By James di Properzio
Special to Vibrant Life

I am one of many people I know who were told they would be dead within a year—over eight years ago now.

I didn’t disagree with the doctors about the treatment they proposed, just about the prognosis.

Today I consider myself fully recovered, and the world’s only expert in my rare diagnosis told me that after eight years, it never recurs.

He also said that full recovery today is no longer unusual—unlike when I was diagnosed.

Medical decisions are messy

Medical decisions are some of the messiest choices we need to make. They’re always a gamble. That’s why doctors can advise us, but in the end the choices must always be ours.

Medical science changes so fast that the half-life of a piece of scientific information in medicine, which used to be measured in years, is now measured in months in many specialties. That’s a good thing: it means knowledge is changing and advancing. We should all be humble about the current consensus, and open-minded about what we will learn in the future.

Science isn’t a set of eternal facts that will be right forever. It’s the process of making the best model we can to understand how things work with the information we have right now. Then the scientific process constantly tries to improve that model.

You choose your quality of life

Medical decisions aren’t just about science, though: they are about your life. You must have the right to make decisions about how you want to live, not just how long. We all need to learn to consciously make personal decisions about our health.

If a treatment will prolong your life, but with a quality of life you don’t want, you can wisely turn it down.

If a treatment has only worked in a small number of cases, but you think it’s worth a try—you get to decide about your own life. Make your decision with all the best information you can find. Educate yourself, think it through for yourself. Listen to medical advice with curiosity: you don’t necessarily need to take the advice, but you can always take it into account.

If you can’t make your own choices for your body, there is no freedom. If you don’t own your body, you aren’t free.

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Freedom is self-determination

Freedom is self-determination, at every level, from your body and mind, to what you express, to the self-determination of a country, decided democratically and protected by a Constitution.

What medical treatments you choose, whether medically recommended and approved or not, are what you decide to do with your body. In a free country, there should be no question of any treatment being coerced on you, or of a treatment you have chosen for yourself being withheld from you.

Just because your state or country elects officials by popular vote, who then mandate health choices, doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for you to practice your own choices freely when they contradict the majority.

When what most people want overrules your personal health choice, that is Tyranny of the Majority, and it’s one of the things the framers wrote the Constitution to prevent.

Stand up for freedom of those you disagree with

Rights and freedoms aren’t things you can pick and choose piecemeal; you have to stand up for freedom itself, for all.

If you disagree with the broader national line on a health issue, don’t just fight to prove yourself right; fight for the freedom to have dissenting opinions.

Everybody thinks they’re right without realizing that there is an infinity of diverse ideas. Therefore, the freedom to think for yourself and hold an “unpopular” opinion must be a universal human right.

Make your own medical decisions. If you’re not thinking for yourself, you’re not free.

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About the author

James di Properzio is a writer, editor, and graduate of St. John’s college. His recently launched Substack, Liberty Street, argues that the idea that freedom is self-determination is the perfect starting point for discussion. He argues that we don’t need to agree with each other; in fact, it’s better when we all have our ideas. What we do need is to express our ideas in a civil discourse that respects our fellow citizens. The courage to have a real conversation—and to step out of the echo chamber—is what is needed to keep a free country fully functional, which is not where we have been during the 21st century. Subscribe to Liberty Street to be part of the conversation.

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Confession: I have a begonia problem.

I love begonias.

They’re colorful and beautiful and come in all sorts of shapes and sizes.

Kinda like people.

(I love people too. My mom? Not so much. She thought humans were ignorant and arrogant. She reserved her love for the microbes.)

Most people struggle to keep begonias alive.

Me, I tend to kill the plants that are “easy” and “low maintenance.”

But begonias … they love me as much as I love them.

I. Will. Not. Tell. You. How. Many. Begonias. I. Have. Right. Now.

Don’t ask.

I will also not tell you that last week a crazy plant guy named Fig Willie, whose home and garden are filled with plants (and hundreds of fig tree starts), gifted me a black magic begonia.

Along with the begonia, Fig told me about a brilliant banana peel hack.

He makes his own plant fertilizer out of banana peels.

How to make your own indoor plant fertilizer

Take 3 organic banana peels.

Put them in a half gallon mason jar.

Fill the jar with water (preferably filtered since the chlorine can hurt the plants).

Let sit for 3 or 4 days.

Use this banana peel water, which now has a lovely brown hue and is infused with potassium and other nutrients from the banana peels, once a month to water all your houseplants.

There’s only one problem with this awesome inexpensive easy-to-make DIY fertilizer: it helps the plants grow big and lush and happy.

Baby plants become big girl plants

Baby plants become big plants and big plants need bigger pots.

My plants are going nuts.

They’re so happy and healthy that I can’t give cuttings away fast enough.

And I maybe kinda sorta can’t pass up the opportunity to acquire new-to-me begonias.

Hush now. No judgment.

If you’re local to southern Oregon and would like a free cutting or a free houseplant, let me know.

Good beginner houseplants, especially if your home doesn’t have a lot of light

If you’ve never tried to grow houseplants, though, I’d recommend starting with an easier genus than begonias.

Aluminum plants

Pothos

Rubber figs

…are all great choices.

As are spider plants and the common varieties of philodendrons.

These plants all thrive in indirect light, only need watering once a week (depending on the humidity in your home), and can tolerate a fair amount of neglect and under watering.

Just beware: houseplants are health-inducing, happiness-producing, and totally addictive. Once you get started, you may end up becoming a crazy plant lady like me.

Do you love houseplants or love to kill them? Got a favorite houseplant or a favorite plant hack? I’d love to hear your thoughts on any plant-related topic—or anything else on your mind—in the comment section below. Just be kind and play nice, please. Unkind comments will be deleted.

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About the author:

Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D., is the proud mama of 83 houseplants, 6 golden doodle puppies (2 of which are still looking for their forever families), 4 children, and 1 ball python. Her readers seem to be most interested in her posts about vaccine safety, medical freedom, and natural health but she’d be happy to be writing exclusively about plants. She earned her B.A. from Cornell University, her M.A. from the University of California at Berkeley, and her Ph.D. from Emory. She’ll be teaching an on-line publicity class for book authors and author wannabes as part of an author bootcamp this month with literary agent Johanna Maaghul, and co-hosting a week-long writing retreat in Tuscany this October, with Anna Bazarnaya, owner of Maitre Verde.

Related posts:

Scientific Reasons to Have Houseplants
Make Your Own Plants, Here’s How
A Hack for Your (Spice) Rack

This beautiful villa in Tuscany awaits us. October 10 to October 16, 2026.

I’ll be teaching and co-hosting a high-level writing retreat in Italy designed both for published authors and highly motivated aspiring writers.

🔥 We have just 2 rooms left in the villa and only 3 spaces left for writers staying off-site.

🕊️ Three (3) days left to get the early-bird special!

Contact me or visit the website for more information.

Now for the pup date. That is, a puppy update.

ICYMI, five weeks ago my sweet golden doodle, whose name is Serenity, gave birth to six avocados.

I mean puppies.

They. Are. Amazing.

They used to be larval.

Now they are actual factual canines.

They’re eating yummy delicious mushy meat with ground bones in it and healthy extras (like egg shells, duck fat, and bits of salmon); nursing like they’re dying of thirst as often as Serenity will let them; learning to play bow, growl and play fight; trying to get the hang of playing chase (Serenity’s favorite game but they don’t quite get it yet); and making ALL sorts of mischief.

Serenity’s hungry all the time. And leaving huge poops all over the yard. Plus she has terrible-smelling farts.

Can someone please tell me why her farts smell so bad?!

They literally get bigger by the hour—the puppies, not the farts. They seem to be growing in their sleep.

Here are a few photos of these rugrats precious divine creatures:

I love showing off these crazy creatures. I even invited the clerk from the grocery store down the street over to see them today. She stopped by after her shift.

“Sorry about the dirt all over the floor,” I said sheepishly. (The puppies had tracked in pine needles, dry grass, and grit. I’ve been sweeping 3 or 4 times a day. It’s a lost cause.)

Aimee guffawed.

“You have PUPPIES,” she said. “Don’t worry about your kitchen floor!”

In other news…

Taking care of these puppies is something of a full-time job but I’m also teaching an on-line publicity class for writers in August, which is part of an Author Publishing Boot Camp. You get a huge discount if you sign up for the entire boot camp and $100 off when other writers sign up using the link you send them.

This will be a motivating, inspiring, roll-up-your-sleeves-to-learn-the-nuts-and-bolts-of-publicity-and-all-things-publishing virtual classroom experience.

A lot more affordable than coming to write with me in Italy.

I recommend you do both. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

NB: to come to the Italy retreat, unless you attended the first one last March or you’re coming with someone who has, you must first complete an application and have a Zoom call with the retreat director. There are no prerequisites—but an eagerness to learn and a motivation to move your work forward—for the publicity class or the Author Boot Camp.

If you made it this far (did you?), thanks for reading.

Drop me a sign in the comments to let me know you were here. (Let’s play Pop Quiz to see if you’ve been paying attention. Here are some questions to answer in the comment section: When’s my birthday? Who’s my friend Diane? What’s happening in Tuscany? Is a pup date the same as a pub date? Are there any angel tickets available?)

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About the author:

Jennifer Margulis is a strange person with an even weirder sense of humor is an award-winning author and science writer. Her last pair of glasses snapped in two but she finally got new ones (pictured below). She has taught postcolonial literature to non-traditional students in inner-city Atlanta, worked on a child survival campaign for Africare in Niger, West Africa, and appeared live on prime-time television in Paris, France. One of her books, co-written with retired pediatrician Paul Thomas, M.D., has sold upwards of 250,000 copies. Another of her books is gifted to every new patient thinking about getting pregnant or expecting a baby who joins Cammy Benton, M.D.’s integrative medical practice in Huntersville, North Carolina. You can read more about her and see some very outdated photos from back when she had not one but TWO eyes and a lot less gray hair at her website, www.JenniferMargulis.net.

My family has just flitted off to the movies.

Me, I’m on puppy duty.

Plus the new Odyssey movie is nearly three-hours long. I have work in the morning and a lot to do to get the word out about the writing retreat I’ll be co-hosting in Tuscany this October.

Besides, I like to go to bed early and it feels like a rare treat to have the house to myself.

My sense of calm and well-being aside, a fascinating new study by researchers in Japan suggests that it would be better for my health and well-being for me to join my family in watching the recently released Greek epic.

This new study, which was published in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health just five days ago, found that adults over 50 years old who stay culturally engaged are healthier—and biologically younger—than older adults who do not.

Activities like going to the movies, visiting art galleries, attending theater productions, or seeing an exhibit at a museum appear to help older adults live longer, healthier, physiologically younger lives.

You don’t have to be a busy bee every single day.

But this study found that adults who attended cultural activities at least once every other month shaved as much as three years off their aging clocks.

Cultural engagement in this study was based on how often people went to the movies, museums or art galleries, the theater, concerts, or opera.

Why would seeing a movie slow down your biological clock?

We need to socialize: There’s a growing body of scientific research that confirms that people—especially older adults—who engage in regular social activities experience less loneliness, less despair, and more well-being.

We humans need social interaction. In real life. (Leaving angry comments or heart emojis on social media posts doesn’t count.)

Attending art openings, visiting museums, and the like bring you in contact with other humans.

Those who enjoy culture eat better and are more physically active: In addition, according to the Japanese research team, people who engage in cultural activities tend to eat healthier food and be more physically active than people who don’t.

They cited a 2012 study of low-income adults in London that found that: “Arts participation was strongly associated with healthy eating, physical activity and positive mental well-being, with no evidence of confounding by socio-economic or sociodemographic factors.”

It improves our mental health: Those who spend time on cultural activities out in the world may also have younger biological clocks because these activities also improve mental health and lower stress levels.

The chicken or the egg?

So is it that participating in cultural activities causes you to age more slowly or is it that people who are healthier as they age tend to be more mobile, have more energy for socializing, and participate more in cultural activities?

This study doesn’t answer that question.

As someone who’s been struggling with a very difficult, rare, and unexpected health problem and who also loves all things art and many things music, I know how hard it can be to find the energy to go to cultural events, no matter how much you may want to.

Still, I find this study inspiring and I like the take-away: Book the ticket to that show you’ve been meaning to see. Show up for your friend’s art opening or author reading. Take yourself and a loved one to the movies. (Or go alone. That’s how my 75-year-old friend Dee met her third husband, walking out of a movie they were both attending solo.)

Close the computer. Get out more. Even if you don’t feel like it.

The puppies have finished nursing. They’re piled in a heap, quietly twitching in their sleep. Serenity is under my chair, resting. I’ll find out what everyone in the fam thought of the movie tomorrow. Right now, I’m going to bed.

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Related posts:
What a Stranger in the Park Taught Me About Loneliness
Five Ways to Lose a Friend
Why False Hope is a Truly Good Thing

My father is the son of Russian Jewish immigrants.

His parents lived through the Great Depression.

My grandfather worked as a plumber and my grandmother as a schoolteacher.

Money was tight. The family worried. A lot.

They finally saved enough money to buy a modest home in the suburbs but they never had money for family vacations. They played penny poker instead. My father worked during the summers. Unlike them, families in Mount Vernon, New York went on vacation.

To Europe.

Europe sounded so exotic to my dad. A place of wonder and mystery.

An independent-minded troublemaker who never got caught when he dipped the braids of the girl in front of him in the inkwell, my dad thought a lot about Europe.

Europe, he decided, didn’t really exist.

The Mount Vernonites who bragged about summer vacations overseas? They were telling tales.

My father confessed this to me one day sitting at the kitchen table when I was about ten or eleven years old.

“I had no evidence that Europe existed,” he said. “I knew it wasn’t real. I knew they drove to the airport, parked their cars, did something nearby for a week or two. Then drove home.”

I get it. Flying to Europe feels surreal. It’s hard for me to wrap my small human mind around being at an altitude of 7 vertical miles above the Earth in a titanium and aluminum cylinder breathing recycled oxygen with enough other people to populate a small village.

You fall asleep on one side of the Atlantic and wake up on the other—where the cars are so much smaller, the people are skinnier, the food is cleaner and more delicious; where the women wear high heels, and no one seems to have gotten the memo that smoking is bad for your health.

Before I ever had a chance to travel in a jumbo jet, I spent a lot of time traveling in my imagination.

That imagination was fueled by books.

I’m so grateful I grew up in a time before “smart” phones. I’m also grateful that my parents read aloud to us before we were old enough to read to ourselves, and that they limited our access to television.

My father always had a stack of books by his bedside. Frugal by nature and upbringing, he was nonetheless happy to buy me as many books as I wanted to read as a kid.

One of the happiest memories of my life is going to the bookstore with my dad, who never rushed me, to pick out anything I wanted to read.

I remember all of them.

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.

Up In Seth’s Room.

Wifey (the back cover said “hide it where the kids won’t find it.” I showed it to my dad and he bought it for me. How I love Judy Blume. And my dad.)

Books take you out of your everyday life and allow you a glimpse behind someone else’s curtain.

Traveling to Europe takes you out of your everyday life and allows you a glimpse into a world where things are done differently.

🇪🇸In Spain, the “c” on the faucet stands for “caliente,” not “cold.” I. Could. Not. Figure. This. Out.

🇫🇷In France, everyone eats cheese every day but very few people are overweight, and even fewer are dairy intolerant. They eat “sandwiches” of bread and chocolate. And they taste delicious.

🇮🇹In Italy, there’s evidence of the brilliance of the Roman Empire everywhere: the ruin of an ancient cobblestone street, a still-functioning Roman aqueduct, stone walls dating back to Etruscan and Roman times.

