This is not about Endo, its about evidence and the science behind some pretty extraordinary claims.
I think this is a giant red flag though
To add a few minutes of research on 10X healthsystems and someone has done a bit of work already to get an idea of the roosters we are dealing with
Gary Brecka, 10X Health System, and a Dana White Endorsement
I make this post in an effort to both vent and learn more about a new fad in quackery that seems to be making a push for more market share in the US. I have some questions about particular points I came across in a video online.
This pertains to
10X Health System which seems to be one of these "hack your health" systems that markets directly to wealthy individuals in the public. With a
recent endorsement by UFC president, medical doctor-skeptic, and ivermectin-fan Dana White (which I suspect is part of a larger marketing push), I thought it might be interesting to look at some of this a little more closely and see if the
r/medicine community can help me parse what on earth they are trying to claim and sell here. If nothing else, I will be better informed when it inevitably gets brought up by bro-science peddling relatives over the holidays.
Please lend me your aid.
Some things stood out to me in the marketing material in the above video as well as what I found on the 10X website and in looking up one of the co-founders, Gary Brecka.
(1) V-Shaped WBC Profile
While discussing
White's CBC, Brecka makes the mystifying claim that the basophil, eosinophil, neutrophil, etc. breakdown on White's lab results after 5 months of the 10 X program:
"line up in a perfect V shaped pattern ... this means that his immune system ... is like an iron horse". Brecka seems to be describing something about the breakdown of leukocytes but what, exactly, he is getting at remains opaque to me.
Have any of you heard of a 'V' shape to the WBC breakdown in conversation with your alternative-medicine using patients? Obviously it smacks of nonsense but what even *is* this claim? I attempted to search for anything online that might speak to this but the algorithm and my search terms failed me.
(2) Triglyceride Level and Emergency Lab Alerts
After
briefly touching on improvements in BUN and Creatinine (which, frankly, doesn't mean much for an expensive health system since simple hydration can improve these numbers), Brecka points to White's
triglyceride level of 764 mg/dL before treatment, stating that this triggered a
"life threatening alert call from LabCorp at 1:30 in the morning because that number was so high".
Setting aside that improvements in the lipid profile would be expected with standard interventions like diet and exercise, the mention of a 1:30 AM phone-call seems like a bald faced, totally unnecessary lie.
Can anyone attest to the LabCorp policy for middle-of-the-night alert calls for lipid panel abnormalities?
(3) Homocysteine and Throat Swelling
At one point in the video, Brecka states that
homocysteine can cause throat swelling and that it can also cause hypertension. He points to a pre-treatment level that is barely moderately elevated and mentions that intervention reduced this into the normal range.
Again, basic diet, exercise, and nutritional supplementation can lower homocysteine levels. Set aside for a moment that homocysteine-lowering therapies do not have an established track record of reducing cardiovascular complications like MI (maybe stroke, but I digress).
What on Earth is Brecka talking about when he says homocysteine causes throat swelling? To make matters worse, White himself interjects
at this point in the video to mention that CPAP machines don't work and links his improvement in Obstructive Sleep Apnea to homocysteine lowering therapy. No mention of the fact that basic weight loss is the explanation behind his resolved OSA.
(4) The Importance of Communication
A sad reflection I had on watching this video was just how poor medical communication must have been to Dana White over the years. In order for him to feel like Brecka is offering some remarkable, noteworthy solution to his problems, his physicians must have failed to impart any of these basic lessons about diet, exercise, etc. in the past.
"
How about this, I had doctors doing my blood every few months... they didn't even tell me that!" -- referring here to his triglyceride levels or HbA1c.
I'm not in a rush to pity a billionaire who demonizes healthcare and tried to re-open public sporting events without adequate safety measures during the height of the pandemic -- but the fact remains that people are often taken in by charlatans when the field is left fallow by our more traditional approach to medicine. The gap or vacuum left behind is fertile ground for snake oil salespeople to fill in the gap. And the poor sucker (in this case, Dana White) is left believing that doctors are only out to suck money out of people and keep them sick.
A positive spin would be: Something as mundane as talking to someone about their pre-diabetes is immensely important and can be the difference between someone being taken in by some pseudoscience spiel or not.
(5) MTHF Gene Mutations
A
gene test is available through the 10X Health Systems website. They say:
*"*
44% of the world’s population has a genetic mutation that makes it challenging for them to create enough of the 5-MTHF gene…
In layman’s terms… it’s hard for your body to work properly. This methylation cycle is a process the human body goes through that takes a raw nutrient from its “non-usable” form and converts it into something your body can actually use. This cycle is vital to detoxification, repair damage, energy, hormones and overall keeping your immune and nervous systems in proper working order…
But it’s not just about this 1 gene, there’s 5 main genes that you could have a mutation".
