Alea Milham

Went to pickup my NP thyroid medication like I do every 3 months for the last 10 years. New pharmacist. She acted like I was trying to refill Percocet or Oxy. “Why NP?” Me: “Versus Synthroid or Levo? Because T4 only medications are poison for many of us.” For a minute I thought she wasn’t going to fill it, and I’d be on some randos TikTok for losing my mind ON my birthday no less . She then prints this out, and asks me if I’d like immunizations, because I’m “not up-to-date.” “I’m in a huge hurry; can I get them all at once?” And this Gen Z pharmacist…without missing a beat, says “absolutely.” I just grabbed the form and walked off. @cvspharmacy , you need to train your people better. And why the high turnover rate at your pharmacies? Unbelievable.

Most people who take vitamin C take 1,000mg in a single pill. Most people who criticize that dose say absorption drops above 200mg so you're wasting your money. Both groups are missing the more interesting part of the data. Levine et al. (1996, PNAS) conducted one of the most rigorous vitamin C pharmacokinetic studies ever done. Seven healthy men were hospitalized for 4 to 6 months on a diet containing less than 5mg of vitamin C per day. They were then repleted at seven sequential doses from 30 to 2,500mg, with steady-state plasma concentrations measured at each level. The absorption curve is sigmoidal. Bioavailability is complete (100%) for a single 200mg dose. At 500mg it drops to roughly 73%. At 1,000mg it drops to roughly 50%. At 1,250mg it is approximately 33%. The intestinal transporter SVCT1 saturates, renal excretion increases, and the fraction you absorb declines with every step above 200mg. Levine et al. (2001, PNAS) confirmed the same pattern in 15 women. This is the part most people stop at. It's also where the analysis gets lazy. The fraction drops, but the total milligrams absorbed still increases. At 200mg you absorb about 200mg. At 500mg you absorb about 365mg. At 1,000mg you absorb about 500mg. You are absorbing more vitamin C at every dose increase. You are just doing it less efficiently per milligram. Less efficient is not the same as useless. This matters because of what happens on the demand side. Immune cells, particularly neutrophils, monocytes, and lymphocytes, actively concentrate vitamin C to levels 50 to 100 times higher than plasma through SVCT2 transporters. In healthy people consuming at least 100mg per day, intracellular concentrations reach roughly 1.5 mM in neutrophils and 3.5 mM in lymphocytes. These cells saturate at about 100mg daily intake under normal conditions. But conditions are not always normal. During infection, inflammation, surgery, or critical illness, plasma vitamin C can drop below 30 micromol/L within days. Activated neutrophils burn through vitamin C during the oxidative burst, taking up oxidized dehydroascorbic acid via glucose transporters and reaching intracellular concentrations as high as 10 mM. The body pool, roughly 1.5 to 2 grams total, can be substantially depleted during severe illness. At that point, the rate of consumption exceeds what a 200mg dose can replace. This is the argument for higher doses during illness. Not that absorption is efficient. It is not. But that the absolute amount reaching your bloodstream is still higher at 500 or 1,000mg than at 200, and during periods of high demand, that additional supply maintains the plasma floor your immune cells draw from. The Cochrane review on vitamin C and the common cold (Hemila & Chalker, 2013) found that regular supplementation (200mg to 2g daily) reduced cold duration by 8% in adults and 14% in children, with larger effects in those under physical stress. The practical insight is not about whether to take more. It is about how to take it. 200mg taken five times per day delivers approximately 1,000mg absorbed, because each individual dose falls within the range of complete bioavailability. 1,000mg taken once per day delivers approximately 500mg absorbed, because the single large dose exceeds SVCT1 saturation. Same total dose. Roughly double the absorption. If you are going to take a gram of vitamin C per day, splitting it into smaller doses across the day is a straightforward way to get more of it into your body. For most healthy people eating a reasonable diet, 200 to 400mg per day is sufficient to saturate plasma and immune cells. Supplementation beyond that has diminishing returns under normal conditions. But during acute illness or high physical stress, the math changes because the demand side changes, and split dosing becomes the most efficient way to meet it. Levine et al., PNAS, 1996 Levine et al., PNAS, 2001 Hemila & Chalker, Cochrane Database Syst Rev, 2013

True currency is steadfast friendship

Trump's most controversial COVID remark was "putting a disinfecting light in the body." In the 1940s, that therapy cured many incurable disease and spread across America until it was buried. Russia took it up and recently proved it treats COVID-19. midwesterndoctor.com/p/the-century-…

@elonmusk "When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals." To make it even worse the lady who created the bill is the State Attorney Generals WIFE. Mia Bonta is the wife to Rob Bonta. Corruption at the highest levels.

Public school admins can now file red flag warnings against parents who cause a fuss in school about their kids and indoctrination… throw up a gun warning. Instant nightmare.

