“He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
This essay draws on two Wednesday webinars Dr. Thomas Cowan hosted in September 2026. On 9 September, Cowan sat with Dr. Jordan Grant, who laid out the operationalist parsing of what laboratory procedures can and cannot justify. On 16 September, Cowan’s solo follow-up extended the argument with Henry Harrower’s clinical observation and the recognition that reification itself generates health-damaging anxiety. The categories used here (lab behaviors, category one, category two, category three, the recipe) are Grant’s. The phrase “the language of the oppressor” is Cowan’s. The essay operates in two registers. Establishment terms (vitamin D, testosterone, TSH, C-reactive protein, antibodies, thyroid stimulating hormone) appear as the names by which the tests are known and their reference standards marketed, not as endorsements of the entities the tests claim to detect. The author’s analytical voice sits in the terrain paradigm: the body as a self-regulating organism whose signals are legible without instrumentation, and whose health follows from clean water, whole food, sunlight, rest, and freedom from toxic exposure. Where the essay names an entity in the establishment’s vocabulary, the reader can read that as scare-quoted throughout.
A vial of your blood arrives at the laboratory. A technician transfers a measured volume into a growth medium seeded with Lactobacillus leichmannii, a bacterium that will not multiply without the compound the assay calls B12. The mixture is incubated. After a set number of hours, the technician places the tube in a photometer. The photometer measures how cloudy the liquid has become. Cloudier means more bacteria. More bacteria means more of the compound the assay calls B12 was present in your blood.
The cloudiness reading is matched against a calibration curve. That curve was constructed by adding known concentrations of cyanocobalamin to bacterial cultures and recording how cloudy each culture became. Cyanocobalamin is an industrial compound produced by bacterial fermentation, first isolated by Merck chemists in 1948 from liver extracts treated with cobalt salts.¹ It contains a cyanide group added during purification. It does not exist in food. Your cloudiness reading is matched to a point on the curve. The point is converted to a number. The number is printed on your lab report as pg/mL. Your doctor says your B12 is 287.
Nothing was measured. Nothing was isolated. Bacteria grew in a mixture that included your blood. The liquid became cloudier or less cloudy than the reference cultures. That is the record of the laboratory event. Everything else printed on your report is a story built on top of it.
Jordan Grant, an operationalist physician who has done the disciplined work of parsing what laboratory procedures can and cannot justify, has a phrase for this. He calls it a lab behavior. Not an entity. Not a level. A behavior. Something a mixture of substances did in a controlled setting. His exact words to Cowan: “That’s not an actual entity in your body. That’s a lab behaviour.”²
The 287 is not a fact about your blood. The 287 is the numerical output of the match between two cloudiness readings, one of them derived from a bacterial culture responding to an industrial chemical invented in a laboratory in 1948. What the report calls your B12 level is a mathematical record of an event that took place in a laboratory. Whatever is in your blood, and whatever it does there, was not investigated. The tube was investigated. The tube became cloudy. The report says 287.
This essay walks through seven of the most commonly ordered blood tests in modern medicine. The framework comes from Grant. The pattern is the same across every test examined. Only the reagents change.
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What Was Actually Done
Grant offers a way of parsing what a laboratory procedure justifies claiming. It works so cleanly across so many cases that it becomes a general-purpose tool the reader can carry through every clinical encounter for the rest of their life.
Category one is what happened. Bacteria were seeded into a mixture containing your blood. The mixture became cloudy. A photometer registered the cloudiness. This is real. This was done. You can watch the technician do it.
Category two is the first claim built on top of what happened. The claim is that the cloudiness registered by the photometer reflects the amount of a specific compound present in your blood. This cannot be validated. Cyanocobalamin is an industrial compound invented in 1948. The cobalt-containing compounds said to occur in animal tissue and traditional food (methylcobalamin, adenosylcobalamin, hydroxocobalamin) are chemically distinct from cyanocobalamin. None of them has been isolated from human tissue by a method independent of the reagents used to detect them. The bacterial assay does not distinguish among any of these forms. It also responds to compounds the field calls B12 analogues, which are not counted as B12 in the reference framework. The test was calibrated against synthetic cyanocobalamin. It is being applied to blood that has never been shown to contain any of the compounds the assay is supposed to represent.