America is such a young country. Europe is a place teeming with ancient history. The tooth of a modern human was found in the Rhône Valley, near Malataverne, in a cave (called Grotte Mandrin) in Southern France. Scientists believe it is from a human who lived 54,000 years ago.

Yesterday at the dinner table I asked my husband what he liked most about Italy. Italian-American, he went to the land of his ancestors for the first time in his mid 20s.

“How I feel when I’m there,” he said after considering the question for a while. “Everything’s so interesting. I feel so alive. And so creative.”

All of which brings me to today’s exciting news.

As my regular readers already know, I taught a week-long writing retreat in Tuscany back in March of this year.

I billed it as a “literal” once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to study with me.

“Literally once-in-a-lifetime” because a year ago last February, I was diagnosed with stage four metastatic ocular melanoma.

Metastatic melanoma is considered an “incurable” cancer. In the allopathic model anyway.

In the Jenniferpathic model, I’m living the best life I can.

Three of my favorite things in the entire universe: travel, teaching, and books.

Which is why the “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity is happening again.

I’ll be teaching a week-long writing retreat in Tuscany from October 10^th to October 16^th, 2026.

An extraordinarily accomplished literary agent, who is closed to submissions but open to pitches from our participants, is coming from New York. We will get to spend an afternoon with an Italian publisher that specializes in books about health and wellness. Curated author head shots, platform-building, and social media training and support are all part of the experience.

I hope you’ll join us.

Space is very limited. Save your spot before July 31^st for our Early Bird Special.

>> Click here or contact us directly for more information <<

See you in Tuscany!

Love,

Jennifer

About the author:

Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D., is an award-winning science writer, health journalist, and book author. Her work has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and on the cover of Smithsonian Magazine. Internationally recognized as a champion of freedom of speech, gentle parenting, and natural medicine, she has taught writing on three continents. She’s performed the cancan in rural Vermont; appeared live on prime-time television in Paris, France; and worked on the literacy component of a child survival campaign in Niger, West Africa. She is currently based in Southern Oregon where she lives with one amazing golden doodle, six puppies, two children, and 87 houseplants (plus a long-suffering husband).

What writers are saying about the retreats:

“I’m so glad I said YES to Jennifer Margulis’ writing retreat in Italy last March. Not only did I gain a ton of knowledge, but I got to meet some other wonderful writers and see a beautiful part of Italy in the bargain. Working with and getting to know Jennifer was a huge highlight for me. Wherever you are in your writing journey, I highly recommend this experience.” ~Judy Rudin, novelist

“I attended the writers’ retreat in Lucca, Italy, the first such retreat I’ve ever been to. I was called to it for several reasons: the beauty of Lucca and northern Italy, the idea of being together intimately with a group of other writers, housed in a gorgeous villa, sharing meals and dreams. And the fact that it was being facilitated by a woman whose writings I deeply admire. It was a profound experience and I will encourage other friends of mine who are at any stage in writing a book, to attend one of Jennifer Margulis’ unique writing retreats.” ~Suzanne Arms, bestselling author of Immaculate Deception

“The moment I met Jennifer Margulis, I knew I had found a kindred spirit among the holistic health advocacy community. I found a capable and knowledgeable writing mentor, colleague and friend. Before attending Writing Under the Tuscan Sun in March 2026, I never expected that she would deliver one-on-one time with me to help tighten my prose. I also never expected expert coaching to pitch my book to our guest literary agent. Her greatest gift as a teacher helped elevate the personalized writing voice I lacked before signing up. I highly recommend Jennifer’s writing workshops. The promise of practical and real-life writing and the publishing advice she offers is a game-changer, and changed me as a writer.” ~Cynthia Chrisman, homeopath & memoirist

“Jennifer Margulis is a colleague, a fierce champion of human rights, and a proponent of choices in childbirth. She featured me in one of her books and I’ve interviewed her on my podcast. A fabulous writer, teacher, and speaker, she’s also a big-hearted person who really cares.” ~Stuart Fischbein, M.D.

“In March 2026, I had the pleasure and a great deal of fun attending a writers retreat in Lucca, Italy hosted by Jennifer Margulis and logistically supported by Anna Bazarnaya. Jennifer is a talented writer and great public speaker. She presented her craft with the upmost skill, intelligence and wit. She privately reviewed our work and gave great advice. She constantly provided learning experiences from which we all flourished. Anna, also a writer, took care of all of our logistical needs with a great deal of patience and reliability. Lucca is a delightful small town with a friendly atmosphere, nature walks, fun restaurants and great wine. It is close to the mountains and coast. It is a true relaxing retreat away from the large city vibe.” ~Saundra Davis, memoirist

“I attended a writing retreat with Jennifer Margulis and it exceeded my expectations in so many ways. A Jennifer Margulis-led writer’s retreat is about much more than improving one’s technical writing skills; she gives you all the tools to breathe life into your book, and fully bring it into the world.” ~Liz, fantasy writer

“Jennifer’s writing instruction is technically and creatively on point while also being gentle, supportive and reassuring in a way that suits both established writers and those making their first ventures into craft. The professionalizing moments and her sharing of networks (meeting an editor, advice on publishing) are invaluable.” ~Kalindi, published author of four nonfiction books

“As an editor, Jennifer Margulis makes excellent suggestions and provides helpful feedback. She is always right. (Don’t tell her I said so.) As a writer, she keeps my attention-challenged brain interested. Squirrel! Where was I? I’m a business man. ROI is important in my line of work. Anyone who gets to work with Dr. Margulis individually or take one of her writing workshops or classes is making a smart investment indeed.” ~Dan McDunn, contractor & blogger

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Last month we talked about how alternative points of view are being silenced.

All. The. Time.

Today I want to talk about how so-called “journalists” regurgitate status quo “science” cloaked as “investigative health reporting.”

News flash: There’s no investigation if you have a pre-determined point of view, you interview sources only to get them to give you the rope you need to hang them with, and you refuse to listen to nuance.

To wit, a new “investigation” from ProPublica about the dangers of raw milk (oh my god, we’re all going to die! Raw milk is so dangerous! The farmers selling it are making everyone sick! They’re just crazy MAGA people! They hug me when I don’t want to be hugged!) is a good case in point.

Instead of fair and balanced reporting, the article simply reiterates today’s cultural norms.

It’s a panic piece, designed to make the reader as upset as possible about raw milk, like the journalist seemingly was before she even started “investigating.”

Right at the beginning of the article we learn:

“Today, most scientists and health experts agree that raw milk has no significant, proven nutritional benefits over its sanitized counterpart, cannot treat or cure disease and subjects its consumers to over 100 times the risk of food borne illness, which can be especially dangerous for young children.”

“Most scientists and health experts agree,” eh?

That settles it then.

Because what most people do or agree about—especially most scientists—is always right.

Take Ptolemy’s model of the cosmos. A mathematician and astronomer, Ptolemy showed scientifically that Earth was at the center of the universe. That was the scientific consensus that was considered an immutable fact for over a thousand years.

Except that it was wrong.

Consensus isn’t Science. It’s groupthink.

According to the article, “At least 233 people have been sickened in eight outbreaks that federal and state regulators have connected to McAfee’s [raw milk] farm since 2006, and at least 40 of them have been hospitalized.”

Ah. Some actual numbers.

Let’s take a moment to examine them. Shall we?

In twenty years, according to the article, 233 people in America have become sick, purportedly due to drinking raw milk from McAfee’s farm.

That’s approximately 12 people a year. Of those 233 people, 40 were hospitalized. That’s 2 hospitalizations a year. There were apparently no deaths, though one young man highlighted in the article reports having ongoing chronic kidney problems.

We have no N.

What I mean is that we don’t know the number of people drinking raw milk from this farm per year. Or the number of people drinking raw milk in the United States. However, since the farm is grossing $30 million a year in revenue, we can assume that the number of people drinking their raw milk and eating their other raw milk products is relatively high.

What we do know, however, is that about 340 million people live in the United States.

We also know that—extrapolating from CDC data—in any given year, some 53,298 people are hospitalized for food borne pathogens from ALL food sources, and approximately 931 die per year.

So, your overall chance of acquiring a food borne illness in America is 1 in 6,379 per year, no matter what you eat.

• Two (2) people per year end up so sick they require hospitalization from McAfee’s raw cow milk.

• Fifty three thousand two hundred and ninety eight (53,298) per year from other food sources.

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If you’re eating pasteurized food, restaurant food, conventionally grown produce, meats of all kinds, and everything else in your fridge, you are taking a chance of being one of the 53,000 people who will get sick.

If you’re drinking raw milk from McAfee’s farm, you’re taking a chance of being one of the two people who get sick per year.

When you look at the numbers from a rational, science-forward perspective, you realize just how biased this article is.

“The article categorically dismisses the benefits of raw milk, which are huge,” says Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., a senior research scientist at MIT.

Seneff herself was duped by the mainstream mindset for years. The first time she tried raw milk was at a conference on nutrition where speakers, dairy farmers, and exhibitors were all talking about its benefits. Though she thought it was delicious, she felt nervous about drinking it.

“I felt this uneasiness about it,” she explains. “I’d been taught all my life that of course you have to pasteurize raw milk. I had really sunk into that concept.”

After trying it, seeing firsthand how delicious it was, and learning about the health benefits, Seneff started buying it for her family from a small-time dairy farmer who lived outside of Boston.

“I think it’s far better than pasteurized milk,” she tells me.

Pasteurization is a multi-billion dollar industry.

Raw milk production, usually done by homesteaders and cottage farmers, is not.

Given there is no financial incentive to study the benefits of raw milk (another fact that was left out of the article completely), it’s remarkable that we have some peer-reviewed literature showing its benefits.

We can certainly argue about the quality of this research. But ProPublica chose to simply pretend this research doesn’t exist, essentially pitting the word of one dairy farmer—and several of the seemingly deluded families that drink and enjoy the benefits of raw milk—against the so-called experts.

Among these studies:

• A 2011 study published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology by an international team of German, Swiss, and Polish scientists found that thousands of children living in farming communities across Europe who regularly drank raw farm milk were less likely to have asthma, hay fever, and allergies than children who did not. These researchers argued that natural components in raw milk—including heat-sensitive proteins and beneficial microbes (that are destroyed when the milk is subjected to high heat)—may have a “protective effect” on the immune system.

• A 2019 study published in the Journal of Complementary Therapies in Medicine found that after regular consumption of raw milk, immune-compromised adults experienced a strong improvement of their health, immunity, bowel problems, and mood. Women surveyed reported more improvements to their health after drinking raw milk than men.

• A 2020 meta-analysis by German and Dutch scientists reviewed the current scientific literature and also found that drinking raw milk benefited the immune system. These scientists reported that children who consumed raw farm milk early in life enjoyed a:

  • 42 percent lower rate of asthma

  • 34 percent lower rate of wheezing

  • 32 percent lower rate of having hay fever
    The benefits were seen both for children raised on farms and for children living in rural areas who weren’t farmers, suggesting that the raw milk itself is beneficial, independent of other benefits to living on a farm.

When our kids were little, we lived in western Massachusetts. We drove once a week to buy raw milk from a local dairy farmer. The milk came in glass jars. I was glad my kids were drinking a living food teeming with immune-enhancing properties that had not been sitting in plastic for weeks. If the milk went a little sour, we baked with it. I also made it into raw-milk yogurt.

My husband and I both suffered from intractable and life-compromising allergies our entire childhoods. Our children did not.

This is N=5 (our youngest wasn’t born yet) but none of us ever got sick from drinking raw milk.

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Most of us in the natural health world understand that it’s important to do everything we can to mitigate our family’s exposure to environmental toxins and maximize exposure to nutrient-dense nourishing food.

Most have read—or at least heard of—Michael Pollen’s work. He’s the food journalist who writes about the importance of eating real whole fresh pesticide and herbicide-free food.

We may not always succeed. But we do try to avoid what Pollan calls “edible food-like substances” and instead eat real, wholesome, healthy food.

None of us is perfect but we all do our best—with the goal being to feed ourselves and our children lots of fresh deliciousness and avoid ultra-processed crap-o-la.

Why? Because eating real food helps your body and your brain.

And because we’ve read—or we’re aware of—the research that shows that ultra-processed food is linked to early death, an elevated risk of dementia, stomach and bowel issues, infertility in both men and women, and several kinds of cancer.

But since we are all human and humans aren’t always rational, we don’t think to apply the same food rules to our pets.

Even people who’ve spent decades researching health issues caused by the one-two punch of overexposure to environmental toxins and the underexposure to nutrient-rich food often don’t think about feeding their dogs and cats ultra-processed additive-laden edible food-like substances.

It’s just what pet owners do.

Kibble is king

Kibble and canned food are easy, convenient, and shelf-stable. Open the bag of kibble, pour it into the bowl, and watch your dogs wolf it all down with alacrity.

They love it.

Canned food too.

Yummy.

And therein lies the problem.

We’ve all been duped by the relentless advertising; the fancy packaging; the gorgeous photographs; and all the promises of “balanced nutrition” and “expert formulated” and “Pro Plan” on the bag.

We Americans, even those of us who try to live more intentional lives, have been conditioned by the cult of convenience and the deep pockets of Big Ag and Big Food, as well as by the $65 billionpet food industry.

So it’s no real surprise that we’re all in the habit of feeding our dogs and cats ultra-processed edible food-like substances.

A habit is something you do without thinking.

But kibble isn’t food.

Ultra-processed canned dog and cat “food” isn’t food either.

Every formulation is different but both kinds of pet food are highly processed, subjected to high heat, and usually laden with artificial ingredients (including emulsifiers, thickeners, mold-inhibitors, artificial colors, synthetic vitamins, and so-called “natural” flavors that are often proprietary blends made in a laboratory).

The kibble package may announce that the pellets inside it are “grain free.”

This kind of pet food may contain certified organic ingredients.

And it may also be ultra expensive.

But almost all commercial pet food—especially dry kibble for dogs and cats—is ultra-processed.

This means the “food” inside the bag has been heavily processed, modified by high heat and pressure.

Don’t believe the advertising.

Don’t be duped by the beauty on the bag

The sleek-coated collie bounding down a hill in the larger-than-life advertising on the side of the bag doesn’t change the fact that the kibble isn’t healthy.

This “food” contains all kinds of synthetic ingredients—lab-created flavors to get the dog to eat it; mold inhibitors to increase the “food”’s shelf life; tar-derived coloring to make the food look more appealing (to humans anyway. Dogs are color blind).

Defiled dry dog food

It can also be contaminated.

Just last week a young woman in North Carolina found insects and larvae in the Purina kibble she purchased.

For the third time.

She posted a video about it on TikTok.

The video has gotten over 40,000 views.

Beatles, worms, spider webs, insect feces, and larvae have also all been found in dry dog food, with disgusted dog owners making videos to rail against the contamination.

But their disgust is misplaced.

The problem isn’t the insect and other contaminants in the dry dog food.

It’s not even the fact that these foods consistently test positive for high levels of aluminum; heavy metal contaminants like mercury and lead; arsenic; and plastic contamination as well.

The problem is that if you want your pets to lead their best, healthiest, most active, and tasty lives, King Kibble must be dethroned.

“But my dog eats kibble and he’s perfectly fine.”

A dog can live a long healthy life on kibble, sure.

Still, according to Rodney Habib and veterinarian Karen Shaw Becker, co-authors of the book The Forever Dog, that’s the exception not the rule.

