Bryan Johnson: I have an autoimmune disease. My stomach is eating itself

I was reading this and didn't understand the point until I got to this:

"I overhauled my medical team earlier this year. It was the rebuild to lay the groundwork for Immortals Care, our $1M a year protocol. With greater capacity, we revisited everything."

And realized this person is speaking the language of scams.

He probably can't any more (I have no idea what the implications of his stomach disorder are, but I don't imagine great). But if he can I hope he has a beer and just relaxes and gets some happy vibes for a time.

Will he share all or will he try to sell you some fad instead? I wish him the best, and hope he recovers, but my money is on him trying to sell something new that won't work.

Bad news #1:

I have an autoimmune disease. My stomach is eating itself.

Bad news #2:

2–5% of people have this, too. Likely more, because it hides.

Good news:

I'm going to try and solve it. Will share all.

As a kid, I ate sugar cereal, drank sugary soda, and gobbled down fast food. I had a few healthy years in my early 20s but then became a young father of three and began building a business.

Juggling that stress and grind, I let my health slip and gained 40 lbs. Within a few years I’d fallen into a deep, chronic depression.

Somewhere in that timeline, my body began developing an autoimmune process affecting my thyroid and then my stomach lining.

It’s called Autoimmune Gastritis (AIG).

My hypothyroidism got diagnosed when I was 21 years old with a routine blood draw. That enabled me to begin proactive management, supplementing levothyroxine and Armour Thyroid. They are the hormones my body should be producing on its own but wasn’t.

By taking these pills daily, my body was able to operate as though my thyroid was functioning properly. What I didn’t know was that something else was going on inside my body: my stomach had begun attacking itself. But there was no routine test to find out and I didn’t have any symptoms.

I just discovered it in May. I'm unsure how long I've had it. AIG causes irreversible damage: nutritional deficiency, anemia, and over a long horizon, elevated cancer risk. When AIG is discovered today, standard medical care concedes defeat, stating that nothing can be done except managing the condition, no matter how awful or lethal the effects.

Looking back over the past few years, I can now see the early signals we were picking up in measurement but hadn’t connected the dots. For 11 years, I’ve had low ferritin, without anemia. We continually tried to raise my iron levels with food and supplementation but nothing would work.

We chased the obvious solutions first. A plant-based diet means all my iron is the hard-to-absorb, non-heme kind. Hard training, sauna, and hyperbaric oxygen all raise the body's demand for iron. But none of them explained the core failure: despite me taking iron orally, trialing every formulation, and using every timing trick, none of the iron would stick.

What I didn’t fully appreciate until recently is how many stones my previous providers had left unturned. The low ferritin kept getting explained away but not fixed.

We need to get back to regenerative farming that already has time proven solutions for weeds (ok maybe not the same yield straight away but at least its sustainable)

If your soil is just a chemical laden dust bowl then there are 2nd and 3 order effects from that

I think the cocktails of experiments and supplements he’s done might not be good for the body.

There is an underlying fear of death that gets these guys as they age. They’d trade all the wealth they have if they could be $X years younger. That is I think worth “solving” more than some immortality thing.

That part that confuses me about his story is: not once does he mention the symptoms or side effects. Unless I somehow missed that part, or he's leaving them out for private reasons, his evidence and symptoms are entirely lab-based.

Bodies are weird and do "abnormal" things in reaction to the environment, stress, physical activity, nutrition, etc. -- not everything your body does has to be a disease, a disorder, or something wrong.

He talks about how if he hadn't spent (ungodly amounts of) money tracking his health over the years, he could be in worse off condition. But I'd bet that if he hadn't been tracking his labs, he would've lived a pretty normal life.

Maybe the outcomes at 80+ years might be slightly different? But bodies will still naturally deteriorate over time and humans cannot live forever.

This is really invasive and I definitely hope there were solid grounds to order this. If not, his team has a pretty gung-ho approach.

Also, we're continuously finding new roles that microbes play in autoimmune disorders, eg rheumatoid, a condition which I myself have managed to reverse from utterly disabling to perfectly functional. My rheumatoid was almost certainly triggered by microbial (bacterial/viral) activity.

H Pylori is ubiquitous, and quite transmissible. Medical journals describe the many ways it can transmit, even via flies landing on utensils, plates, etc. I do not suggest pylori is directly at work here, but the growing consensus when treating it is that reducing it, not eradicating it, may be the better approach. Considering the many ailments it might be contributing to, including some forms of cancer, protocols for managing it may be prudent. But pylori is one of many, and there are countless strains of it alone.

I got to the point where I would get rashes from touching certain materials. That persisted for over a year. Not presently though. Doctors literally mocked me though, and without the temptation of insurance to milk, would ave nothing to do with me, at times literally taunting me.

My last encounter with an ER doctor was due to nasal swelling and pain, accompanied by extreme fatigue and malaise. During the visit, he told me to simply use any sharp object to remove the internal swollen matter and consider taking antidepressants. As soon as he left the room, so did I, and promptly the hospital itself. Unconventional disorders can seem futile, but there are, until corporately aligned LLMs centralize information and substitute the internet altogether, many medical journals, case reports and research papers that remain available.

I had chronic high BP sitting often around 197/170. Doctors told me I'd need to remain on BP medicine indefinitely, and that it would almost certainly be irreversible. When I could no longer afford regular tests, my GP sent a certified letter dismissing me as a patient. That was the end of my BP meds. 4 years later, without any medication, my BP sits at ~128/87, which may not be ideal, but is better than it was while on the meds.

I will say, that if we can wangle a truly FOSS LLM, rigorously policed for corporate and institutional influence, a lot of what is presently ailing us could be resolved. Many answer are out there, many waiting to be conceptually synthesized, but there is a lot out there. And there is a lot of incentive going in both directions.

1. try taking Saccharomyces Boulardii asap, it is a very different kind of probiotic, a yeast actually, that tends to push out the bad and promote the good

2. JAK-STAT inhibitors are the only known drug to get the body to stop attacking itself from autoimmune diseases, but not a cure and unfortunately they cost an absolute fortune without insurance but importing from Canada and India is possible