Category three is the second claim built on top of the first. The claim is that the number derived from the calibration curve reflects a functional state of your body that predicts your health and dictates your treatment. Category three inherits every problem category two has and adds new ones. Even if the compound existed and were reliably measured, the leap from a number to a treatment decision requires a demonstrated causal chain from the number to the outcome. The chain is asserted, not demonstrated. The correlations that appear to support it were generated inside a clinical system where treatment decisions are made downstream of the number, which makes the correlations circular.
Grant puts category one plainly. What you can watch happen at the bench is honest. Everything else is gap-filling and storytelling, usually based on models people have made up in their minds that they already believe are true, and then they reverse-engineer their findings to those stories.
The B12 test does category one honestly and cannot support category two or three. Your doctor is acting on category three as if it were category one. That is the entire problem.
The Recipe
Grant’s second contribution is the observation that the sequence that arrived at the B12 test is not idiosyncratic to that test. It is the standard operating procedure across the entire invisible-entity industry.
Take a starting substance. Do many steps to it. The steps involve solvents. They involve heat, or centrifugation, or precipitation. They take multiple stages of processing. At the end, you have a substance you did not start with. Call the substance an isolate. Give it a name. Match subsequent tests against it. Every one of the tests in this essay was arrived at that way.
Cowan illustrated the philosophical problem with a thought experiment during the webinar. Cut a stick of butter in half. What do you have? Half a stick of butter. Cut it in half again. Half of that. Keep going. At every stage what you have is a smaller amount of butter. You do not, at any point, start pulling out discrete chemicals that were secretly there all along. The claim that butter contains dozens or hundreds of specific compounds is a category two claim built on top of category one procedures (grind, dissolve, heat, precipitate, register a peak) that could not justify it. As Grant asked Cowan during the same exchange, if you cannot unbake a cake, why does anyone think you can unmake butter?
The recipe applied to bat guano produced what nineteenth-century chemists called guanine and then claimed as a constituent of your DNA. Guano is bird and bat droppings. Chemists processed the droppings, extracted a crystal, named the crystal after the source material, and the crystal took its place as one of the four nucleotide bases said to encode inherited life. The foundation of molecular biology carries the name of what it was first extracted from. Applied to liver extract, the recipe produced cyanocobalamin. Applied to sheep wool grease and ultraviolet light, it produced cholecalciferol. Applied to Mexican yam roots and industrial chemistry, it produced testosterone. Applied to serum precipitates, it produced C-reactive protein. In every case the sequence was the same. Start with something. Do things to it. End up with something else. Name the end product as if it had always been in the start material.
The industrial compound became the reference standard. The reference standard became the calibration curve. The calibration curve became the mechanism by which the compound was declared to exist in your blood. The test defines the entity. The entity is what the test detects. The circle closes on itself, and inside it, your lab report generates.
The rest of this essay walks through six more tests. Each one follows the recipe.
Vitamin D: Fluorescence and the Rat Poison Standard
The vitamin D test measures what it calls 25-hydroxyvitamin D by immunoassay or by liquid chromatography paired with mass spectrometry. Both methods produce a signal. The signal is matched to a calibration curve. The curve is constructed with synthetic 25-hydroxycholecalciferol, manufactured in the laboratory from cholecalciferol as the starting substrate.
Cholecalciferol is produced from lanolin, the grease scraped from sheep wool during commercial processing.³ The lanolin is treated with organic solvents including benzene and chloroform to isolate 7-dehydrocholesterol, which is then irradiated with ultraviolet light to convert it to cholecalciferol. The resulting compound is the active ingredient in commercial rat poison marketed under trade names such as Quintox and Rampage.⁴ The lethal dose in rodents is achieved by producing hypercalcemia severe enough to calcify soft tissue and stop the heart. This is the substance from which the reference standard for your vitamin D test is derived.
The fluorescence emission method that Cowan and Grant examined during the webinar exploits an observation from analytical chemistry: certain compounds emit light at characteristic wavelengths when excited by ultraviolet input. The paper they read conceded in its own introduction that the emissions are not unique to any single compound. The authors used the word “intrinsic” to describe them, but wrote in the same paragraph that fluorescence can be used to rule out substances, not to rule them in. Grant caught the concession immediately. Non-unique behaviors cannot establish specificity. What the fluorescence test does is register a filter response. What it does not do is prove the presence of the compound.
Set aside the philosophical problem and the reification still collapses on the same architecture as B12. The compound the fluorescence readings are matched against is a synthetic derivative of a rat poison feedstock. The blood being tested has never been shown to contain the compound the test is calibrated to detect. What the test registers is a fluorescence behavior of a sample under specific input conditions, matched to a curve constructed from a lab-manufactured standard. The number your doctor calls a vitamin D level is that match. Whatever your body actually does with sunlight and cholesterol was not investigated. The sample was investigated. The sample fluoresced. The report says 32.