I ate a lot of kibble as a kid, so to speak

I grew up eating brightly colored cereal like Apple Jax that left the milk pink in the bowl and Chef Boyardi spaghetti that fell into the pot on the stove in the shape of the can.

Ultra-processed foods contribute to the same health problems in humans and in pets.

These health problems include but aren’t limited to:

• Bowel issues like constipation and diarrhea, especially in older animals

• Brittle dry-looking fur

• Chronic inflammation

• Gut dysbiosis

• Increased risk of cancer

• Joint pain

• Lethargy

• Metabolic disease

• Unhealthy weight gain

Ultra-processed foods feed harmful bacteria

Ultra-processed food helps harmful bacteria survive and thrive. When these unhealthy and unwanted bacteria get out of balance, they crowd out the beneficial microbes that contribute to healthy digestion, cognition, and mood.

This is true for both our pets and our human selves.

Oxidized fats damage our cells.

Emulsifiers disrupt the incredible specialized cells called enterocytes that line our guts, allowing nutrients in but keeping toxins out.

Last week my friend’s daughter visited.

She brought her mini poodle with her.

My friend’s dog is 15 years old, a high-stepping mixed breed.

He’s the kindest, most good-natured, most active bundle of fluff you’ll ever meet. He eats a real food diet of pork, green beans, and sweet potatoes.

He eats one meal in the morning and another at night. He gets bacon as a special treat.

A rescue from the pound, he has a sensitive stomach. My friend tried giving him desiccated chicken hearts as a treat. They made him gassy.

Her daughter’s dog eats kibble.

Expensive kibble.

When her daughter’s dog got a taste of the real food, his tail went crazy, wagging with happiness and the unexpected deliciousness.

He got a taste of the elixir of life. And he refused to touch the kibble after that.

I didn’t feed my children baby food from a jar

My husband and I didn’t eat my meals from a jar—and did not want to—so we figured our children shouldn’t either.

Instead, we introduced them to whole real fresh organic foods, one at a time.

Ripe avocado is easy to mash.

Banana makes a lovely first baby food.

As do roasted and mushed sweet potatoes.

My dog eats a whole real food diet as well. Right now, she’s nursing six of the most adorable puppies on the planet.

Serenity’s hungry all the time. She gets as much healthy food as she wants. She’s also taken to eating at least one—but usually two—raw chicken drumsticks a day.

Before she got pregnant, she ate one to two meals a day. One meal I made her out of fresh raw ingredients and one I defrosted from pre-made raw pet food from one of several local butcher shops or the natural pet food store.

The bowl from scratch usually includes:

• Trim from the butcher shop (beef, pork, or another animal protein) or chunks of raw chicken (her favorite)

• A raw chicken foot or two

• One or two raw chicken hearts. She especially loves these when they’re slightly rotten. Yummy.

• A beef kidney

• A raw duck or chicken egg.

• A sprinkling of ground duck, chicken, or quail egg shell or half a crushed egg shell if I’m in a hurry.

• A green vegetable. Serenity is partial to green tea leaves. I also give her asparagus, broccoli, lettuce, kale, celery, and/or whatever other green veggie we have on hand.

• An orange vegetable. Usually grated carrot. Or a heaping teaspoon of pumpkin purée. Pumpkin hardens dogs’ stool so if your dog ever has diarrhea, mixing in some pumpkin will help.

• A fruit of some kind. Blueberries or raspberries. My dog is not a fan of any fruits or anything sweet so she will pull the fruit out of the bowl and leave it on the ground. Other dogs love fruit. Slightly green bananas are especially good for dogs. And humans.

• A splash of fermented cod liver oil.

• A generous teaspoon of plain yogurt or another probiotic food like sauerkraut.

  Vibrant Life is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re curious about what a less processed diet actually looks like for a dog, start small. Even one fresh meal a week is a step in the right direction.

The Forever Dog calls these “longevity toppers.”

The hardest thing about having an amazing four-legged furball in your life is that they don’t live as long as we humans do.

Though feeding your dog raw food may seem “difficult” or “inconvenient,” the few extra minutes it takes to assemble the ingredients is an investment in your puppy’s health and longevity.

And we all want our fur babies to lead long, healthy, happy lives.

If you made it this far (did you?), thanks for reading.

Love,

Jennifer

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Related posts:

His Lipstick Isn’t Out Though
The Lipstick Diaries Continued
The Avocados Are Coming
The Avocados Have Arrived!

About the author:

Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D., is an award-winning science journalist and book author. She’s the author of Your Baby, Your Way, and co-author, with Paul Thomas, M.D., of The Vaccine-Friendly Plan, neither of which have anything to do with dogs.

When you get diagnosed with cancer, or someone you love does, everyone on the planet—from cancer survivors, family, “friends” on social media, to strangers, doctors, and natural healers—starts sharing all sorts of cancer advice with you.

You’re suddenly regaled with myriad suggestions for what supplements to take; why you absolutely must follow the latest anti-cancer fad protocol; and how person X dodged the Grim Reaper and made a miraculous recovery by doing Y.

The very best thing about all of this unsolicited advice? It’s a mishmash of contradictions. Especially when the advice is about what you should be eating.

Follow a vegan diet!

Eat only raw meat!

Never eat raw meat, but become a total carnivore!

Water-only fast!

Don’t ever fast!

Carrots will cure you!

Carrots contain too much sugar, don’t ever eat them!

You get the idea.

It’s all a little overwhelming, especially at first. Especially when you wake up every morning surprised that you’re still alive.

Trying to get high quality information in this age of mind-fullness, artificial “intelligence,” and snake-oil sellers disguising themselves as caring healers is difficult.

And … if you’re lucky enough to lose your eye to ocular cancer (yay me!), reading anything on-line, which causes me both eye strain and headaches, is also challenge.

I’ve been doing my best to learn as much as I can. I know that cancer **is** curable. I remain stubbornly optimistic. I’m inspired by the stories of miraculous recoveries and the good folks who go from hospice to healthy. But it’s been really rough.

I don’t wish a cancer diagnosis on anyone. It’s devastating to watch so many friends, colleagues, and acquaintances die from this disease. And the suffering some of my friends have experienced is beyond anything I could have imagined before going through it myself.

Still, cancer is also very interesting.

Being alive is too.

I don’t want my body to be overwhelmed by this disease but I also find it curious—and sometimes even funny—that I have an extraordinarily rare cancer and I have somehow become the test subject in an (admittedly rather unscientific and messy) experiment.

My husband likes to say that curiosity is everything. I think he’s right.

Cancer is teaching me all the lessons.

“Beekeepers don’t get cancer”

Last year an apiarist told me about an old wives’ tale. She said the scuttlebutt in the beekeeping world is that “beekeepers don’t get cancer.”

Many anti-cancer protocols insist on zero sugar and no sweeteners of any kind, whether natural or artificial. But this apiarist is a firm believer in the healing power of honey, as well as in the immune benefits of bee stings.

All of this piques my curiosity. Is it really true that beekeepers don’t get cancer? And if beekeepers don’t get cancer, why not?

Is it the honey? Is it the bee stings? Is it that they’re spending most of their days outside in the healing sunshine, soaking up the vitamin D?

Is it that they’re also digging in the dirt a lot and we know getting down and dirty—playing in the dirt, keeping animals, growing organic food—helps us avoid chronic diseases, autoimmune disorders, and cancer, at least according to pediatric neurologist Maya Shetreat-Klein, M.D., author of The Dirt Cure?

Is it that most beekeepers usually live on farms, eat fresh, whole foods, and generally follow a more active and healthier lifestyle than many modern-day humans who eat ultra-processed foods and live sedentary lives?

Is it something else entirely?

Researching human health and longevity is notoriously complicated.

A cure for one person with cancer may have no effect on another patient’s disease. It may even accelerate cancer growth in someone else with the same diagnosis.

The pre-cancer Jennifer was such a know-it-all.

The Jennifer 2.0 is knowledgeable but nuanced, less certain, and much less judgmental.

So, I can’t give you a definitive answer about beekeepers and cancer. Like with many health questions, I’m not sure what I think. But I can share with you some of what my research has revealed.

Fuzzy chemists

Bees aren’t just adorable and wonderful and good for the planet in so many ways. They’re also little fluffy six-legged chemists and builders.

They make something called propolis—a sticky, resinous material also known as “bee glue.” They use this propolis to seal cracks in their hives, protect the colony from predators, and help keep certain non-beneficial microbes out of the colony, according to ScienceInsights.org.

Propolis is chemically fascinating. [1] Its composition changes depending on where the bees live, which flowers and other plants the bees are frequenting, and the season.

We have interesting data showing that propolis can be protective against cancer, and may also be an effective anti-cancer bee product for treating cancer patients.

This may in part be due to a compound found in propolis called CAPE: caffeic acid phenethyl ester.

Say that five times fast. I double dare you.

Why caffeic acid phenethyl ester (CAPE) matters

In a peer-reviewed scientific article published in 1996, a team of scientists from the University of Texas found that CAPE blocked activation of NF-κB. NF-κB activation is an inflammatory factor involved in immune signaling, inflammation, cell survival, and cancer-related stress responses. [2]

This is a little confusing and complicated—as is a lot of cancer biochemistry.

If I may simplify: blocking NF-κB activation is good and has the potential to help fight against cancer.

NF-κB matters because some cancer cells use inflammatory survival programs to avoid dying.

For example, in 2001 scientists discovered that NF-κB activity is required for tumor-cell survival in activated B cell-like diffuse large B cell lymphoma. [3]

CAPE has also been studied in gastric epithelial cells exposed to Helicobacter pylori, the bacterium linked to ulcers and gastric cancer.

In a 2005 study, published in the British Journal of Pharmacology, Egyptian scientists found that CAPE inhibited H. pylori-induced NF-κB and AP-1 DNA-binding activity in a dose-dependent way.

That study also found that CAPE reduced H. pylori-induced cell proliferation, inflammatory cytokines, and COX-2 expression. [4]

In an earlier study on colon cancer, a team of researchers in Taiwan found that CAPE inhibited capillary-like tube formation, reduced invasion by CT26 colon adenocarcinoma cells, lowered MMP-2 and MMP-9 activity, and reduced VEGF production in mice. [5]

VEGF stands for vascular endothelial growth factor. VEGF promotes the formation of new blood vessels that then feed nutrients to cancer cells. In the 2003 Taiwanese study when CAPE was given intraperitoneally (that is, administered via entry into the small bowel), it reduced pulmonary metastasis and lowered blood levels of VEGF.

CAPE has also been studied in breast cancer cells. In 2004, scientists in Japan found that CAPE appeared to help push some cancer cells from survival mode toward self-destruct mode. [7]

At the same time, another study, published in 2009, found that CAPE was eliminated rapidly after intravenous administration in rats, with a half-life of only about 21 to 27 minutes. [6]

Questions remain: What does it mean that CAPE has such a short half-life in vivo? Are these studies biologically relevant to humans struggling with cancer? What’s the best and most effective way to get CAPE into the human body? Does it do anything when taken orally as opposed to being administered intravenously? What kind of dosing do we need to give a human patient in order for it to be effective? And how do we source the propolis that has the largest concentrations of anti-cancer properties?

So we know—sort of—that propolis in general and CAPE in particular can help mitigate cancer-induced inflammatory, apoptotic, angiogenic, and invasive pathways.

Might this be one reason beekeepers don’t get cancer as often as non-beekeepers?

And then there’s the bee venom…

When I met with the apiarist last year, she did a sting test on me. Epi-pen and antihistamines in hand, she put a bee on my abdomen and had it sting me near my liver.

I love getting stung by bees. ~Said no sane person ever.

It hurt.

I also felt bad for the bee, whose life was then forfeit.

And I had a full-blown immune reaction, with swelling and redness and itching that started the next day and lasted for nearly a week.

Ouch.

No fun.

Pain notwithstanding, bee venom is touted as a powerful anti-inflammatory.

(An interesting aside: blue scorpion venom is another treatment that is used by integrative doctors to fight cancer. Blue scorpions are native to Cuba. I don’t know what compounds are contained in their venom but ever since I heard about this—when I was looking for an in-patient hospital to go to outside the United States—I’ve wanted to find out.)

Back to bees. Bee venom, which contains a mixture of bioactive compounds, has two peptides that are thought to be beneficial to human health. A peptide is a short string of amino acids and a building block of protein. The two peptides are:

1. Melittin, a 26-amino-acid peptide

2. Apamin, an 18-amino-acid peptide

Melittin is a main component of honeybee venom. It interacts with cell membranes and can rupture cells.

Cancer cells don’t like having their membranes disrupted.

(Neither do healthy cells.)

In 2020, an interesting and important study on bee venom’s effects on cancer was published in the prestigious journal Nature. [8]

An international team of scientists based in Australia and the United States found that honeybee venom suppressed growth factor receptor activation in HER2-enriched and triple-negative breast cancer cells.

Melittin was especially potent in aggressive breast cancer subtypes.

For the biochemists and uber science geeks: It appeared to suppress EGFR and HER2 phosphorylation, interfering with downstream PI3K/Akt and MAPK signaling.

Triple-negative breast cancer is notoriously hard to treat. HER2-enriched cancers are as well.

While that study didn’t show that bee stings cure breast cancer, it did find that melittin is biologically potent and mechanistically interesting.

Another study on ovarian cancer, published in 2012, found that bee venom inhibited the growth of SKOV3 and PA-1 ovarian cancer cells, increased death receptor expression, and inhibited JAK2/STAT3 signaling. [9]

The problem with bee venom, which is a problem with almost every potential anti-cancer treatment (including chemotherapy and radiation), is that it also has the potential to damages healthy cells.

Still, I think it’s fair to assume that beekeepers get stung by bees regularly, and that this is likely another reason for why they don’t get cancer as often as the rest of us.

But the best avenue for melittin as a cancer treatment is probably not having cancer patients get stung over and over again by bees.

Instead, scientists would need to develop a safe and effective way to safely deliver melittin so that it can destroy cancer cells without doing excessive harm to the human host.

One way to do this may be by suspending the melittin in microscopic globules of oil.

Scientists in China examined whether melittin-lipid nanoparticles designed to target lymph nodes could trigger a systemic anti-tumor immune response. [10]

Those experiments, published in Nature Communications in 2020, found that α-melittin nanoparticles promoted tumor antigen release in place, activated antigen-presenting cells in lymph nodes, increased antigen-specific CD8+ T-cell responses, and inhibited both primary and distant tumor growth in a B16F10 melanoma mouse model.

In that mouse model, α-melittin nanoparticles produced dramatic inhibition of both primary and distant tumors.

This study seems particularly important to me, perhaps because I have metastatic melanoma. It suggests that when melittin is packaged and delivered intelligently, it can become a local immune activator and an effective way to inhibit tumor growth.

What about honey itself?

Honey is a chemically complex substance that contains hundreds of different compounds.

Not all honey is created equal.

Honey can degrade over time. And many varieties of honey—like so many other foods—have been found to be contaminated with known carcinogens.

The mother of all honeys, known for its healing properties and used even in conventional medicine, is Manuka honey.

Manuka honey comes from bees that pollinate the Manuka tree, Leptospermum scoparium, a flowering tree in the myrtle family native to New Zealand.

A key compound in Manuka honey is methylglyoxal, or MGO.

In a 2009 Czech study of 61 Manuka honey samples, MGO levels ranged from 189 to 835 mg/kg, and antibacterial activity rose in close correlation with MGO concentration.

The Czech scientists concluded that MGO was the dominant bioactive compound responsible for the characteristic antibacterial properties of Manuka honey above about 150 mg/kg. [11]

Antibacterial properties, check.

