn’t have the energy or immune system of a normal person.<br>I tried multiple alternative practitioners to fix the remaining problems, but it was all cycles of hope and disillusionment. I spent a year on leave from work for five dental surgeries to clear out infections in all four wisdom tooth-removal sites (the last infection was large enough that it needed two procedures). I took some devastating antibiotics that gave me seasonal affective disorder, but not much else (based on information from a friend, I tried inositol, which fixed it). Multiple providers told me that if I wasn’t going to eat one gram of protein per pound of bodyweight (which was impossible even with the stomach acid supplements), I was wasting their time.<br>Then, in April 2022, I fortuitously caught COVID-19. The actual sickness was quite bad, laying me up for five weeks. Even after my tests came back negative, I was exhausted and in constant pain. My doctor at the time was very good, which other people had noticed, so she was also very busy. If I wanted to see someone quickly, I had to see one of her underlings, whom we will call Dr. Lucky Idiot.

Maria Jesus Contreras

Dr. Lucky Idiot free-associated his way to prescribing me five different herbal interventions. A younger me might have demanded he explain what they did, or at least investigated them herself. But I was exhausted and already getting suspicious that research wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. I took every pill.<br>A few weeks later, I felt better. Actually, certain things were a lot better. Going into COVID-19, I’d been working very hard on protein consumption. I could get up to 50 grams a day if I made it my hobby and tolerated moderate discomfort. A few weeks into the herbs, I looked down one day at an empty tub of cottage cheese and realized I’d eaten 50 grams of protein in a sitting and felt fine. Good, even.<br>This was exciting in its own right — protein is crucial for approximately everything in the body — but I was also excited to learn what this said about my underlying issue. Surely this would be the clue that let us unravel the mystery of What Was Wrong With Me, which would suggest more treatments and possibly even a cure.<br>Dr. Lucky Idiot was less excited. When I asked why the particular herb (it turned out to be Boswellia, aka frankincense) was so transformative, he mumbled something about inflammation and considered the question resolved. As if I hadn’t taken 40 other herbs marketing themselves as anti-inflammatory.<br>That success was the exact moment I gave up on understanding my problems as the way to solve them. Careful cultivation had already solved all the problems it was going to solve.2<br>What was left was trying shit until something worked. I still use doctors as sources of ideas, but at the end of the day, I’m the one running the experiments and judging the results.<br>So when I see people buying exotic peptides from uncredentialed sources, I don’t see daredevils or lunatics abandoning a system that works. I see people with problems the system isn’t solving refusing to give up on themselves. And when people condemn this, I hear, “You don’t deserve a cure.”

The counteroffensive

I would...