Ferritin: When the Antibodies Are Also Made in a Lab
The ferritin test uses a chemiluminescent immunoassay. Small beads coated with what the assay calls anti-ferritin antibodies are added to your blood. The claim is that these proteins bind selectively to ferritin, a protein said to store iron inside your cells. A second batch of what the assay calls antibodies, tagged with a chemical that emits light when triggered, is added next. Light is emitted. A photomultiplier measures the light. The reading is matched against a calibration curve built from recombinant human ferritin as the reference standard.
What the assay calls antibodies were made in a laboratory. Monoclonal antibodies are the product of hybridoma technology, developed by Georges Köhler and César Milstein in 1975.⁵ Cancerous myeloma cells were fused with spleen cells from mice that had been injected with the target substance. The fused cells were selected for their capacity to produce a specific protein at scale. The proteins they produce exist nowhere in nature. Natural antibodies with the structural features assigned to them by mainstream immunology have never been isolated from human serum in a form independent of the tools used to detect them.
The reference standard was also made in a laboratory. Recombinant human ferritin is produced by inserting what molecular biology calls the ferritin gene sequence into a bacterial expression system and harvesting the product. The compound in the test tube is a lab construct calibrated against another lab construct. When the two lab constructs bind to each other, they release a signal. The signal is matched to a curve derived from further lab constructs. Two proteins that exist nowhere in nature performed their designed binding behavior in a mixture that included your blood, and this event was declared a measurement of the iron your cells are storing.
Category one is honest. Two engineered proteins were combined with your blood. A light signal was generated. A photomultiplier registered it. Category two is the claim that the signal reflects the amount of a specific natural protein present in your blood, and that the natural protein exists as an iron-storage repository inside your cells. Category three is the claim that the number produced by the calibration curve reflects your total body iron stores, predicts your risk of anemia or overload, and dictates supplementation or phlebotomy. Neither category two nor category three has ever been demonstrated by a method independent of the assay itself.
The reader told they have low ferritin and prescribed iron has been prescribed an intervention based on the binding behavior of two lab-manufactured proteins in a mixture that contained their blood. Whether they benefit from the intervention is a separate question the test cannot answer.
Testosterone: The Yam-Derived Reference Compound
The testosterone test uses either an older immunoassay or a newer liquid chromatography paired with tandem mass spectrometry, marketed as the gold standard. Both methods produce a signal. Both signals are matched to a calibration curve. The curve is constructed from synthetic testosterone.
Synthetic testosterone is produced from plant sterols, primarily diosgenin extracted from Mexican yam roots. Russell Marker developed the industrial pathway (now called the Marker degradation) in the 1940s.⁶ Diosgenin becomes progesterone through a sequence of chemical reactions, and progesterone becomes testosterone through additional synthetic steps. The end product has no biological connection to human tissue. It was made by industrial chemistry from a botanical precursor.
Grant made this a particular focus of the webinar because he is a practicing physician who prescribes what the industry calls hormones every day of his working life. His conclusion, after years inside the system, is that the entire architecture is applied fiction. The compounds administered to patients are industrial synthetics manufactured from plant sterols. The tests used to measure them are calibrated against the same synthetics. What the tests register is the behavior of the administered compound in a laboratory mixture, matched to a curve derived from the administered compound.
The early hormone experiments in the 1920s and 1930s at least involved animal tissue. Researchers castrated roosters, observed the loss of certain traits, transplanted testicular tissue back into the animals, and observed the return of some of those traits. That work established that a gland does something. It did not establish that a specific molecule extracted from the gland does what the gland does. The molecule was never isolated from the gland in a form independent of the extraction. What the extraction produced was a crystal, characterized only by its behavior in further chemistry. Modern medicine took the industrial synthetic and declared it identical to what the gland produces. The declaration was never demonstrated. It was assumed and then made permanent by building the entire testing and prescribing infrastructure on top of it.
The testosterone replacement therapy industry runs on this. A man is tested against a curve derived from yam-processed synthetic. He is prescribed the yam-processed synthetic to correct the deficiency defined by the curve. His retest, showing improved numbers, confirms the treatment worked. What was measured was the yam-processed synthetic he was prescribed. What was corrected was the reading of the yam-processed synthetic he was prescribed. The circle is airtight. Nothing about the patient’s endocrine system was investigated at any point. Whatever effects the compound produces in his body are real and observable, and they still tell you nothing about whether the endocrine system’s own signaling has been measured or corrected.