Wound healing potential, check. (When an 82-year-old friend went to the doctor the other day for a wound on his leg that would not heal, they slathered the wound with Manuka honey and put a dressing over it.)

What about anti-cancer properties?

In a 2021 review article, scientists in Italy explained that MGO has a dual role in tumor progression.

At high levels, MGO can be cytotoxic and push cells toward apoptosis.

Apoptosis is programmed cell death.

It’s what we want healthy cells to do when they’re misbehaving.

When you have cancer, this normal, life-saving apoptosis shuts off. Cancer cells have unchecked growth, which is a problem since they will eventually grow themselves out of existence by killing the host.

At the same time, according to the Italian researchers, at lower levels, cancer cells may adapt to MGO stress in ways that actually encourage and support tumor progression, the opposite of what we want a cancer treatment to do. [12]

“Poking the bear” is how an ozone engineer named Steve (more about him behind the paywall of this post), who has dedicated the second half of his career to helping people fight cancer, describes sub-therapeutic cancer treatment dosing.

You don’t want to wake the bear up and make him angry. You want to usher the bear out of your body and make sure it never returns.

A 2024 Manuka honey breast cancer study

Natural health advocates make a huge to do about manuka honey.

Perhaps there’s a there there.

I’m not sure.

But I can tell you that a 2024 preclinical study done by a team of scientists at UCLA reported that Manuka honey inhibited human breast cancer progression in laboratory and animal models. [13]

This study used human breast cancer cells transplanted into mice.

In MCF-7 breast cancer cells, Manuka honey inhibited proliferation at 0.3 to 5.0 percent methylglyoxal (MGO).

At 2.5 percent MGO, it reduced proliferation of MCF-7 cancer cells but not non-malignant human mammary epithelial cells.

It also stimulated apoptosis, increased PARP cleavage, activated AMPK, inhibited AKT/mTOR signaling, and reduced phosphorylated STAT3.

In mice with established MCF-7 tumors, orally administered Manuka honey significantly inhibited tumor growth. The study reported an 84 percent reduction in established tumor growth.

This UCLA study wasn’t a randomized clinical trial in women with breast cancer.

And it doesn’t “prove” that eating Manuka honey is an effective treatment for breast cancer.

But it does suggest that Manuka honey may be a powerful way to help breast cancer patients heal.

I love bees.

And I enjoy eating honey.

I also like the idea that some of the natural substances made by the diligent and tireless work of bees could help us humans.

So, is it okay to eat honey and use bee products if you have cancer?

For over a year after I was diagnosed with ocular melanoma, I ate nothing sweet. No refined sugar, date sugar, or coconut sugar. No maple syrup. No honey. I did eat some fruit, including blueberries, but I avoided over-ripe bananas, raisins, dates, and sweet apples.

Now I eat a little local honey.

I still have more questions than answers.

What honey is best to eat?

Are there some bee products I should be using on a daily basis?

Can honey or bee products actually treat cancer?

If so, what’s the best way to administer them? And what’s the optimal dosing?

Yikesamundo. No wonder those of us trying to use the best of allopathic medicine and more natural modalities end up feeling overwhelmed.

Treating cancer is complicated.

Miracle-cure marketing is not.

There’s no one more willing to fall for false promises than a bone-weary, desperate cancer patient (and their family) worried about dying.

Don’t believe the hype, whether it’s allopathic or alternative. When it comes to bees and cancer, here are my take-aways:

Bee-derived compounds show potential in treating cancer.

Getting stung by bees is also likely beneficial to the immune system (as long as you don’t have an anaphylactic reaction).

Manuka honey is biologically active, appears to have several anti-cancer properties, and has shown promise in preclinical breast cancer rodent studies.

Honey and bee-derived compounds may be effective cancer-busters—especially if scientists, clinicians, and patients can figure out the best delivery methods, proper dosing, and safety issues.

In the meantime, I don’t think I’ll become a beekeeper in this lifetime. But I am working very hard to not die from stage four metastatic melanoma, and I will keep drawing bees.

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About the author:

Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D., is an award-winning investigative journalist and book author. She has worked on a child survival campaign in Niger, West Africa; appeared live on prime-time television in Paris, France; and been a fellow at the Schuster Institute of Investigative Journalism in Waltham, Massachusetts. Her books, which have sold over 300,000 copies combined, have been translated into Chinese, Estonian, German, Korean, and Vietnamese. A sought-after speaker and writing coach, she is also an internationally recognized advocate for medical freedom and toxic-free living.

Related articles:

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Eye Can’t See, But I Have a Falsie Now
I Wore Contact Lenses for Almost 30 Years. Is THAT Why I Have Cancer Now?

Selected references:

[1] Toreti VC, Sato HH, Pastore GM, Park YK. “Recent Progress of Propolis for Its Biological and Chemical Compositions and Its Botanical Origin.” Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, 2013.

[2] Natarajan K, Singh S, Burke TR Jr, Grunberger D, Aggarwal BB. “Caffeic acid phenethyl ester is a potent and specific inhibitor of activation of nuclear transcription factor NF-κB.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 1996; 93: 9090–9095.

[3] Davis RE, Brown KD, Siebenlist U, Staudt LM. “Constitutive Nuclear Factor κB Activity Is Required for Survival of Activated B Cell–like Diffuse Large B Cell Lymphoma Cells.” Journal of Experimental Medicine, 2001.

[4] Abdel-Latif MMM, Windle HJ, El Homasany BS, Sabra K, Kelleher D. “Caffeic acid phenethyl ester modulates Helicobacter pylori-induced nuclear factor-kappa B and activator protein-1 expression in gastric epithelial cells.” British Journal of Pharmacology, 2005; 146:1139–1147.

[5] Liao H-F, Chen Y-Y, Liu J-J, Hsu M-L, Shieh H-J, Liao H-J, Shieh C-J, Shiao M-S, Chen Y-J. “Inhibitory Effect of Caffeic Acid Phenethyl Ester on Angiogenesis, Tumor Invasion, and Metastasis.” Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 2003.

[6] Watabe M, Hishikawa K, Takayanagi A, Shimizu N, Nakaki T. “Caffeic Acid Phenethyl Ester Induces Apoptosis by Inhibition of NFκB and Activation of Fas in Human Breast Cancer MCF-7 Cells.” Journal of Biological Chemistry, 2004; 279: 6017–6026.

[7] Wang X, Pang J, Maffucci JA, Pade DS, Newman RA, Kerwin SM, Bowman PD, Stavchansky S. “Pharmacokinetics of Caffeic Acid Phenethyl Ester and its Catechol-ring Fluorinated Derivative Following Intravenous Administration to Rats.” Biomedical Chromatography, 2009.

[8] Duffy C, Sorolla A, Wang E, Golden E, Woodward E, Davenport K, Ho D, Johnstone E, Pfleger K, Redfern A, Iyer KS, Baer B, Blancafort P. “Honeybee venom and melittin suppress growth factor receptor activation in HER2-enriched and triple-negative breast cancer.” npj Precision Oncology, 2020;4:24.

[9] Jo M, Park MH, Kollipara PS, An BJ, Song HS, Han SB, Kim JH, Song MJ, Hong JT. “Anti-cancer effect of bee venom toxin and melittin in ovarian cancer cells through induction of death receptors and inhibition of JAK2/STAT3 pathway.” Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology, 2012.

[10] Yu X, Dai Y, Zhao Y, Qi S, Liu L, Lu L, Luo Q, Zhang Z. “Melittin-lipid nanoparticles target to lymph nodes and elicit a systemic anti-tumor immune response.” Nature Communications, 2020;11.

[11] Atrott J, Henle T. “Methylglyoxal in Manuka Honey – Correlation with Antibacterial Properties.” Czech Journal of Food Sciences 27(Special Issue 1), 2009; S163-S165.

[12] Leone A, Nigro C, Nicolò A, Prevenzano I, Formisano P, Beguinot F, Miele C. “The Dual-Role of Methylglyoxal in Tumor Progression – Novel Therapeutic Approaches.” Frontiers in Oncology, 2021; 11:645686.

[13] Márquez-Garbán DC, Yanes CD, Llarena G, Elashoff D, Hamilton N, Hardy M, Wadehra M, McCloskey SA, Pietras RJ. “Manuka Honey Inhibits Human Breast Cancer Progression in Preclinical Models.” Nutrients, 2024;16:2369.

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Censored.

Suppressed.

Gaslit.

That’s what many forward-thinking medical doctors, spiritually minded outside-the-box thinkers, and advocates for medical freedom, natural medicine, and safe vaccines experience.

Every. Single. Day.

We get hate emails, death threats, belligerent phone calls, heckling, eye-rolling, and rejections from colleagues, friends, and family.

This has been going on for decades, sure.

But the censorship and ostracism appear to have gotten much worse in the past decade.

In an outstanding article in The Atlantic, Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee describe how a research scientist and head of the Cochrane Collaboration started being treated like a pariah for his meticulous work exposing that the flu vaccine was not nearly as effective as it is touted to be. Dr. Jefferson’s international team of experts combed through hundreds of flu vaccine studies, finding that most of the so-called “science” showing the vaccine’s efficacy was “deeply flawed.”

I was canceled from an NPR show that had over a million listeners because I wrote about how cesarean birth is a life-saving operation when medically necessary but is also a profit-driven, often unnecessary, and sometimes deadly surgery that is grossly over-used in the United States.

“I’ve had three,” the producer who called me for the pre-interview, said her voice tight with defensiveness. She seemed to feel like me criticizing a for-profit medical system that runs roughshod over women’s bodies was a personal attack on her births. “What’s wrong with that?”

Recently, scientific papers that challenge the status quo on a variety of issues are being retracted in larger numbers than ever before.

Sometimes years after publication.

When lay people start reading the science, Big Pharma, Big Tech, and Big Ad put Big Money behind discrediting science that exposes their lies and malfeasance.

This month Neil Z. Miller’s work on the causal link between sudden infant death syndrome and too many vaccines was retracted, five years after it was published.

They want to silence us.

Unfortunately “they” is not just the status quo. “They,” it seems, are the institutions, flash-in-the-pan celebrities, and the humans on any side of any given issue who are making huge money and feel their enormous profits, outsized egos, and undersized intelligence are at risk.

So how do we fight back?

We refuse to be silenced.

We push back.

We find our voice.

We write articles, make videos, appear on podcasts.

We gather in real life. We gather on-line. We protest. We exercise freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom to hold unpopular beliefs.

And … we write and publish books.

J.B. Handley, author of How to End the Autism Epidemic and one of the smartest people I know, said to me recently that he thinks book publishing may be one of the last bastions of free speech in today’s divided world.

I believe that one of the best ways that to fight against tyranny and fix a broken system is to write thoughtful accurate science-forward books that people want to read.

But how?

To begin to answer that question, literary agent Johanna Maaghul and I will be hosting a free on-line ASK ME ANYTHING this afternoon (Monday, June 22, 2026) — at noon Pacific Standard Time/ 3:00 p.m. East Coast time to give you tools that you need to write the book you always wanted to read.

I don’t know what motivates you. But I know that I am wanting to make the world a better, kinder, gentler place for the humans living on Planet Earth today and for future generations.

And I believe that writing books—novels, memoirs, nonfiction, big think books, sci fi books, even books about plants and music and art—is one of the best ways to make that happen.

Join us this afternoon so we can change the world together.

Serenity is one proud mama.

Tired too.

I was expecting avocados. I didn’t realize we were having little squeakers.

These newborn pups—there are six in total—look and sound like guinea pigs.

They make a lot of squeaky noises.

They’re keeping Serenity very busy.

She’s so hungry and so thirsty, putting out a huge amount of energy (and dog milk).

They’re keeping me busy too.

I’ll tell you more later this week—about the labor and the roly polies.

Now please excuse me while I go wash the puppy pad.

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If you’re feeling clicky:

Now she looks more like a pot-bellied pig.

What have I done to my dog?

Serenity, who most of you know by now, is preggo.

Her belly is practically scraping on the floor. She’s hungry and thirsty and hot. The last few days instead of happily trotting along beside me on our morning sniff-ari, she’s been walking half a block down the street and then turning around to head for home.

Her once-perfect belly is all distended now and her perfect nipples are all pendulous teats. Charlie Dog got to enjoy the fun. Poor Serenity is doing all the work now.

Her puppies are due this week. Um. Like tomorrow.

I’m envisioning six puppies:

• 2 amber

• 2 brindled

• 1 jet black

• 1 blondie

But this little lady, I mean little pot-bellied piggie, has ten teats. She herself was one of eleven puppies. Her boyfriend, Charlie Dog, recently sired a litter of eight.

Six puppies I can handle. Ten? 🆘

In the meantime, my friend Diane (whose photo is behind the paywall in this post) reminded me that puppies are born blind and deaf. At birth they’re each the size of a small avocado.

The avocados are coming.

Tonight? Tomorrow?

I’ll keep you posted.

Wish me luck, will ya?

Love,

Jennifer

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About the author:
Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D., is an award-winning science journalist and book author.

Related posts:
How Having a Dog is Good for Your Health
What a Stranger’s Dog Taking a Dump at the Pool Taught me About Myself
A Solution to the Dog Sh*t Conundrum

When her town of Katy, Texas flooded in 2016, Cathy Rude refused to let the torrential rains stop her from getting to work.

Rude had an urgent task in front of her that day. One that could not wait for the dangerously high flood waters to recede.

Rude, who was 63 years old at the time, had a baby to deliver.

A midwife with over two decades of experience, Rude had no way to get to the birth center where her client, Andrea Haley, who’d been having contractions for several days and was soon to be in active labor, had planned to give birth. The water was waist high throughout town. Rude could not wade through it without damaging the birth supplies she needed to make sure Andrea’s baby was born safely.

Andrea was poised to give birth to her third child. With her labor progressing quickly, Andrea drove with her mom and husband to pick up Rude at home in their truck. But the floodwaters barred their way.

Their truck couldn’t go any further. Their friend who owned a kayak was unreachable.

Channelling creative energy

A woman in labor is in the act of becoming a mother; channeling the creative power of the universe to cleave from being one human into two. So it shouldn’t be surprising, perhaps, that Andrea Haley found the perfect solution to Rude’s conundrum: an inflatable freshwater bird.

Say what?

Yelling from the window of the truck, Andrea Haley cried to a neighbor who was riding on an inflatable swan through the floodwaters to ask if the neighbor could please give her midwife a ride.

The Haleys’ neighbor was happy to lend a hand. She managed to boost both Rude and her birthing supplies onto the larger-than-life inflatable swan and push her down the street through waist-high water to where Andrea and her family were waiting in their truck. Off they sped to the birthing center.

Just in time.

Once in active labor, Andrea’s new baby was born lickety-split. Without the swan transportation system, there was no way her beloved midwife—who had delivered both of her other children—would have gotten to Andrea on time.

Midwives will do anything for their clients. Doctors? Not so much

The vast majority of doctors don’t make house calls. They also don’t accomplish Herculean feats in order to support their patients.

Homebirth and out-of-hospital birth midwives do.

“A midwife’s not just a care provider, she’s your friend,” Rude told a reporter at Today.com back in 2016. “So of course, she wanted me to be there. I think she was appreciative, but I don’t think she was very surprised, because as midwives, that’s just what we do.”

Doctor-led birth in America harms women and their babies

I birthed my first in the hospital. I was shamed and humiliated by both the hospital staff and the doctor on call. One very grumpy labor and delivery nurse told me I was making no progress, “not even a dimple.”

