Catching What Doctors Miss

In today's issue:

• AI caught a deadly infection a doctor missed
• The body’s hidden ability to regenerate, not just wear out

A guy on Reddit says ChatGPT saved his wife’s life.

The doctor said her cyst wasn’t infected. A cyst is a small bubble that appears under the skin, it's filled with fluid, kind of like a big, deeper pimple.

So she got a fever anyway.

ChatGPT told him to get her to the hospital fast; she was developing sepsis, this is when the body overreacts to an infection and starts harming itself instead of fighting the germs.

Had they waited, she might not be here today. He paid twenty bucks for ChatGPT Plus and says it was the best $20 he ever spent.

This is just one of many stories.

So, if we're turning to AI for answers, are doctors adjusting fast enough?

Shouldn’t AI be helping doctors explain things better, diagnose more accurately, and give us clearer options?

At the same time, most of us are depending on AI for life or death decisions.

Are AI companies fully aware of this responsibility, and are they improving accuracy fast enough?

Should we hold ourselves accountable for using AI responsibly, knowing it can be helpful but sometimes wrong?

Any thoughts on this?

Did You Know This?

(From my upcoming book)

The human body doesn’t just repair itself; it also regenerates.

If you and I really understood what this means, half the fear around aging and disease in America would melt overnight. We grew up with one story: as we get older, the body just wears out. Knees go, memory fades, gut acts up, and the best we can do is patch it with pills, surgeries, and manage the decline.

But the science tells a different story.

Back in 1968, at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Robert Good and his team did something that sounded like science fiction. They took bone marrow, which is full of stem cells, from a healthy sibling and put it into a young boy who was born with almost no immune system.

Before that, kids like him usually died from simple infections. After the transplant, his body started making a brand-new immune system from scratch.

That was the first successful human bone marrow transplant with donor stem cells, and it proved something huge: the body has an in-house construction crew.

Stem cells.

They live in our bones, our fat, and our muscles.

They can turn into new blood cells, new immune cells, new gut lining, and even parts of organs.

Fast-forward to the 2010s, at the University of Southern California, Dr. Valter Longo and his team started asking a simple but dangerous question for our food culture: what happens if we stop eating for a while? Not starving, but controlled fasting?

In 2014, they published research in the journal Cell Stem Cell showing that cycles of prolonged fasting in mice, and early human data, pushed the body to clear out old, damaged immune cells and then build new ones from stem cells when food was reintroduced. In plain English, they watched the immune system clean house, then reboot.

On the other hand, we have a health system and a food system that make money when we believe the opposite. The food and snack cartel in America needs us to snack from morning to night.

What if our bodies have been trying to repair and rebuild for years, but the way we live, eat, and medicate keeps that system in sleep mode?

What if aging is not only wear and tear, but also blocked repair?

We're walking around every day with a regeneration system inside us: stem cells and autophagy, the cleanup process that clears out broken parts inside cells, and hormones that shift when we stop eating for a while.

All of that is just sitting there, waiting for the right conditions.

Is it time to start learning, with real medical guidance, how to give our biology a fair chance to do what it was built to do?