The clinical damage is visible to any physician who watches long enough. In a follow-up webinar the week after the Grant conversation, Cowan cited the endocrinologist Henry Harrower, who documented across three decades of clinical practice what every doctor prescribing the isolated compounds the industry calls hormones eventually sees.⁷ A patient with low-thyroid symptoms is given thyroxin. The initial response is symptomatic improvement. Over time the same dose produces less effect. The dose is raised. The patient’s own thyroid function progressively declines. Stopping the medication now produces worse symptoms than the patient began with, and lower measured function than before treatment started. The same pattern appears with testosterone. Harrower’s comparison group were his own patients treated instead with whole animal tissue preparations from the corresponding gland. They showed sustained improvement without progressive suppression. Giving the isolated compound damages the function the compound is said to represent. Every physician watches this and calls it dose escalation.
TSH: Regulating Something Never Isolated Against a Standard Made in Bacteria
Thyroid stimulating hormone is measured by third-generation chemiluminescent immunoassay. Two lab-manufactured proteins, each said to bind to a different site on the TSH molecule, capture whatever is in your blood between them. This architecture is called a sandwich assay. The bound complex is detected by a light signal. The signal is matched to a calibration curve built from an international reference standard maintained by the World Health Organization.
The reference standard is recombinant, produced by inserting what molecular biology calls a genetic sequence into an expression system and harvesting the product. Earlier standards were purified from cadaver pituitary extract. In neither case has the substance been demonstrated to be identical to whatever the human pituitary secretes into circulation, because whatever the human pituitary secretes into circulation has never been isolated in a form independent of the tools used to detect it. The recombinant standard is the operational definition of TSH. The test is calibrated against the operational definition. Your blood is compared to the operational definition. The comparison produces a number.
That number is used to determine whether your thyroid is being adequately regulated. If the number is high, you are given levothyroxine (sold as Synthroid). If the number is low, the levothyroxine is reduced or stopped. Category three claims that the number reflects the actual regulatory state of your endocrine system. Category two claims that the number reflects the amount of TSH circulating in your blood. Neither claim has been demonstrated. A light signal was generated when a lab-manufactured protein pair combined with your blood, and the signal was matched to a curve.
The clinical logic runs in reverse. A patient with a high TSH is given Synthroid. Six months later the reading has normalized. The normalization is not evidence that the patient’s thyroid is now producing more of what the pituitary requires. It is evidence that the exogenous levothyroxine is present in sufficient quantity to suppress the pituitary’s output of what the assay calls TSH. The test measures the effect of the medication, not the state of the patient. The test result required to justify the medication is generated by the medication itself.
CRP: The Same Turbidity Trick, Different Reagents
C-reactive protein is measured by immunoturbidimetric assay. What the assay calls anti-CRP antibodies are added to your blood. If the substance the assay targets is present, it binds to the antibodies, forming complexes. The complexes make the mixture cloudy. The cloudiness is measured by photometer. The reading is matched against a calibration curve constructed from a purified CRP reference standard.
The reader who has been following the essay will notice what has just been described. The B12 test measured cloudiness generated by bacteria multiplying in a mixture containing blood. The CRP test measures cloudiness generated by lab-manufactured proteins binding to something in a mixture containing blood. Both are turbidity measurements. Both are matched to calibration curves. Both curves are built from synthetic reference compounds. The physical machinery is the same. The reagents differ. The story attached to the reading differs, which is why the B12 reading leads to cyanocobalamin injections and the CRP reading leads to cardiovascular workups. The category one operation is nearly identical.
This is what Grant meant by the recipe. It is a literal description of the standardized architecture of the modern blood test. The photometer that reads the B12 sample was probably manufactured by the same company that made the photometer that reads the CRP sample. The mathematics of matching a cloudiness reading to a curve is identical in both cases. The difference is only in what is added to the mixture and what story is told about the resulting cloudiness. That story is not in the test. The test is a cloudiness reading. The story was added by someone who was not present at the bench.