Her tone was angry, as if my husband and I were imposing on her by our very presence in a delivery room.

That nurse checked me so roughly with her gloved fingers that it’s not an exaggeration to say that it felt like obstetric rape.

That happened at Crawford Long Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. But the way I was treated is not unique to large teaching hospitals in the Southeast.

Most labor and delivery wards across the United States are run like businesses, because that is what they are. The goal is to maximize profit and convenience and minimize liability.

Hospitals practice assembly-line obstetrics, push women in labor to get as many interventions as they can foist on them (each with a hefty upcharge), and report and even fire doctors who have low C-section rates.

Our birth outcomes are among the worst in the industrialized world.

In countries where birth is safest and women have the best outcomes, midwives—usually in the hospital but also homebirth midwives and midwives who deliver babies at freestanding birth clinics like Rude’s—are in charge of how birthing women and their babies are treated. Medical doctors are only called in when something goes amiss.

As I reported in my book, Your Baby, Your Way,* Norway has one of the best maternal outcomes in the world.

Among the big differences between Norway and the United States?

In a Norwegian hospital there are ten times as many midwives as obstetricians; medical doctors work in tandem with midwives instead of working against them; and spontaneous vaginal birth is considered the best outcome.

Scandinavian medical doctors learn birth from midwives

Indeed in Scandinavia, experienced midwives train medical school students and med students must attend midwife-led births during their equivalent of residency.

Expectant couples are taught about the health benefits of vaginal birth, for both the mom and the baby.

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During the birth itself, non-pharmaceutical techniques like hydrotherapy, acupressure, acupuncture, emotional support, and birthing balls are routinely used to help a woman manage pain.

“Obstetrics is an ugly business and it’s our most primitive medicine,” Stefan Topolski, M.D., a family physician based in Western Massachusetts, told me. “We say it in meetings in our department all the time. It’s the least evidence-based discipline.”

The Haley’s named their baby Bennett. He was born into the loving arms of his family and the midwife. The birth lasted only 23 minutes. Delivered by swan—not by stork.

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About the author:

Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D., is an award-winning science and health journalist. She is the author of Your Baby, Your Way: Taking Charge of Your Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Parenting Practices for a Happier, Healthier Family.* A former contributing editor at Mothering magazine and fellow for the Schuster Institute of Investigative Journalism, she has published about best birth and parenting practices for the New York Times, Jefferson Public Radio, the Washington Post, Skirt, BlogHer, and hundreds of other newspapers, magazines, and on-line sites. A subscription to Vibrant Life costs the equivalent of a cuppa organic Joe a month and helps promote independent ad-free uncensored health journalism.

Related posts:

Birth, Every Home Should Have One
The Valorous Vagina
Everyone I Know Had a C-section, What’s the Big Deal?

*Referred link to Amazon but please get my book, Your Baby, Your Way, from your local library or brick-and-mortar bookstore.

“Go away, Bear!” I bellowed in as deep a voice as I could muster.

It was 11:30 in the morning. I was standing on an overturned wheelbarrow, making myself look as big as possible, waving my hands over my head like the crazy lady I was in that moment.

Then I growled.

Then I roared.

And roared and roared.

And banged on the side of the wheelbarrow.

Serenity helped by barking so furiously her whole body vibrated.

Our uninvited guest, a medium-sized black bear, was sitting on the lowest limb of the Doug fir in our back yard.

He swung his head from side to side, staring at Serenity and me with inscrutable jet-black beady eyes.

Looking for a way down

He seemed to be looking for a way out.

And therein lay both his problem and mine.

If he climbed down the trunk he’d be trapped in our fenced yard. If he jumped onto the translucent, corrugated porch roof, his hundred plus pounds of muscle, fat, bones, claws, and fur would break straight through the roof and end up locked in my neighbor’s screened porch.

The bear looked bewildered. He started to snuffle. Then to make little wet sucking noises with his maw. He didn’t growl exactly but the mouth smacking scared me.

I called the police. The dispatcher told me to make sure we humans and our pets were all secure, with at least one locked door between us and Mr. Bear.

A dutiful citizen, I rushed inside the kitchen and slammed the door shut, still hoping the noise would scare Bear. At that moment, my husband James and our youngest came into the house through the front door.

The dispatcher said not to let our uninvited guest out of my sight. But by this time, realizing Crazy Lady and Barky Dog weren’t going to stop fussing, the bear had already climbed too high in the Doug fir for me to keep an eye on from inside the kitchen.

James grabbed his 9-millimeter Fabrique Nationale and stood just outside the back door to survey the bear.

The officer arrives

It seemed like forever before the officer arrived.

“Baby bears are super curious,” the officer told us. “They get into mischief and want to explore everything. Like puppies. Even if you can’t see her, Mom’s always nearby so you have to be careful. She’ll come bounding back if the baby whimpers or calls out for her.”

He smiled broadly as he looked at our back yard, revealing a row of such straight white teeth a dentist’s kid would be jealous. “I’d zip up your trampoline if I were you…”

“These black bears are shy,” the officer said. “Not aggressive like grizzlies or brown bears. Once it quiets down, he’ll slink away.”

Officer Kinney looked thoughtful.

“It’s good you made all that noise. He’ll think twice before coming back here to sleep away his day.”

We live up a steep hill not far from the watershed. We’ve had skunks in the yard. Rats. Racoons. Deer. Snakes. Even possums.

Bear, dear, we love you

Every once in a blue morning, Serenity and I cross paths with fresh bear dung in the middle of the street, full of twigs and berries, on our early a.m. walk.

And woe be it to the neighbor who hasn’t converted over to a bear-proof garbage can. It’s no fun to pick up bear-strewn garbage halfway down the hill. Ask me how I know.

But a yearling in broad daylight snuffling in a tree less than 15 feet away? This was a first for all of us.

Bear, dear, you’re gorgeous.

Your black fur is shiny.

Your claws are sharp.

The light brown ridges on the sides of your black snout are going to be a great hit with the lady bears.

We love you.

We bless you.

Now, could you please go away?

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Related posts:

How Mangy Curs Are Good For Human Health
Scientifically Proven Health Benefits of Having Houseplants (spoiler: they don’t talk back)
Serenity’s Big News: The Universe Called My Bluff

About the author:

Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D., is an award-winning science journalist and book author. A champion of freedom of speech, home birth, gentle parenting, and integrative medicine, she helps readers stay up to date about the latest and most important health and wellness information, often served with a side of snark.

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“Oh my word, oh my word, oh my word,” I texted a friend the other day. “Puppy is having puppies.”

An experienced dog person, my friend sent back a word of caution.

“Don’t get too excited,” the friend said in a voicemail. “Remember dogs can have false pregnancies too.”

False pregnancies?

In dogs?

Oh my word, oh my word, oh my word.

How do you know if your puppers is preggo?

It’s a lot harder than you might think to know if a dog is pregnant. Especially if, like me, you don’t have a lot of experience with dogs. Especially if, like me, you aren’t willing to bring them to a vet for an X-ray to confirm the pregnancy.

(We try very hard not to expose pregnant women and their unborn babies to X-rays. Why on God’s green earth would we expose puppies?)

In case you haven’t been following The Lipstick Diaries, back in late March and April, Serenity and her friend, Charlie Dog, had the time of their lives.

They got together about 1,022 times to romp and play and bow and wrestle and wag their tails at each other.

But as much as the poor lovesick Charlie Dog—who started howling and whining by the front door of his house whenever he was away from Serenity—tried, it was quite a challenge for the poor young man canine to get himself in the right position.

While he was trying, Serenity would stand there, smiling, panting a little, with her long pink tongue lolling out of her mouth. Then, just at the moment when Charlie Dog seemed to get into the right position, she’d plop her tush onto the ground, precipitously ending the attempted copulation.

Charlie Dog would be frantic and rather miserable, lick his leaking privates, and rest. Serenity looked like she was laughing. She’d rest too. Then they’d go back to wrestling and chasing each other like mad fiends around the yard.

I mostly gave them space, and privacy, figuring that dog love need not be a spectator sport.

On the 1,023rd try, the two lovebirds—I mean lovedogs—finally figured it out.

A yelp and a long period of quiet were the tells.

I maybe sneaked a peek out the window. They definitely appeared to be stuck.

Channeling my inner Joe Dispenza

Dr. Joe Dispenza is a chiropractor who has been studying and writing about neuroscience for nearly two decades. His main idea, as I understand it, is that you can change your reality by reprogramming your brain.

Dispenza argues that the human mind doesn’t know the difference between reality and imagined reality. When you change your thought patterns, your biochemistry changes and you prime your brain—and your body—to manifest the new reality you are envisioning. So if you want something to happen in your life, you can quite literally imagine it into being.

Ever since my friend Lily, who’s been cohabitating with stage four cancer, recommended a Joe Dispenza meditation to me, I’ve been reading his books and listening to his lectures on YouTube.

Since finding Charlie Dog, I’ve imagined the puppies Serenity would have. Channeling my inner Joe Dispenza, I told the universe, the quantum field, God the Father, God the Son, and every other higher power I could think of, that I was hoping for six puppies.

Two amber-colored.

One blonde-white.

One black.

And two brindled.

The power of positive thinking. The power of prayer. The power of visualization. I tried to channel it all.

I’m pretty sure they did the deed more than once. With all their playing and all my praying, surely Serenity got knocked up.

And then … [drumroll] …

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I always shower at night. I do this because I’m a general contractor, and even though I’m 51 years old now and mostly working in a supervisory capacity, I still end most workdays covered in sawdust and bits of drywall.

In early spring of 2023, I’d just finished showering when the phone rang. Towel around my waist, I grabbed my phone off the counter and looked at the screen.

“Why is Montay calling me at 10:03 at night?” I called to my wife from the bathroom.

Montay, a single black father whose son was the same age as our middle boy, had once been a huge part of our lives.

Every morning he was on the playground dropping off Montay Jr. at Washington Elementary School in Berkeley.

I was always there too, dropping off our three boys.

Most of my work days began with a big hug from Montay and a few minutes of conversation before we went our separate ways—me off to build things, Montay often staying behind to support his son and, really, countless other students.

A huge heart and a giant smile

Montay had a huge heart and a giant smile. He knew every parent, every teacher, and every kid. He served as a surrogate father for many Washington Elementary students who were being raised by their moms and grandmothers.

To make a living, Montay ran after-school programs and camps on teacher in-service days, holidays, and over the summer.

These were ragtag camps designed for maximum fun and affordability for everyone. Every day was different. Under Montay’s supervision, the kids might stay and play for hours at an urban park, 1980s style, or go on a spontaneous outing by foot, or take public transportation to discover a new place. One time they went to Six Flags.

My boys attended nearly every camp Montay ran for half a decade.

We’d drop the boys off at the park, exchange a big hug and a little conversation with Montay, and then leave—always a little nervous about whether the group would make it home from whatever loosely planned adventure awaited them.

In an attempt to engineer equity—mixing up race, income, and educational status of the parents—Berkeley public school students are assigned to schools in other neighborhoods.

After elementary school, Montay Jr. ended up at a different middle school than our sons.

Middle school reshuffles friendships.

Though Montay Jr.’s new school was farther from his house and closer to ours, with the new school affiliation, the boys drifted apart and we stopped seeing Montay Sr. on a regular basis.

In crisis

In 2022, I was shocked to receive a GoFundMe email about Montay Sr.

Montay had been found unconscious and severely dehydrated in his car and was recovering in the hospital.

I donated to his campaign to help him pay his medical bills, buy groceries, and get back on his feet, and called him several times that summer.

He never called me back.

That Thanksgiving, I ran into him at the grocery store.

Montay looked terrible—bloated and downcast. He had no sparkle in his eyes. He didn’t smile.

I gave him an enormous hug.

I asked about his health and he brushed off the question.

Still, I made sure he had my number, told him I loved him, and that he could call me anytime, for any reason.

Six months or so later, at 10:03 p.m., I finally heard from my friend.

“Montay!” I said when I answered the phone. “Great to hear from you. What’s happening?”

The story he gave me—one I didn’t believe—was that he was stranded without his wallet and needed cash to get home. It was obvious he was intoxicated. He asked if I could send him $50 via ApplePay.

I’m a total Luddite and didn’t even have Apple Pay. But I loved Montay. Even knowing he was lying, I figured out how to use ApplePay and sent him the money.

I sent it on one condition: he had to meet me for lunch the next day.

He agreed.

Isolation, despair, and drugs

We met at Saul’s Deli. Over Reuben sandwiches, Montay unburdened himself. He talked about COVID—how, given his work with kids, the shutdowns brought extreme isolation.

His camps had always been cash-based, so there was no PPP money available for his business.

Isolation led to despair, despair to loss of identity, and eventually to drugs, alcohol, and estrangement from his son.

And that’s how he ended up calling me after years of silence, asking for digital cash at 10:03 p.m.

I was openly skeptical of lockdowns and school closures from the beginning, a position that cost me friendships and social standing in Berkeley.

But it also meant that when Montay described what the previous three years had done to him, I recognized that his struggles were part of the collateral damage caused by irrational and misguided public health policies purportedly implemented to “keep people safe” and “save lives.”

Healing at a Christian men’s retreat

That weekend, my men’s group at church was holding a retreat. I invited Montay to join us. Surprisingly, he said yes. My son Charlie was attending as well. Montay drove himself and Charlie in our van.

That weekend changed me.

Montay was restored to himself.

He played basketball for hours, nearly won the horseshoe tournament, and shared his story of isolation and despair with us. He went on stage during worship and had men praying over him.

He kept saying, “This is exactly what I needed.”

When the men’s pastor gave him a sweatshirt from the retreat, Montay broke down in tears.

I’ve never seen anything quite so powerful as what I saw that weekend. Christian men lifting up a profoundly broken man with love and compassion and a willingness to listen and to pray.

I felt sure I was witnessing a miracle that would turn Montay back into the joyful spirit that I knew him to be.

As the weekend wound down, Montay asked if he could borrow the van. His truck was acting up, he said.

“Of course,” I answered without hesitation.

For a few weeks, things were beautiful. Montay came to church. He joined my men’s group.

Then communication stopped. Weeks went by. He still had our van but I didn’t hear a word from him.

The last time I saw Montay

Eventually, he called. He was in West Oakland. The van was undriveable, he said. When I arrived, I found Montay and a completely totaled vehicle. He’d been living in it. It reeked of alcohol and human suffering.

We waited for AAA and talked about the demons he was fighting.

I offered to take him to John George Psychiatric Hospital.

He agreed—then panicked and changed his mind.

I offered to take him to our home. He agreed. Then changed his mind again.

He asked to go to his mother’s house. I drove him there and gave him all the cash in my wallet.

That was the last time I saw Montay.

He called a few more times asking for money. I refused to give him money but offered to buy him lunch, take him to church, give him rides to wherever he needed to go—anything else. He declined. The next time I called, a robotic voice announced that the number had been disconnected.

I never heard from Montay again.

Later that summer, I learned he had died. I don’t know how, and I don’t want to.

At the memorial, I thought about saying what I believed—that fear, compliance, and moral cowardice destroyed a man I loved. I was prepared to confront the room.

But when the time came, I didn’t have it in me.

Instead, I spoke about the retreat. About seeing Montay whole again, playing basketball under the redwoods.

About his smile.

About his love for kids.

About men praying over him.

I shared a photo I’d taken of him with one of our pastors and another dear friend of mine—arms around each other, heads bowed.

I pray Montay was repenting and turning to the Lord in those moments. I pray he’s in heaven now, playing basketball, lighting up every room he enters. And I pray I’ll see him again.