43% of young American college grads (22–27) are now underemployed — the highest rate since the pandemic. They’re nannying, working as baristas, and taking retail sales jobs that don’t require a degree. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of OPT students keep landing the exact same entry-level STEM and tech roles — with employer tax breaks and no American-worker-first rules. H-1B lottery + OPT extensions = outsourcing American opportunity. AI is already freezing the job market for U.S. grads. Why are we still flooding it with foreign students on taxpayer-subsidized visas? This isn’t a talent shortage. It’s engineered displacement. American STEM grads first. bloomberg.com/news/articles/… #OPT #H1B #AmericanJobs #Underemployment

People are never told this: The longer you remain on antidepressants the chances of turning an episodic emotional struggle into chronic disability increases dramatically.

In 1990, approximately 1 in 184 Americans was on a psychiatric disability claim. Today it's closer to 1 in 50. We have more psychiatric medications than ever before. More psychiatrists. More awareness. More treatment centers. More everything. And yet the disability rate keeps climbing. Something is not working. The model is broken at the foundation. I spent two years psychotic and four hospitalizations inside that broken model. They fed me root beer and chips in the psych ward and gave me injections against my will. My condition got worse, not better. What finally worked had nothing to do with that system. It was food. It was ketones. It was treating my brain as a metabolic organ instead of a chemical imbalance waiting to be corrected by a pill. The data doesn't lie. We are losing this fight under the current paradigm.

The U.S. imported 32,470 J-1 camp counselor workers in 2025. There are just barely 100,000 camp counselor job openings a year per Zippia. It seems excessive, right?

If DMSO was used for strokes and spinal injury, millions would be spared from paralysis and death—yet despite over a hundred studies showing this, the FDA banned it. Since publishing this article, dozens of readers shared DMSO saved them from a stroke.🧵 midwesterndoctor.com/p/dmso-could-s…

The US House Ways and Means Committee is investigating a New Jersey organ procurement organization for deceiving families into thinking that their loved ones were registered organ donors when they were not. If you do not wish to be an organ donor, you must take these steps to document your specific refusal: 1. Remove your name at your DMV. 2. If you have registered in other states, remove your name there too. 3. Remove your name from the national donor registry and get confirmation that it is removed. 4. State in your healthcare power of attorney that you refuse to donate. 5. Have your refusal to donate documented in your electronic health records. 6. Carry a wallet card with your refusal. 7. Tell your family that you refuse to donate. 🧵

@NoVA_Campaigns It seems stupid to build new schools when school enrollment is declining.

Abigail Spanberger signed HB29. It will give localities across VA permission to raise sales taxes by 1% for school construction. $1.5 BILLION / year tax ⬆️ for Virginians

It’s absurd that there’s a category of companies, officially referred to by the Dept of Labor as, “H1b Dependent.” That designation should make a company illegal to operate in the US. For companies like Cognizant, they subcontract to US Big Biz, import H1b’s, gain institutional knowledge, siphon jobs offshore & repeat. It’s a flywheel of destruction for US tech workers.

1/ Your doctor didn’t diagnose your depression. A Pfizer marketing executive did.

2/ The tool he created has a false-positive rate so high it pathologizes grief, stress, and ordinary sadness — and funnels millions toward drugs they don’t need.

Some states now allow foreign doctors to practice without completing a full U.S. residency Even though American doctors are still required to. <5 yrs vs 13yrs> If U.S.-trained physicians must spend more years training and take on far more debt before practicing, why are the rules being relaxed for some instead of fixed for everyone? Are patients comfortable with different training standards for the same care? Should patients be informed?

Nobody returns to "normal functioning" because of an SSRI (antidepressant drug). This would be impossible- as the drug is so disruptive to the system that everyone taking the drug is by definition not functioning normally. Blunting of emotions is not normal.

The families destroyed by SSRIs aren't collateral damage. They're casualties of an undeclared chemical war on human connection. Until we name this war & fight back, the casualties will keep mounting, one numbed-out divorce at a time.

@GovernorVA Spanberger amended HB29, the “Caboose Budget” and signed it on Feb 20, 2026 - with it, she raised taxes by $200,000,000 on Virginians, striking the tax code changes to confirm with the new federal governments tax cuts. HB29 HAD conformed to the relevant tax cuts enacted by President Trump and Congress in H.R. 1, the Working Families Tax Cut Act, and included modified versions of “No Tax on Tips” and “No Tax on Car Loan Interest,” as well as reforms to make Virginia’s business climate more tax friendly. But when amended and signed by Governor Spanberger, the bill now reimposes those taxes, to the tune of $200 million of costs in FY26 put back on Virginians, as plainly stated in both the budget amendment language (“Striking the tax conformity language included in the introduced budget results in increased general fund revenues of $200.3 million in FY 2026”