Antibody Titres: The Circle Closes
The fullest expression of the reification problem appears in what medicine calls antibody testing. The protocol most commonly used is called ELISA, for enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. A plastic plate is coated with a substance called the antigen. The antigen is a lab-manufactured protein or protein fragment said to represent what a vaccine is thought to present to the body, or what an alleged virus, a bacterium, or a suspected allergen is thought to present. Your blood serum is added to the coated plate. What the assay calls antibodies in your serum are said to bind to the coated antigen. Unbound material is washed away. A secondary lab-manufactured protein, tagged with an enzyme, is added. The secondary protein binds to what is now stuck to the plate. A substrate for the enzyme is added, and the enzyme catalyzes a color change. A photometer measures the color intensity. The reading is matched to a calibration curve.
The plate is coated with a synthetic construct declared to represent something the body encounters, though the something has never been isolated from a sick person in a form independent of the tools used to detect it. This is the antigen problem, and it is the foundation of germ theory as a practical matter. If the alleged virus has never been isolated, the viral antigen is a lab construct with no natural referent. The claim that it represents anything present in the body during illness is a story.
The proteins in your blood said to bind to the antigen have never been isolated from human serum either. Paul Ehrlich’s original antibody drawings were hypothetical, and for nearly a century researchers were unable to purify from human blood what he had drawn. The problem was solved in 1975 not by isolating natural antibodies but by inventing the hybridoma technology that produces synthetic ones. The claim that natural antibodies exist in the form the assay assumes is a category two claim that has never been supported by a category one operation.
The secondary protein added to the plate is a monoclonal antibody, a hybridoma product, existing nowhere in nature.
Two lab constructs (the antigen and the secondary antibody) were combined with your blood. A color change was generated. A photometer registered the color change. The reading was matched to a curve built from other lab constructs. The number produced was declared to be the amount of a natural substance (your antibodies) reactive with another natural substance (the antigen). Neither of the natural substances has been isolated. The reference standards are synthetic. The tools of detection are synthetic. The story is that all of this measures your body’s defensive response to an infectious agent.
The story determines whether you are declared immune, whether your vaccine is said to have worked, whether you are said to have been exposed to a pathogen, and whether you carry what medicine calls autoimmune markers. The entire vaccine efficacy apparatus rests on antibody titre readings. So does the diagnostic apparatus for the conditions labeled autoimmune. So does what the field calls natural immunity, measured after illness. Category one is honest. Color change in a mixture, measured by a photometer. Everything above it is story-building on top of laboratory events that cannot bear the weight.
What Opponents Concede
Cowan documented a pattern in the 16 September webinar that recurs every time the operationalist argument is put to a defender of the current framework. The defender begins in full confidence: testosterone is in the testicle, cholecalciferol is in your blood, the antibody titre measures your immune status. Within five minutes of the operationalist explanation, the confidence collapses to a smaller claim. The defender concedes, in Cowan’s exact words from his clinical practice, that “there’s something in there.”
The concession is the argument. The move from “the compound is present in the tissue” to “something is present in the tissue that allows the compound to be produced by a laboratory procedure” is the whole distance the essay has walked. What is present is what the recipe converts into what the compound is called. Cowan noted that defenders never return from the smaller claim to the original one. The concession holds. The defender may change the subject, may argue that clinical practice remains useful, may argue that the reader is not qualified to raise the question. The defender does not go back to “the compound is present in the tissue,” because that claim cannot survive the operationalist question about what was actually done at the bench.
The Language of the Oppressor
Cowan named this in the webinar. His phrase was the language of the oppressor. What he meant was that framing health in terms of invisible entities the patient cannot investigate produces powerlessness by design.
Consider the reader who is told the following. Your RAS-2 enzyme is downregulated. This is negatively affecting your mTOR pathway. Your methylation cycle is compromised, which is why your MTHFR variant is significant. You have an inflammatory response driven by NLRP3 inflammasome activation. Your microbiome shows decreased Akkermansia and elevated Prevotella. Your intracellular magnesium is low despite normal serum magnesium. Your reverse T3 is elevated. Your morning cortisol is dysregulated.
The reader has been told that many things are wrong inside them. Not one of the things named can be seen, touched, verified, or investigated by the reader without further laboratory intervention. Every one of the things named was arrived at by the recipe walked through in this essay. The reader has no way to check whether any of it is true. The reader has no way to verify improvement except by ordering more of the same tests. For as long as the reader accepts the framing, they are dependent on the practitioners who order the tests and interpret the results.
The framing does the work. Once you accept that your problem is your RAS-2 enzyme, you are inside a system where the only path forward runs through the interpreters of RAS-2 enzyme data. You cannot investigate the enzyme. You cannot fix the enzyme. You can only pay for the readings and follow the recommendations. This is a rental agreement.