My friend’s life was built on presence, purpose, and belonging.

The COVID lockdowns, school closures, forced vaccination, and isolation took all of that away from him.

These public policies didn’t keep us safe, didn’t make us healthier, and didn’t stop the spread of COVID-19. They deprived Montay—and countless others—of his livelihood and destroyed his life.

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Related posts:

RIP Tyler Edwards. He Just Wanted to Hug His Grandma
Two Years Ago Today Lauren Died
Parents in Berkeley Say Their Unvaccinated Kids Have Become Pariahs

I recently had a falling out with a longtime and very dear friend.

Change is hard.

Staying in a routine makes us humans feel safe.

But sometimes—perhaps often—a routine starts to feel like a rut: a repetitive, never-changing, all-too-familiar pattern that doesn’t get us to where we want to go.

Even so, most of us tend to cling to the familiar. When something disrupts our normal routine, we have a tendency to feel upset, disappointed, or angry.

It’s hard to remember that an ending is also a beginning.

It smarts when someone stops returning your calls, claims to be “too busy,” or tells you outright that they no longer want to be your friend.

In those situations, I ruminate and fret. In the moment, and for months afterwards. I struggle to believe that losing a friend—or putting a friendship on pause for awhile—is a growth opportunity. But it is. It’s a chance to examine and improve yourself and your own behavior.

The loss of a friend, whether it comes about because the friend dies, ghosts you indefinitely, or breaks up with you outright, can help you be more strategic about the people you open your heart to. It can also help motivate you to find new friends.

So, if you’re in the market for some new friendships, new experiences, and new people in your life, here are five surefire ways to lose the friends you already have.

1. Say yes when you mean no

If you nod and smile when a friend asks you to do something but you really don’t want to do it and feel resentful about it, you’re being unkind to both yourself and to your friend.

Want to keep friends? Say yes when you mean yes and no when you mean no.

Want to lose friends fast? Say yes when you mean no and let the bad energy exude from your pores as you fulfill their request to the detriment of your own health and wellbeing (and to the detriment of their ability to trust you and take you at your word.)

2. Take everything personally (including this post)

A friend of mine stewed for months about a friend of hers who’d stopped returning her calls.

She couldn’t figure out what she’d done or why she was being ghosted.

She felt hurt and sad and betrayed.

It turned out that her friend, who’d just had a baby, was suffering silently from postpartum depression. She was too depressed to get out of bed or take a shower, and she wasn’t able to return anyone’s phone calls.

The takeaway lesson here: What other people go through is rarely, if ever, about you, as I’ve written about before.

Believing the world revolves around you, however, is another great way to lose your friends.

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Several years ago, I was cold contacted by a successful businessman, builder, and father of three.

He wrote to me that a dear family friend had died suddenly not long after she received an mRNA vaccine.

Healthy, fit, and only 47 years old, Lauren Morgan Tweedale was found unresponsive in her bed on the morning of April 6, 2021.

Her death seemed completely unexpected and inexplicable.

The doctors said she’d died of a “sudden cardiac event.”

But when Dan McDunn started looking into it, he realized Lauren had gotten a first dose of the Pfizer vaccine eight days earlier.

Dan was reaching out to journalists across the country urging someone to look into what had happened to their friend and why.

No one responded.

Except me.

When I called him on the phone to find out more, Dan explained that he’d been searching the national and international databases and had discovered that the vaccine lot that Lauren had been given, Pfizer EN6201 was already associated with nearly a hundred deaths in the United States.

The death of their dear friend, along with the way people who chose not to get the COVID-19 vaccines were being treated in the Bay Area, especially young people, led Dan McDunn and his wife to start questioning many things about modern medicine that they had previously taken for granted.

Dan is a resister—someone who is unafraid to speak up when he sees that something is amiss.

Learning about the dangers of the mRNA vaccines, their failure to protect people from COVID, and the contaminants in many vaccines has opened his eyes to the over-bloated nature of the current childhood vaccine schedule.

Two days ago, I spoke at the inaugural meeting of the Ashland, Oregon Brownstone Supper Club.

This coming Tuesday, May 26, 2026 Dan McDunn—in conjunction with the Brownstone Institute, is hosting the inaugural meeting of the Berkeley Brownstone Supper Club.

When: Tuesday, May 26 at 7:00 p.m.

Where: Downtown Berkeley at Revival Bar and Kitchen, a great venue with easy parking and public transportation (Bart) right on the corner.

What: A chance to mingle, meet and network with other people who resisted the conventional narrative, eat delicious food, and learn from Colin Chan Redemer, Ph.D., a professor of philosophy and classics at St. Mary’s College.

Cost: $65/person

»Click here for tickets to the event and more information.«

Redemer will be giving a short talk on education in the age of Artificial Intelligence, and finding purpose in an increasingly confusing world.

According to Dan, who’s heard a different version of this presentation, “This is a very relevant topic and truly one of the most interesting and thought-provoking talks I’ve seen in a long time. Best of all, he provides an argument that’s hopeful and restorative as we contend with all the complex conversations about AI and tech in our lives.”

Future Berkeley Brownstone Supper Club speakers include Blake Alexandre, a regenerative dairy farmer from Crescent City who was recommended by The Lunatic Farmer himself, Joel Salatin who will be speaking on June 30.

I am scheming to find a way to attend this event, even though it’s a 6-hour drive each way. If I’m not there in person, I’ll be there in spirit. I hope you’ll join us.

»Click here for tickets to the event and more information.«

Related posts:

Pfizer COVID Vaccine Safety Varies From Lot to Lot
Two Years After Lauren Died
Parents in Berkeley Say Their Kids Have Become Pariahs

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“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” ~Margaret Mead

There’s a new trend in America: an unbridled enthusiasm for synthetic hormones and a feeling of excitement that taking these hormones will lead to a miraculous sense of wellbeing and a diminishment of symptoms associated with menopause and other feminine ills.

We can trace the current excitement about taking synthetic hormones to November of last year. On November 10, 2025, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service issued a highly publicized industry-celebrated about-face announcing that HHS would initiate the removal of the black box warnings about hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for menopause.

Having honest and open conversations about what was once something of a taboo topic is a good thing. That said, in my mind, the internet-fueledidea that HRT is the cure-all for menopause symptoms, “a perfect solution,” and “a total miracle” ignores the ignominious history of the use of synthetic hormones and just how harmful endocrine disruption can actually be.

Feeling hormonal

“I’m just feeling hormonal,” explained a friend of mine, a mom of four small children who was having a remarkably difficult day.

She’d jammed her foot on a toy in the kitchen, lost her temper with her five-year-old twins, and forgotten that it was her turn to drive the carpool to her son’s preschool.

But she felt like her cabinet-slamming anger went beyond the daily trials of mothering small children.

Like so many of us women often do, my friend was blaming the outburst and gloomy mood on those endocrine gland secretions that sometimes seem to rule our lives.

A starring role

Who can fault her?

Hormones play a starring role in our lives.

They announce their presence at the onset of menstruation, they’re responsible for the flushed glow and energy surge that usually accompanies ovulation, and they’re crucial to the conception and development of our babies.

Hormones give us our sex drive, uterine contractions during labor, and the capacity to nurse our babies.

Changing hormone levels signal the onset of menopause.

And, yes, hormones affect our moods—sometimes for good, sometimes for bad.

What other substances in our bodies are so central to so much human drama?

The more that scientists discover about hormones, the more pervasive and vital to our health and well-being they seem to be.

Excess hormones harm human health

Except in excess.

For a long time now, we’ve known that too much testosterone, the hormone responsible for male sex characteristics—is linked to rage and violence in men.

Though considered a “male” hormone, testosterone is important for women as well.

Low testosterone in women is connected to low libido, decreased energy, and mood dysregulation.

But what about when women have too much estrogen or progesterone in their bodies? Or even oxytocin (the so-called “love hormone”?)

“Testosterone poisoning” and the idea of “toxic masculinity” (that latter of which is often blamed on testosterone) have become popular phrases.

These terms are bandied about to describe—and criticize—behaviors in men that feel “too masculine.”

Behaviors like being physically violent or excessively aggressive, bullying, refusing to or being incapable of expressing emotions in a genuine and unguarded way, believing that the key to moving forward in life is to push yourself to the brink of exhaustion (and that people who prioritize self-care and rest are “sissies”), and being tone deaf to the needs and concerns of others, especially women.

But what about “estrogen poisoning”?

I’d wager that’s not a phrase you’ve been reading about on social media.

Does such a thing as estrogen poisoning even exist?

Estrogen poisoning

It turns out we know a lot about overexposure to estrogen.

As much as you will see enthusiastic social media users blowing up the comment section of posts lamenting about menopause symptoms these days with the recommendations to “get a prescription for HRT!”, the truth is that taken in the wrong dosage, estrogen and other synthetic hormones can exacerbate or even cause a veritable horror show of human health problems.

While some of the science is contradictory, the problems that can be caused by hormone imbalances in general and exposure to too much synthetic estrogen in particular include but aren’t limited to:

• Birth defects in the children whose mothers took hormones during pregnancy

• Infertility, reproductive disorders, and difficulty becoming pregnant, especially when women stay on birth control pills for years at a time

• Unexplained pregnancy loss

• Hormone-dependent cancers, including breast, ovarian, uterine, and endometrial

• Cognitive issues, mood fluctuations, and other disorders

What’s being left out of the current excitement about HRT is just how dangerous an excess of synthetic hormones can be for human health, for both men and women.

A checkered past

The history of synthetic estrogen reads like a spy novel, full of good guys gone bad, botched cover-ups, and unexpected consequences.

Some people died, others got rich.

There were unsuspecting pawns and some shady characters.

And, while the advent of the birth control pill for women arguably spawned a sexual revolution—one that changed the way women thought about themselves, their sexuality, and their place in the society—the widespread use of synthetic hormones to trick the body into believing it is pregnant has not been without some devastating consequences.

It would all be a thumping good read, except that it really happened. And it’s complicated. And nuanced. And difficult to unravel. But nuance is exactly what the “HRT will fix your life!” comments on the internet doesn’t take into consideration.

When the race to develop new drugs (and sell them to the public) outpaces safety testing

As science writer, lecturer, and late activist Barbara Seaman recounts in her excellent (especially-for-medical-science-nerds-like-me) 2003 book, The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women: Exploding the Estrogen Myth, the tale of synthetic estrogen is a case study of what happens when the development of a drug outpaces our knowledge of its effects in living humans.

As Seaman recounts, in the 1930s, hormone research was hot. In labs around the world, biochemists raced to unlock the mystery of hormones, the keys to the body’s regulatory system.

In the darkening time not long before World War II, word was out that the Nazis were synthesizing hormones for use in their eugenics program, designed to prevent undesirable individuals (the mentally ill, the physically disabled) and whole groups (gypsies and Jews) from reproducing.

Scientists elsewhere scrambled to stop Germany from gaining control of lab-created hormones.

Dr. Charles Dodds

In 1938, a British doctor and biochemist at London’s Courtauld Institute of Biochemistry in London made a big breakthrough.

Charles Dodds and a team of researchers discovered a way to synthesize the first nonsteroidal estrogen—a simpler compound than the estrogen being made by the Germans.

This synthetic form was called diethylstilbestrol or DES.

DES was easily manufactured and could be formulated as a pill or tablet.

It was also many times more powerful than natural estrogen, a fact that would come back to haunt its creators in the years to come.

Eager to share his discovery with the world and to stop German scientists from cornering the market, Charles Dodds never patented his process.

His discovery was widely hailed, especially by scientists and researchers. Within three years, over two hundred scientific papers were written about DES.

But among those two hundred papers, it turns out, were dozens that presented alarming information

about the negative effects of DES on animals.

The Journal of the American Medical Association, for instance, printed a preliminary report on stilbestrol in December, 1939, written by the Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry of the American Medical Association.

The Council concluded that “until the nature of the side effects of stilbestrol are understood, its use in the human being should be confined to experimental studies by qualified investigators.”

JAMA added an even stronger warning:

“In this connection, the possibility of carcinoma induced by estrogens cannot be ignored. The long continued administration of these proliferating agents to patients with a predisposition to cancer may be hazardous. The idea that estrogens are related in their activity only to sex organs should be abandoned. Other tissues of the body may react in an. undesirable manner when the doses are excessive and over too long a period. This point should be firmly established, since it appears likely that in the future the medical profession maybe importuned to prescribe to-patients large doses of high-potency estrogens, such as stilbestrol, because of the ease of administration of these preparations.”

Uterine defects in murine experiments

At about the same time, researchers at Northwestern University discovered that the offspring of rats exposed to DES developed uterine defects.

Another study, this one from Johns Hopkins University, reported that mice injected with DES developed breast cancer.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration ignored these findings.

Instead, at the urging of the pharmaceutical companies, in 1941, the government approved the use of DES for the suppression of lactation and relief of menopause symptoms.

A husband-wife science team with no scruples

Six years later, thanks in part to the tireless promotional efforts of a husband-and-wife research team based at

Harvard, DES was approved for use as an anti-abortifacient, that is, a drug to prevent miscarriage.

It was a decision that would result in death, deformation, and heartbreak for millions of women and their children, including my mother’s best friend, one of my colleagues, and my father-in-law.

Research biochemist Olive Watkins Smith, Ph.D., and her husband, Dr. George Van Siclen Smith, the head of the gynecology department at Harvard University, spent the 1940s pushing their claim that women treated with DES had better placental function and bigger and healthier babies than mothers who didn’t take DES.

Their work culminated in a 1949 paper published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Their research methods were unconscionable, as Seaman reports in her book.

The Smiths eschewed testing on pregnant animals, opting instead to give DES directly to human subjects.

Their study did not include a control group of un-DES-treated mothers for comparison’s sake.

And still, they feigned astonishment that they’d “found” was exactly what they’d set themselves up to find: DES was good for pregnant women.

They had expected DES mothers to do well while on the regimen, the husband-wife team wrote, but the extent of the benefits surprised even them.

“We did not anticipate that it could render normal gestation more normal’ as it were,” they wrote. (Without a control group, the question must certainly be, “More normal than what?)

After that study was published, medical doctors across the country began prescribing DES to otherwise healthy pregnant women. After all, scientists from Harvard had found that DES could make a healthy pregnancy healthier. So why wouldn’t this be a drug to prescribe with aplomb?

Drug manufacturers copied and distributed the Smiths’ study to thousands of doctors to encourage them to prescribe DES.

It worked.

Over the next forty years, an estimated five to ten million American women would take DES during pregnancy.

Harmful both to women and to their unborn babies

At the same time, more scrupulous and safety-conscious scientists and medical researchers working on laboratory animals met the Smiths’ results with some skepticism.

No other scientists were able to duplicate the Smiths’ results.

Instead, the studies conducted in the wake of the Smiths’ findings, turned the Smiths’ results on their head.

In 1953, Dr. William J. Dieckmann of the University of Chicago headed up a study of over 1,600 pregnant women. Half were treated with DES, and half were given a placebo.

Dieckmann concluded that DES was actually harmful both to women and to their fetuses.

Among other things, this study found that women treated with DES had smaller babies and were twice as likely to miscarry.

Unfortunately, this study, published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, did not sway drug manufacturers or the doctors in their thrall.

Even its originator, Charles Dodds, knew that synthetic estrogen prevented egg implantation, caused miscarriage, and could result in intersex changes in rabbits and mice, Seaman told me when I interviewed her years ago, before she passed away.

When Dodds learned that drug companies planned to use his synthetic estrogen on pregnant women, “he was furious,” Seaman said.

