Lithium, copper, and boron -- just three of the trace minerals rewriting the boundaries of modern physiology.
Forgive me. This post was supposed to go out tomorrow, but instead of saving the draft, I mistakenly published it. Ugh. Only a doofus would post twice in one day!
Anyway, for my mineral minions, this post also appears as Chapter 6 in the Table of Contents of "From Volcanoes to Vitality."
Somewhere along the way, "Science" decided that it had already mapped the entire mineral universe of the human body. We named a few dozen elements "essential," filed the rest under "trace" or "non-essential," and moved on -- as if biology would politely conform to its categories.
The "textbook" line above derives from a quip a mentor once delivered early in my career, when he was teaching me a new therapeutic technique. I had said something naïve along the lines of, "But in this textbook I was reading..."
He smiled and shot back, "You know who writes textbooks, don't you?"
I would eventually come to know what he meant. The "authors" of medical dogma -- the lab rats and department heads, the self-described physician-scientists of academia. They spend most of their time writing NIH grants (which bring in huge sums for the University and thus make them the stars of academic medical centers). When not writing grants, they run labs and experiments, "administrate" at high levels, and/or publish minimally novel, scientifically redundant papers.
The point of this salvo is this: those who write the textbooks are usually the ones who spend the least time with patients (fun and contradictory fact: I wrote a highly acclaimed and field-defining textbook called Point of Care Ultrasound, but that's different :).
The "real academics" also belong to the clergy of the "Church of RCT Fundamentalism," while the rest of us -- the frontline clinicians and folks like me, the "clinician-educators" -- serve in the trenches where theory meets reality and honest, helpful, and pragmatic RCTs are nearly non-existent.
Oh boy. Can you forgive this digression? Ok, where was I? Ah yes. I was playing off that line: "Nature doesn't read our textbooks."
Instead, early mineral biology manifested itself through the tiniest minerals, in ratios and relationships too subtle for Science's early instruments to detect (i.e., before the advent of ICP-MS technology). What they once dismissed as inert, we're now finding may quietly steer the chemistry of thought, immunity, and regeneration.
At our Leading Edge Clinic, we began noticing something peculiar: patients whose minds cleared, whose energy returned, whose anxiety softened -- not from new drugs, but from restoring the most minor elements. Primarily the element lithium, but I have come to learn (and you will too in this chapter) that boron and copper are similar -- barely measurable, rarely tested, quietly missing. Each time, it feels like finding a missing tile in a gorgeous mosaic.
So let's revisit these "non-essentials," beginning with a mineral once feared, then ignored, and now -- finally -- understood for what it is: a stabilizer of mood, memory, and meaning itself.
Lithium
Lithium deficiency is a good example of how a supposedly "non-essential" trace mineral deficiency can negatively impact health. In our three and a half years treating cognitive and mood disturbances in vaccine-injured patients at Leading Edge Clinic, we noticed that many patients suspected to be lithium-deficient showed clinical improvement after starting lithium orotate (LO) supplementation -- a form that readily crosses the blood-brain barrier.
Important: small doses of LO have nothing to do with the comparatively massive doses of lithium carbonate used in the treatment of severe mental illness.
Here I want to thank Michael Nehls, whose fantastic Substack post titled "Lithium, the Essential Trace Element" brought LO to our attention back in 2023. After reading it, Paul Marik, Scott Marsland, and I had an enlightening Zoom call with him to learn more. That call inspired my best man, Prof. Paul Marik to review the literature (excerpted for brevity):
According to published research and anecdotal reports, people taking LO have described:
Finally, (and most importantly for this longevity obsessive), long-term, low-dose exposure to lithium appears to confer anti-aging effects and may decrease mortality in evolutionarily distinct species.
Based on this body of research, I have been taking 5 mg of lithium orotate daily for a couple of years now and plan to do it lifelong (no COI here, but I like the Horbach brand -- good quality, inexpensive. I take 130mg orally daily (which contains only 5mg of elemental lithium), a dose far below known toxicity levels (my patients take between 5-20 mg daily). A six-month supply costs about $15 online.
This is my personal choice based on the research I reviewed -- not medical advice. Anyone considering lithium supplementation should consult with a qualified healthcare provider of course.