The reification also damages health directly. Cowan noted in the follow-up webinar that if you accept you have hormones and that yours may be wrong, you worry about whether they are right. The worry produces the physiological consequences of chronic stress. Someone who believes their cortisol is dysregulated is now dysregulating whatever their body does in that domain, through the anxiety the belief generates. The reader dependent on the interpreters of RAS-2 enzyme data is not only paying for the readings. The reader is getting sicker from the belief.
The functional medicine diagnostic industry has grown into a global market approaching $17 billion annually, and its architecture depends on the availability of exactly this kind of framing.⁸ Expensive panels generate dozens of numbers, each attached to a plausible-sounding causal claim, each requiring interpretation the patient cannot perform, each pointing to a supplement or protocol the patient can purchase. Every reading can be adjusted, and each adjustment can be measured, and the measurement generates a new reading. The wheel spins forever.
None of this means the reader cannot benefit from a supplement or from an intervention that produces a real effect. Clinical effects are real when they are real. Frederick Klenner’s high-dose intravenous ascorbic acid work in the 1940s documented dramatic recoveries in dozens of cases his published papers labeled polio.⁹ Thomas Levy has documented thousands of clinical effects across decades. The compound has effects. This has been observed. What has not been established is that the compound existed in oranges before it was extracted from them, or that a laboratory reading of the compound tells you anything about a natural state of the person’s body. The effect is one question. The reification of the compound as a natural constituent measured by a natural test is a different question. The two have been fused, and untangling them is where the reader recovers agency.
Trust Your Senses
Grant’s operationalist framework does not leave the reader stranded. It restores the reader to the position of investigator.
If a lab reading is a description of a laboratory event, not of your body, the reading has narrow application. It tells you what happened in the tube. What tells you about your body is your body. Your energy at 3 pm is available to you. So are your sleep, your digestion, your capacity for physical work, your resilience to stress, your mood, your cognitive function, and your recovery from exertion. Every signal your body sends is legible without instrumentation, was legible for the entire span of human history before the invention of the calibration curve, and remains legible now.
Weston Price documented fourteen traditional populations across five continents in the 1930s.¹⁰ They did not order blood tests. They did not supplement. The numbers current medicine treats as central to health were unknown to any of them. All of them enjoyed dental arch development, skeletal robustness, freedom from tuberculosis, freedom from the chronic conditions modernity has normalized. Price documented this with photographs and dental measurements. What he found was that the healthy populations ate the whole foods available to them, ate the parts of animals modern populations discard, and consumed the fat-soluble activators he identified through observation rather than through blood tests. The evidence was clinical and structural, visible in his photographs and measurable in his dental records. It required no photometer.
Grant’s practice, as he described it during the webinar, has moved toward this kind of empiricism. Patients report how they feel. He recommends interventions. Patients report whether the interventions helped. The number on the lab report, when it is drawn at all, is understood as what it is: a laboratory event, not a fact about the patient. The clinical question is whether the patient improved. The empirical question is what changed and whether the change persisted. These are the questions available to a human being in the world. They do not require a rental agreement.
The essay does not tell the reader what to eat or what to supplement. Those questions belong to the reader’s own investigation. Some interventions will help this reader and harm that one. What the essay does is remove the false authority of the number on the report. The number is what it is: a match between what happened in a tube and what happened when a synthetic reference compound was put through the same procedure. Once the false authority is removed, the reader can approach the questions of what to eat and what to take as their own.
Try this with your most recent lab report. Read each row not as a fact about your body but as the record of an event that took place in a tube. Every row is a match between what happened in that tube and what happened when a synthetic reference compound was put through the same procedure. The reference range printed on the right side of the page is the interval within which the machinery is designed to place most samples. Your number is where the machinery placed your sample. That is what the page says. Everything else was added by someone who was not at the bench.
The Number on the Report
Return to the vial of blood. The bacteria have grown, or not. The photometer has registered a cloudiness, matched to a curve derived from a compound invented in 1948. The report says 287.
The 287 is not in you. It has never been in you. It is a record of an event that took place in a laboratory, involving a mixture of your blood, a bacterium, and a growth medium, measured by an instrument calibrated against an industrial compound whose presence in your blood was never demonstrated. What the report calls your B12 level is the mathematical output of the match. The output is what the machine produced. Whatever is inside your body remains, as it has always been, whatever it is. The test did not open a window into you. It performed an operation on a sample of you and generated a number.