He knew this was a powerful substance; he’d seen the men in his lab who were handling it start to grow breasts.

“All of the original people key in developing estrogen products were very worried about cancer,” Seaman told me. “They knew that it, quite simply, made cells divide. They never intended it for long-term use.”

The business of DES

It would take another eighteen years before the federal government officially discouraged doctors from prescribing DES.

In the meantime, DES became big business, with over 250 pharmaceutical companies marketing it under 325 brand names.

The average regimen for pregnant women was one 125 milligram pill per day, the estrogenic equivalent of 700 of today’s birth control pills.

Doctors continued to prescribe DES to pregnant women, as well as for a vast array of other ills:

1. To suppress postpartum milk production,

2. To induce miscarriage, as an early version of the “morning-after” pill

3. To alleviate the symptoms of menopause

4. To treat problems ranging from acne to prostate cancer

It was even given to stunt the growth of teenage girls in danger of becoming unfashionably tall.

By taking this synthetic estrogen, millions of women were unwittingly setting themselves and their children up for sometimes fatal health problems down the road.

Just how health-crushing and even fatal this “wonder drug” really was began to surface in the 1960s.

Clear-cell adenocarcinoma

In 1966, a fifteen-year-old girl was admitted to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, bleeding from her vagina. She was diagnosed with an invasive and fast-growing cancer: clear-cell adenocarcinoma.

What made her case so unusual, besides her young age, was the fact that this type of cancer only occurs in glandular tissue, something the normal vagina contains none of.

Over the next five years, several other teenage girls would come to Mass General with clear-cell adenocarcinoma of the reproductive tract.

A quarter of those who contracted it would die from it.

The others would require drastic surgery including vaginectomies and hysterectomies.

Finally, the intuition of one affected girl’s mother led a doctor named Arthur Herbst to make the link between these adenocarcinoma cases and the DES the girls’ mothers took while pregnant.

After Herbst’s report appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine, the dangers of DES became national news.

At last, the FDA listened.

In 1971, the FDA issued a warning bulletin (though not a ban) against the use of DES in pregnancy.

Since then, the news on DES went bad to worse.

Fifty-five years later, we still don’t know the extent of the damage done.

In the 1970s, DES mothers had the mortifying job of informing their daughters that they were at lifelong risk for cancer and fertility problems.

Study after study appeared listing new problems related to use of synthetic estrogen: deformities of the uterus in DES daughters, deformities of the penis and testes in DES sons.

In the 1980s, DES was linked to autoimmune diseases.

Another study showed a thirty-three percent infertility rate among DES daughters, more than double the non-DES population.

DES daughters trying to get pregnant often encountered many difficulties, including structural malformations of the reproductive organs (such as a T-shaped uterus), preterm births, a higher likelihood of ectopic pregnancy, a higher rate of miscarriage, and permanent infertility.

In the 1990s, researchers drew a link between skeletal changes in offspring and DES-exposure in mothers.

Clear-cell adenocarcinoma continued to show up in DES daughters into their forties.

The turn of the century brought more bad news: In 2000, new studies cropped up about severe, sometimes suicidal depression in DES-exposed offspring.

In the same year, researchers discovered tumors in “grandchildren” mice, two generations removed from direct DES exposure.

One of the most frightening aspects of the DES debacle is how little the public still knows about it, and how long the information seemed to take to filter down to the practices of individual doctors. (An article in The Wall Street Journal in 1974, for instance, reported that 11,000 prescriptions were written that year for the use of DES to prevent miscarriage-three years after the explicit FDA warning.)

In Europe, DES was prescribed for years after it was discouraged in America.

Some developing countries around the world did not stop using DES until even more recently.

In the United States, Eli Lilly & Company did not end production of DES until the spring of 1997, since the drug was still being used to treat other diseases.

Still, uncovering the horrors of DES can be a relief.

A higher risk of breast cancer

In 2003 Katie Greenebaum, a writer, educator, and 38-year-old mother of three from Nashville, Tennessee, was diagnosed with malignant ductal carcinoma, a form of breast cancer rare in someone of her age with no known family history.

“No one has had early cancer or breast cancer in my family,” Greenebaum told me back then. “I’m not a hypochondriac. I hardly ever get sick. I was really surprised. It made me realize I had no idea what was going on inside me.”

Greenebaum had long known she was a DES daughter, but it didn’t occur to her at first that the tumor the doctors found in her breast tissue could be related to the medication her mom took before Katie was even born.

But when she learned that several studies showed that DES-exposed women have an increased rise of developing breast cancer than non-exposed women, things started to make more sense.

“It was comforting in a weird way to realize that it’s connected,” Greenebaum said. “It made me think I’m actually a healthy person, except for the DES.”

One lesson from the DES disaster is clear: synthetic hormones taken orally, like the hormones our bodies produce naturally, have a systemic effect on every tissue in the human body, altering our endocrine systems in unnatural, often damaging ways.

And when these hormones are taken during pregnancy, the negative effects can be passed on to offspring in ways that scientists still don’t understand.

The doctors’ case against the pill

Birth control pills are a synthetic hormone cocktail that millions of American women of childbearing age take every day.

Today, there are several different kinds of birth control pills on the market that include synthetic estrogen and synthetic progesterone (called progestin) in various combinations.

Because of the problems associated with synthetic estrogen, a progestin-only pill has also been developed, though it’s thought to be less effective in preventing pregnancy.

While many of us may be too young to remember, the first birth control pills offered to the public have an ignominious history, as Barbara Seaman explores in her 1969 exposé, The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill, co-written with her then M.D. husband. Their book is credited with having a wide-ranging impact on the birth control industry.

Seaman, who was sixty-seven years old when we spoke on the phone, traced her concerns about the safety and rationality of medical advice to the period following the birth of her first child. It was then that she told her doctor that she wanted to breastfeed.

This was the late 1950s, the era when infant formula companies claimed their products were more nutritious than breast milk.

“You won’t make a very good cow,” Seaman’s doctor told her dismissively.

Thinking the case closed, he went on to prescribe Seaman a strong laxative.

Seaman’s son became severely diarrheic from the medicine he ingested with her breast milk and nearly died.

Not long after, Seaman watched her aunt sicken and die from endometrial cancer, allegedly brought on, the oncologist told her aunt, by the estrogen in the hormone replacement therapy that Seaman’s aunt had been taking.

The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill traces the formulation of Enovid, the first prescription birth control pill.

It was approved by the FDA in 1960 after a year-long clinical trial was conducted on 132 (mostly poor) women in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

In 1963, mounting evidence of health problems caused by this birth control pill prompted a Senate investigation.

In addition to progestin, Enovid contained “a massive overdose” of estrogen, Seaman writes, ten times higher than the amount necessary to prevent ovulation.

Of the women in the original clinical trial, three died.

“The outrage is that they weren’t autopsied,” Seaman told me, adding that two of the women died of “what sounded like” pulmonary embolisms.

“The third one may have set herself on fire. She had some sort of severe depression or psychosis that her family said had manifested only after she went on the Pill. Some thought it was a suicide.”

Enovid’s major manufacturer, G.D. Searle & Company, aggressively promoted the Pill—as a cure-all for demographic problems in developing countries, for poor Americans who couldn’t afford large families, and for middle-class women everywhere who wanted to enjoy sexual intimacy without fear of pregnancy.

An increased risk of blood clots

The number-one danger first-generation Pill users faced was an increased risk of blood clots.

After the Pill was on the market for only a little over a year, G.D. Searle had amassed a file of over a 130 reports of Pill-users who suffered from blood clots and occluded blood vessels, eleven of whom died.

First-generation users also suffered from strokes, sterility, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, genetic changes, jaundice, thyroid dysfunction, weight gain, urinary infections, arthritis, depression, and irritability.

Myriad scientific studies later confirmed that these symptoms were caused by the Pill’s massive overdose of estrogen.

Similar symptoms can still occur in some women taking the lower-dose pills, Seaman said.

Following the publication of Seamans’ book, in 1970 the United States Senate conducted three months of hearings into the safety of the Pill.

As a direct result of the book, of the hearings, and of the international press coverage of the dangers of the Pill, a detailed consumer warning pamphlet was placed inside packages of oral contraceptives—the first of its kind ever distributed with prescription drugs in America.

Consistently faked results

As Seaman reported in a follow-up book, Women and the Crisis in Sex Hormones (1977), the FDA sent an inspection team to audit G.D. Searle’s offices in 1975.

They discovered that the results of Searle’s birth control pill drug safety tests had been consistently faked.

It reads like conspiracy theory. Only it’s true, and the FDA auditors have the documents to prove it: Animals from drug-treated groups had been switched into control groups if they became sick; even more egregiously, tumors developed in animal subjects had been cut out of their bodies, ignored, and left out of any of the so-called “scientific” safety data.

Yet despite the accumulation of evidence against it, the high-dose Pill wasn’t dropped in the United States until 1987. During that time my friend Pam’s mom died of blood clots. Pam was only 18 months old when she lost her mom, who had no history of blood clots in her medical history. Pam’s mom had been on the high-dose Pill. No one in the family connected the dots.

Drug companies today tout the safety of current low-dose pills and most doctors don’t hesitate to prescribe them to young women seeking birth control—they also dole them out like candy to teens as young as ten or eleven seeking a cure for acne and to youngsters of all ages who complain of having too long or too painful periods.

“There’s still much more trouble with the Pill than people are admitting,” Seaman said. She was quick to add that she was not entirely against the use of modern birth control pills, just wary.

“I want to be careful not to overestimate the problems. Of course, every woman has different susceptibilities.

But if it happens to you, it’s one hundred percent.”

As a health columnist for both Brides and Ladies Home Journal in the 1960s, Seaman fielded dozens of questions about depression and the Pill before this was even an acknowledged problem.

“Readers would write that they had this terrible depression. Doctors were saying, ‘it’s just because you feel guilty because you can have carefree sex,’” she said.

Pill packet inserts and medical manuals these days list depression as a possible side effect.

Women who begin using contraceptive pills as teenagers have a 130 percent higher chance of symptoms of depression than women who don’t, according to one of the largest studies on the subject done by researchers in Sweden.

Any woman with a history of liver problems, blood clots, or heart disease should not take the Pill.

Breastfeeding women should also avoid the Pill because estrogen and progesterone are secreted into breast milk.

The list of what we still don’t know about birth control pills is extremely long, Seaman argued, a comment which is likely true of most medications that contain synthetic hormones.

And since every woman’s body reacts differently to hormones, some women are at greater risk for side effects than others.

Medicalizing menopause

Just as the Drs. Smith pushed a program of medicalizing healthy pregnancies with DES in the 1950s, medical professionals since the 1990s have been increasingly medicalizing menopause, pushing prescription drug therapies on otherwise healthy women going through the “change of life.”

And just like the popularity of DES can be traced to the promotional efforts of the Smiths, the rise of HRT would have been far less effective without one New York-based gynecologist named Robert Wilson.

In 1966, Wilson published Forever Feminine, part memoir, part self-help book, in which he described his own mother’s journey through menopause.

It was a “frightful experience,” he detailed, watching his own mother go from a healthy, happy, energetic parent to a “pain-wracked petulant individual.”

Wilson touted the ability of HRT to stop aging, reverse estrogen depletion, and restore a woman to health and vitality.

Wilson portrayed Premarin—an estrogen supplement synthesized from pregnant mare urine—as a fountain of youth.

What he didn’t disclose when he wrote the book was that his research had been financed by three drug companies: Ayerst Laboratories (the owner of Wyeth Pharmaceuticals), the Searle Foundation, and the Upjohn Company.

Though it’s no longer in print (a mass market paperback version in good condition now sells for upwards of $55 on-line), Forever Feminine quickly became a bestseller, and drugs like Premarin became some of the top-selling prescription drugs in America.

In a sad coda, Wilson’s own wife, Thelma, later developed breast cancer while on HRT. She was forced to undergo a double mastectomy and died of her cancer seven years later.

Menopause can be difficult. While some women sail through it with nary a hot flash, others experience difficulties courtesy of changing hormones. These can include negative feelings about growing older, insecurity about entering a new phase of life, spaciness, memory loss, brain fog, unwanted weight gain, and a more-sluggish-than-normal libido.

Still, the rise of the menopause-alleviation industry has become a way for modern medicine to cash in, yet again, on women’s bodies and vulnerabilities.

You will be hard pressed to find an allopathic doctor recommending more cardiovascular and weight bearing exercise, time in nature, stress reduction, creativity, lovemaking, socializing, healthy eating, or decreasing exposures to environmental endocrine disruptors, especially those that interfere with the body’s estrogen receptors.

What you will find, however, is a medical industry keen on pathologizing your condition and prescribing you a pill for every ill: HRT, weight-loss drugs, acne medication, benzodiazepines, and pharmaceutical sleep aids.

Just ask Trisha Posner, author of the 2002 book, No Hormones, No Fear: A Natural Journey Through Menopause. Posner was alerted to her own menopause not through any of the telltale signs like hot flashes or irregular menstrual cycles, but from a phone call from her gynecologist.

Her blood work, the gynecologist told her grimly, showed that she was “in complete uterine failure” and needed to start treating her “illness” with HRT at once.

Without synthetic hormones, the doctor insisted, her bones would break, her memory would fail, and her body would gain unhealthy fat.

Only forty-six years old, Posner was concerned about the long-term effect of HRT and the associated risk of breast cancer, a disease that had afflicted both her mother and her aunt.

Posner’s doctor dismissed her fears, claiming that the benefits of HRT far outweighed the known risks.

But in July, 2002, a large and wide-ranging study of the health benefits of HRT undertaken by the National Institutes of Health was called to an emergency halt.

Researchers had found that otherwise healthy women in the study were at greater risk for heart attack, stroke, breast cancer, and pulmonary blood clots.

Nearly seventeen thousand women had joined the Women’s Health Initiative Study, which, in a grim but all-too-common irony, set out to examine the claims that HRT would strengthen women’s hearts and prevent their bones from becoming too brittle.

“A twenty-six percent increase in breast cancer risk is too high a price to pay, even if there were heart benefit,” said Dr. Claude Lenfant, director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute based in Bethesda, Maryland.

“Similarly, the risks outweigh the benefits of fewer hip fractures.”

Letters were written to all of the study participants, urging them to discontinue HRT.

Another study, completed in May of 2003, contradicted another HRT claim: that using hormones can stave off old-age dementia.

In this four-year study, half of the 4,532 participants were given placebos and the other half were given Wyeth Pharmaceuticals Prempro.

By the study’s end forty cases of dementia were found in the women taking Prempro, compared to just twenty-one in the control group.

In other words, that study found that HRT was actually doubling the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementia in women over 65.

Published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, this report reinforced two other studies showing that HRT has a negative impact on cognitive functioning.

Although today the HHS has been publicly insisting on the safety of HRT, Dr. Kathleen Harney, chief of women’s health at the Cambridge Health Alliance in Cambridge Massachusetts, a consortium of hospitals, stopped recommending HRT as a long-term, preventive for menopause symptoms years ago.

“It’s clear that there is not the benefit [from HRT] we thought there was,” Harney said. “But I still have a significant number of women who chose to stay on hormones for symptomatic relief of hot flashes, insomnia, and decreases in libido. Many women describe a general sense of well-being while on them.”

Harney also said she was careful to describe the risks to her patients, but that ultimately the decision to try HRT was up to them.

“When I was in medical school in the ‘80s and a resident in the 1990s, we were so strongly encouraged to counsel women to take hormones,” Harney continued, “as if hormones were a panacea. We were led to believe that hormones were good for women, and that women have problems because of insufficient estrogen. It has been a real challenge for me professionally and culturally.”