Your doctor will act on the 287. The doctor will prescribe, or not prescribe, based on it. The prescription, if it comes, will be for cyanocobalamin. You will be retested. The retest will show a different number. The new number will confirm the treatment worked.
What was measured was the compound that was prescribed. What was corrected was the reading of the compound that was prescribed. The circle closed on itself, and inside it, your treatment happened. Nothing about you was investigated at any point. The report says 287. That is the number the machine produced. Whatever word your doctor uses next is a word your doctor added.
How to Explain It to a Six-Year-Old
Imagine you want to know how many red marbles are in a big glass jar full of mixed marbles. You cannot see inside the jar. So you invent a test. You pour the whole jar into a bathtub full of water. Then you count how much the water splashes when the marbles land.
The bigger the splash, the more red marbles, you say.
You never looked at any red marbles. You looked at splashing water. You do not know if the splashing had anything to do with red marbles. Maybe the splashing was about how many marbles there were, red or blue or green. Maybe it was about how heavy they were, or how fast you tipped the jar, or how deep the water was.
You do not know. You cannot know. You never saw the red marbles. You only saw the splash.
Now imagine you tell everyone in town that your splash test measures red marbles. You charge people money to test their jars. When the splash is small, you tell them their jar has too few red marbles, and they need to buy red marbles from you. The red marbles you sell are marbles you made in your workshop. Nobody has ever seen a red marble that was not one of the ones you made in your workshop.
That is what blood tests are doing.
They put your blood in a special jar and do something to it. Then they measure how the mixture behaves. The behavior might be cloudiness, or color, or light, or a beeping machine reading. Then they say the behavior means you have a certain amount of a special thing in your blood.
Nobody ever looked at the special thing. They only looked at the behavior. They matched the behavior against a curve they built from a chemical they made in a factory. Then they printed a number on your report and told your doctor what to do.
The number is real. The behavior is real. But the special thing was never found. It was only named after the chemical in the factory, and the chemical in the factory is what the test was built to see.
If you want to know how your body is doing, you can do what people did for thousands of years before there were any of these tests. You can notice how you feel, how you sleep, whether you can run and play and think and grow. Your body will tell you. It has always been telling you.
The people with the machines want you to stop listening to your body and listen to their machines. Do not stop listening to your body.
In Print
The Unbekoming library is available in paperback, printed to order through Lulu and shipped worldwide. The shelf begins with the paradigm question underneath everything else — No Virus, the isolation problem, the collapse of virology’s foundational claims, and a disease-by-disease reappraisal — and moves through the suppressed compounds mainstream medicine set aside: The DMSO Book, Chlorine Dioxide: The Forbidden Remedy, The Iodine Book, and The Hydrogen Peroxide Book. Two more recover what’s still on the kitchen shelf: Baking Soda and The Castor Oil Book. Two more recover the minerals modern soil, water, and processing quietly stripped from the diet: The Magnesium Handbook and The Boron Book. Sitting alongside these is No Contagion, co-authored with Jamie Andrews — the case against germ theory itself, catalogued through 258 failed contagion experiments.
The critique books cover what medicine, dentistry, psychiatry, and veterinary practice have become. The Unvaccinated treats the completely unvaccinated as a comparison group across twenty chapters and five appendices. Medicalized Motherhood follows a woman through 123 documented interventions from teenage pill to postpartum discharge. Drilling for Profit treats cavities, gum disease, and crooked teeth as the dietary problem they are. What Your Vet Can’t Tell You applies the same critique to pets. Escape from Psychiatry documents the fabrication of the DSM and the specific damage of every major psychiatric drug class. The Vitamin K Injection covers what happens in the first hours of a newborn’s life.
The full shelf is at lulu.com/spotlight/unbekoming. A physical book reaches the person a Substack post never will — the skeptical relative, the friend who won’t click a link but might open a book, the visitor whose eye lands on a coffee table. Buy one to keep, and one to give away.
New Biology Clinic
For those of you looking for practitioners who actually understand terrain medicine and the principles we explore here, I want to share something valuable. Dr. Tom Cowan—whose books and podcasts have shaped much of my own thinking about health—has created the New Biology Clinic, a virtual practice staffed by wellness specialists who operate from the same foundational understanding. This isn’t about symptom suppression or the conventional model. It’s about personalized guidance rooted in how living systems actually work. The clinic offers individual and family memberships that include not just private consults, but group sessions covering movement, nutrition, breathwork, biofield tuning, and more. Everything is virtual, making it accessible wherever you are. If you’ve been searching for practitioners who won’t look at you blankly when you mention structured water or the importance of the extracellular matrix, this is worth exploring. Use discount code “Unbekoming” to get $100 off the member activation fee. You can learn more and sign up at newbiologyclinic.com
References
Rickes, E. L., Brink, N. G., Koniuszy, F. R., Wood, T. R., and Folkers, K. (1948). Crystalline vitamin B12. Science, 107(2781), 396–397. The original Merck report of the isolation of what the field calls B12 in crystalline form from liver concentrates.
Cowan, T., and Grant, J. Wednesday webinar, 9 September 2026. Dr. Tom Cowan’s Wednesday Webinar series. Discussion of vitamins, hormones, and laboratory reification; source of the operationalist framework, the category one/two/three parsing, the recipe, and the lab-behavior terminology used throughout this essay.
Norman, A. W. (2012). The history of the discovery of vitamin D and its daughter steroid hormone. Annals of Nutrition and Metabolism, 61(3), 199–206. Covers the industrial derivation of cholecalciferol from lanolin and the ultraviolet-irradiation step.
United States Environmental Protection Agency. (1994). Reregistration Eligibility Decision (RED): Cholecalciferol. Office of Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances. EPA registration of cholecalciferol as a rodenticide active ingredient.
Köhler, G., and Milstein, C. (1975). Continuous cultures of fused cells secreting antibody of predefined specificity. Nature, 256(5517), 495–497. The original hybridoma-technology paper; the invention of monoclonal antibodies as laboratory constructs.
Lehmann, P. A., Bolívar, A., and Quintero, R. (1973). Russell E. Marker: pioneer of the Mexican steroid industry. Journal of Chemical Education, 50(3), 195–199. The Marker degradation and the synthesis of what industry calls testosterone from diosgenin.
Cowan, T. Wednesday webinar, 16 September 2026. Dr. Tom Cowan’s Wednesday Webinar series. Follow-up to the Grant conversation; source of the Harrower clinical observation on progressive suppression from isolated hormone preparations, and the observation that reification itself generates health-damaging anxiety.
Towards Healthcare Research & Consulting. (2026). Functional Medicine Diagnostic Market Size, Trends, Share, and Innovations 2035. Report Code 6854, updated 21 July 2026. Market size figure cited in the text.
Klenner, F. R. (1949). The treatment of poliomyelitis and other virus diseases with vitamin C. Southern Medicine and Surgery, 111, 209–214. The primary clinical report of Klenner’s high-dose intravenous ascorbic acid protocol.
Price, W. A. (1939). Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. Paul B. Hoeber, Inc. The primary source for the fourteen traditional populations documented across five continents.
Additional Sources
Bailey, M., and Bailey, S. The Final Pandemic: An Antidote to Medical Tyranny. 2023.
Cowan, T. Cancer and the New Biology of Water. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2019.
Cowan, T. Wednesday Webinar archive. Substack: Dr. Tom Cowan.
Grant, J. Interviews, lectures, and podcast appearances (via terrain-medicine community channels).
Levy, T. Curing the Incurable: Vitamin C, Infectious Diseases, and Toxins. Third Edition. MedFox Publishing, 2011.
Roytas, D. Can You Catch a Cold? Untold History and Human Experiments. 2024.
Shelton, H. M. Natural Hygiene: The Pristine Way of Life. Dr. Shelton’s Health School, 1968.
Tilden, J. H. Toxemia Explained. Health Research, 1926.
This is a jaw-dropping report.
Your writing is always so clear!
Thank you.
I had to laugh when I read this. American doctors go mostly, or solely, on that 'bloodwork'. In all the 40 years I lived in Belgium blood testing was done twice before a surgery (and it had probably little to do with these test tube measures). But here, you go for a broken nail, you need blood work! And I hate syringes and almost faint seeing blood, so you can imagine how I work very hard at home so as not to have to go to a doctor!
As proof of your discourse I mention here how both I myself and a friend, avid out-doors people, both tested as vitD deficient. I bought a bottle and read the ingredients, took a few and decided to throw the chemical in the garbage. Later on I read some articles on how vitD is made and what it really is, and regretted even trying a couple.
Now I mostly go for capsuled herbs or tinctures or low dose homeopathic tablets (from which I know where they dirived from) made by a trusted herbalist. Both help not only me but also for my animals.