While Hamey emphasized that treatment for women should be done on an individual basis—a sentiment echoed by responsible medical doctors—she also said she felt it’s important to question medical practices and for patients to raise their concerns with doctors.

“There are things we do in medicine because there is a little bit of evidence and that’s just the way it’s done,” she conceded.

Natalie de Vane, who was a spokesperson for Wyeth Pharmaceuticals (the manufacturer of both Prempro and Premarin, until it was purchased by Pfizer in 2009), insisted that long-term HRT was never prescribed irresponsibly.

When I asked her years ago about the evidence of health risks to women taking HRT, she chose her words carefully.

“Since last summer, there has been a decline in the number of women using hormone therapy in general, not just our products, de Vane said. “But the results of the trial don’t change the fact that women go through menopause. Women are still going to go through menopause and have symptoms which can be very disruptive. It remains a very valuable treatment option for what it is indicated for: the relief of menopausal symptoms.”

Even if your mom didn’t take DES, you may have eaten it

Women who ate meat before 1980 were exposed to DES, which was routinely given to chicken and cows to fatten them for slaughter.

In September 1979, a federal ruling banned the use of DES in livestock feed. The judge cited research on mice showing that a dosage of DES as small as six parts per billion caused cancer and concluded that there is no safe limit of DES to humans.

The livestock industry appealed the decision. But on his last day in office, in June 1980, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Donald Kennedy made a final ban.

Since then, the livestock industry has started using other kinds of synthetic estrogen to artificially fatten animals before slaughter.

So even American women who do their best to eschew synthetic hormones their entire lives, those of us who have never swallowed a birth control pill or taken HRT, likely have man-made estrogen products in measurable amounts in our fat cells.

To wit, in a 1993 study published in the Lancet, Richard Sharpe and Niels Skakkebaek wrote that “humans now live in an environment that can be viewed as a virtual sea of estrogens.”

This study—and literally hundreds of others—show that synthetic estrogens and other hormones are present in the animal products and other foods we eat, the water we drink, the soil in which we grow our food, and even the air we breathe.

“The dangers of synthetic hormones are not limited to the women who have taken them, nor to their male or female children,” Barbara Seaman wrote in the last chapter of The Greatest Experiment.

“Perhaps even more disconcerting is the growing evidence that such hormones pollute our soil and water and have a cascade of effects on wildlife.”

For Seaman, one of the most important lessons to be learned was one she discovered as a new mother wanting to breastfeed her son:

No matter what experts tell us, we humans need to be proactive about our health, ask questions of our doctors, and do our own research.

Whether pregnant, trying to avoid pregnancy, or entering menopause, women often find out the hard way that our doctors are not infallible, and that they may not have our best interests in mind.

As consumers of health care products, we all need to read the fine print.

What that fine print tells us is that we still don’t know everything we need to know about how hormones affect the whole human organism, and that any treatment must be considered, to a greater or lesser extent, experimental.

The choice to take birth control pills or to use hormone replacement therapy to help alleviate the symptoms of menopause is ultimately a personal one.

But next time you’re streaming your favorite series and a commercial for birth control pills or HRT comes on the screen, you would do well to remember the troubled history of synthetic hormones: the women who died taking Enovid in Puerto Rico, the G.D. Searle & Company study that falsified evidence about birth control pill research, Thelma Wilson’s untimely death, and Katie Greenebaum’s fight against breast cancer.

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A different version of this article, under the title, “Hormonally Charged: An Estrogen Exposé,” first appeared in Brain, Child Magazine.

About the author:

Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D., is an award-winning science writer and book author.

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“I don’t want to give you false hope,” the medical assistant at the cancer clinic said to me last week, brow furrowed.

Wait.

What?

Pause the game.

Psychologists even have a label for “false hope.” They define it as a syndrome, akin to fetal alcohol syndrome or Raynaud’s syndrome.

According to Dan Tomasula, Ph.D., a champion of positive psychology, there are three key elements to what he calls “false hope syndrome”:

1. Repeatedly believing in unrealistic expectations

2. Feeling empowered to do something to change the problem even if it is unrealistic

3. Overconfidence from believing you’re in control of the situation even if you’re not

It’s common for allopathic medical doctors to insist that it’s wrong or bad to give their patients, especially people like me who are fighting extremely rare and difficult-to-clear cancers, “false hope.”

They then use their stated or unconscious fear of giving patients “false hope” to justify not using an off-label treatment, not trying something different if the treatment the patient is receiving isn’t working, or to dismiss a patient’s lived experience.

Addicted to negative thinking

Rachel Naomi Remen, a medical doctor, oncology counselor, and academic, tells a story in her book Kitchen Table Wisdom, about a young man with “terminal cancer” who rejected his doctor’s recommendations, beat all the odds, and healed from the cancer nonetheless.

Some time later, Remen called the young man’s former oncologist to talk to him about this fascinating and wonderful outcome. The young man’s doctor was so flabbergasted that his patient did not die—as he had predicted—and was instead living his best life, that he hung up the phone on her.

She called him back several times.

He refused to talk to her.

That story illustrates, to me, just how addicted many people in the medical field are to their own negativity, lack of hope, and feelings of doom and gloom.

False hope? Yes, ma’am!

“There’s nothing wrong with giving me hope,” I insisted to the medical assistant, making a come-hither gesture with my hands. We both laughed. “What’s wrong with being hopeful? Bring it on! I need as much hope as I can get.”

Here’s the thing: none of us knows our expiration date but we all know that we have one. Furthermore, no one can predict the future—what works for one person may be a disaster for another. At the same time, some outside-the-box thinking combined with a determinedly optimistic point of view is often how we can get from the bad place that we are in right now to the good place where we want ourselves to be.

When things look really dire, what benefit is there to being “realistic”? If you want to get ontological about it, what is reality anyway?

Besides, there are measurable positive scientific benefits to the placebo effect, which may be the perfect way to reframe what experts want us to believe is “false” hope.

Think of it this way: If you are going to have a bad outcome, should you think terrible miserable downward spiraling thoughts and be as unhappy as possible until the “inevitable” happens?

Or might it serve you better to be optimistic and positive and imagine the future you want to embody, so that you are bathing your brain and body in positive emotions for the X amount of time you have left?

Joe Dispenza, author of Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, says when you imagine every aspect of the future you want, you create that future in the quantum field, and you give the universe (or God or Mother Nature) the opportunity to give you the future you have imagined.

He’s been relentlessly criticized for saying this. As if it’s disturbing, unfair, or, in one hit piece writer’s words, “scary,” to empower people to think good thoughts, believe they can heal themselves, and imagine a better future for themselves and their families.

Because, you know, even when it works, it’s just a coincidence.

What do you lose in hoping for the best if you end up with the worst?

Let’s say the outcome turns out to be bad: you don’t get the job or the promotion you’ve been trying so hard for, your daughter doesn’t call you on Mother’s Day, the wonderful houseplants you had to leave behind for two weeks while you were on assignment die from lack of watering, or you succumb to a “terminal” illness like stage four metastatic breast cancer (me, I have stage four metastatic melanoma, yay!). Do you want to spend your time in a miserable state of anxious waiting, nonstop worrying, ruminating on your imminent demise, and utter misery, or do you want to be positive and hopeful (and write run-on sentences)?

Yes, we need to plan for possible bad outcomes.

Yes, we need to have all the hard conversations.

And, yes, the couples that sign prenuptial agreements (to protect themselves financially and otherwise in the event that they end up getting divorced) tend to have more stable marriages and are actually less likely to get divorced than couples that don’t.

I do believe in talking about the hard stuff. I do believe in advanced directives and plan Bs. And I do take exception with the people who call or text me and say things like:

“Just drink some hydrogen peroxide and your cancer will be cured!”

“Keep upping the dose of X, Y, Z ‘miracle cure’ and you’ll be better in a jiffy!” (Liver failure, side effects, and the fact that the person promoting said X, Y, or Z is getting financial kickbacks for doing so be damned.)

“OMG, my friend is completely NED because she did ____! [an allopathic treatment you’ve been on that does not work for you but does cause terrible side effects.] All you need to do is read these ten [AI-generated industry-sponsored] links and you’ll see why it works!”

(This happens much more often than you may think. I know these people always mean well. Maybe some are reading this post. But it’s not helpful to send a visually impaired cancer-addled science writer your exclamation-pointed miracle cure, especially when you haven’t talked to her in months, she hasn’t asked for your advice, she cannot click on the above-mentioned industry-sponsored links without experiencing severe eye strain, and has likely tried said miracle cure already. Don’t send texts like this. Do call your friend and tell her these five words. Do show up in person. Do offer them this medicine. These are the things that help. Not AI.)

Too-good-to-be-true stories aside, sometimes all we have is hope. Hope is a beautiful thing. It increases your resilience in the face of a chronic or debilitating disease. Scientists from the Brookings Institute have found that there is a “strong link” between hope and better current and future outcomes. Iranian researchers have found that changing your thinking results in more hope and less depression, stress, and anxiety, and can even reduce pain associated with cancer.

Have hope.

Be optimistic.

Dream big.

Me, I believe in hope.

Leave a comment

About the author:

Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D., is an award-winning science writer and book author. She has taught post-colonial literature to non-traditional students in inner-city Atlanta; performed the cancan in Middlebury, Vermont; and appeared live on prime-time television in Paris, France. An internationally known advocate for medical freedom, gentle parenting, bodily autonomy, and natural health, she taught for a year as a Fulbright grantee in Niger, West Africa; has em-ceed a conference on the safety concerns of the HPV vaccine in Copenhagen, Denmark; and taught writing in Lucca, Italy.

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I’m teaming up with literary agent Johanna Maaghul to teach an on-line class in how to write a nonfiction book proposal.

This is a live class, that meets in real time (albeit on-line). Attendees will have the opportunity to ask questions and get personal feedback on their ideas.

Whether your nonfiction book is mostly written or you just have the germ of an idea, yes, you need an actual factual book proposal.

Even if you plan to self publish, you will be a thousand times more successful throughout every stage of the process if you have a book proposal.

Our course begins on Thursday, May 21, 2026.

I hope you’ll join us.

Wait, what is the Jennifer talking about?

I’m glad you asked.

Here’s the Substack Johanna posted about it, which contains ALL the deets (keep reading, you’ll see):

5 Reasons a Strong Book Proposal Matters

And why most aspiring nonfiction authors get it wrong before they ever get the chance to get it right

CLEAR LANTERN MEDIA AND ARKHUB INSIGHTS AND JOHANNA MAAGHUL

MAY 02, 2026

Every nonfiction author I’ve ever spoken to remembers the moment their book felt real.

For some, it was the first time they typed a chapter title.

For others, it was a stray sentence scribbled on a napkin that wouldn’t leave them alone.

But there’s another moment — a quieter, more decisive one — that almost no one talks about: the moment the book proposal lands on an editor’s desk.

Because here’s the truth most first-time authors don’t realize until it’s too late:

In nonfiction, your book isn’t sold by your manuscript. It’s sold by your proposal.

Agents say yes or no based on the proposal.

Acquisitions editors pitch their teams from the proposal.

Marketing departments forecast sales off the proposal.

Advance amounts are negotiated against the proposal. The manuscript? That comes after the contract. Working with nonfiction authors, I recommend 2-3 chapters are included, but even these chapters go at the END of the proposal.

So if the proposal is the document that decides everything, it’s worth understanding why a strong one matters — and what “strong” actually means.

Here are five reasons.

1. A proposal is the only place your book exists before it exists

A nonfiction book proposal is a working document. It’s the blueprint, the pitch, and the business case rolled into one. Before a single chapter is fully drafted, the proposal has to convince a publisher that this book deserves to exist, that you are the right person to write it, and that there are readers waiting for it.

Most aspiring authors think of a proposal as paperwork. It isn’t. It’s the first piece of professional writing a publisher will ever read from you, and it’s where your future book takes its earliest, most fragile shape.

2. A book proposal tells a publisher whether you understand the market

A surprising number of proposals fail not because the idea is bad, but because the author hasn’t done the work of locating their book in the world. Who is it for? What else is out there? Why does this book belong on the shelf next to those titles — and what does it offer that they don’t?

A strong competitive titles section, a defined audience, and a clear-eyed market analysis do something subtle but powerful: they tell a publisher that you’ve already thought like a publisher. That signal alone moves proposals from the “no” pile to the “let’s talk” pile.

3. A book proposal proves you can write the book

This is the part most writers underestimate. A proposal isn’t just a description of what you’ll write — it’s a sample of your voice, your structure, and your thinking. The overview, the chapter outline, and the sample chapters all do double duty: they describe the book, and they audition you as its author.

If the proposal is muddled, the assumption is that the manuscript will be too. If the proposal is sharp, specific, and confident, the publisher starts to imagine the finished book in their hands.

Join the class

4. A book proposal defines your platform — without making you cringe

“Platform” is one of those words that makes good writers want to disappear under their desks.

But platform isn’t bragging.

It’s evidence. It’s the case for why you — your expertise, your credibility, your reach, your relationships — give this book a fighting chance to find its readers.

A strong proposal presents your platform with clarity and confidence, neither inflating it nor apologizing for it. Done well, this section turns “I’m a first-time author” from a liability into an asset.

5. It’s leverage — long after the deal is signed

Even after you sign your contract, the proposal keeps working. It guides your manuscript when you lose your way. It anchors marketing conversations a year down the line. It shapes how your publicist pitches you, how your cover designer thinks about positioning, how booksellers categorize your title.

A weak proposal gets you a deal you’ll spend the next two years trying to live up to. A strong proposal gets you a deal — and a roadmap.

Learn how to write one that works

I’m thrilled to share that Clear Lantern Authors Academy is launching a brand-new course on exactly this:

How to Write a Killer Book Proposal

Starts Thursday, May 21, 2026 · 2:00–3:30 PM PDT Three live sessions · May 21, May 28, and June 4

Taught by Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D. — an award-winning science journalist, Fulbright grantee, and author or co-author of eight books (three of them national award winners), with bylines in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Smithsonian — alongside me, ArkHub’s Lead Strategist Johanna Maaghul, this three-session course walks you through the exact structure literary agents and publishers expect to see.

Join the class

Across three live sessions, you’ll learn how to:

• Write a strong, magnetic book overview

• Position yourself as the right author for the book

• Define your target audience and analyze competing titles

• Build a marketing and publicity plan publishers take seriously

• Develop a chapter outline and prepare sample chapters

• Format and finalize a submission-ready proposal

You’ll leave the course with the major sections of a professional nonfiction book proposal drafted, structured, and ready for refinement.

If you’ve been sitting on a book idea — or staring at a half-finished proposal that you can’t quite get over the line — this is the class for you.

👉 Space is limited. Reserve your spot here

The book you’ve been carrying around in your head deserves a proposal that does it justice. Let’s build it together.

Clear Lantern Authors Academy is a learning portal for writers who want to strengthen their craft, grow their platform, and expand their creative potential. Browse the full catalog at Clear Lantern Authors Academy on ArkHub.

Clear Lantern Media is a boutique agency focused on strategic representation for authors, creators, and original intellectual property across publishing, film, and media. We provide our clients with the publishing deals, licensing opportunities, and adaptation pathways to match their bold vision and diligent work. We also provide the editorial, publicity, and platform development tools and resources needed to ensure each project reaches its full potential. From pitch to placement, our work is rooted in strong relationships, targeted strategy, and a commitment to preserving creative vision while expanding market reach.

Join the class

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