I found no concrete information. It is unclear to me what, if anything, they are gaining by assessing for polymorphisms in 5-methyltetrahydrofolate reductase (I presume this is what they are referring to when they mention a MTHF "gene"). I suspect they end up recommending an alternative folic acid supplement (which I'm sure they sell for a premium) even though evidence suggests people with gene variants of 5-MTHFR can still process folic acid.
Does anyone have any insights into why (if ever) one would use an alternative folic acid supplement? Or what one could learn about the MTHF gene that would influence care (aside from an increased risk of methotrexate toxicity)?
(6) Testing Insulin Levels
Brecka takes some pains to explain the various roles of insulin in the body then brings up
White's insulin levels. Please tell me --
has there ever been a role for testing actual insulin levels in health (aside from unexplained hypoglycemia)?
(7) Myers' Cocktail and Osmolality
In a
video available at the bottom of
his own website, Brecka breaks down his
IV therapy which is also listed on the 10X site. He touts improved immune function, help "detoxify those organs", and hydration.
If we set aside for one second that a bottle of water will also hydrate someone, and that he is basically selling people what many of you will know as a "banana bag" or as "Pabrinex" depending on your side of the Atlantic... Set that aside for a moment and reflect on his bass-ackwards, confused understanding of how fluid leaves the intravascular compartment and enters the tissue.
He emphasizes that the vitamins are delivered in a saline solution and that this is so that the fluid will leave the vessels and enter the tissue, and that the "toxins" will then leave the tissue and enter the vessels to be "flushed" from the system.
His abject misinformation when it comes to osmolality and fluid shifts is shockingly in its ignorance. But it sounds good to a gullible audience and, as such, has a home on Instagram.
(8) Gary Brecka himself
The company seems to have a man called Gary Brecka as their "chief human biologist".
Brecka boasts a bachelors degree in biology from Frostburg State University as well as the National College of Chiropractic. That seems to be it, in terms of education.
So who the heck is this guy? The
"realest guy that I've ever met in the medical field" according to Dana White. He's obviously promoting some sensible things like weight loss, diet, and exercise. His website has a short little video of him at a local supermarket talking up the importance of free range eggs, warning people about the low smoke point of olive oil in cooking, the value of berrys -- things like that. So far, so agreeable.
But then he's also
selling products from $5000 to $130,000 on the basis of ... basically nothing, as far as I can tell. He's producing videos which bash established medical treatments (like CPAP for OSA) and scare monger to the public (at one stage, Dana White makes fun of people who would doubt this panacea and tells them to "
stick with your doctor and good luck to you!" and Brecka snickers -- tacitly endorsing the message that people should doubt the care they get from their doctors and instead jump on the 10X Health Systems bandwagon).
Can we learn anything else about this guy?
Brecka's previous work involved using mortality prediction models to predict life expectancy for insurance companies. More specifically, he was the
co-founder and CEO of Life Asset Group, LLC, a company that deals in the secondary life insurance market. What's the
secondary life insurance market? Why, it is simply the "purchase [of] existing insurance policies at a discount to face value" for the eventual realization of "a profit when the insured dies and they can collect the death benefit of the policy." These are bundled and sold as multi-million dollar packages to institutional investors.
Somewhat interestingly, Brecka's name also comes up in court documents as a defendant in a 2011
case brought by Concord Capital Management (InsCap Management), in which a default judgement of almost $1 million was brought against Brecka.
He is also mentioned, tangentially, in a
separate case in which a particular bank (Fifth Third Bank) brought a case against one Matthew Ross, a former bank employee. The bank alleged that this employee had colluded with InsCap Management and created fraudulent documentation used to secure premium financing loans funded by the Bank, and funding advances for life insurance policies that were never purchased. The bank's complaint against Ross also specified that he had concealed from the Bank the close affiliation between InsCap and Life Asset Group’s owner, Gary Brecka.
I'm not a lawyer, nor have I plumbed the depths of these legal cases to understand the extent of Brecka's involvement. The picture, however, is not one that fills me with confidence that Brecka's lifelong ambition has truly been the public good. Nevertheless, perhaps becoming disenchanted with the legal quagmires involved in attempting to sell life insurance policies on a secondary market for profit, Gary Brecka has since re-branded himself as a "bio hacker" and "functional medicine specialist". Life Asset Group is listed as "
Inactive" on the Florida "Division of Corporations" website. By 2018, Brecka was writing articles on melatonin, sleep, vitamin D, and sunlight on
LinkedIn as CEO of Streamline Medical Group. The
streamlinemedicalgroup.com website now re-directs to 10X Health Systems.
***
So that's it. Apologies for the uninvited rant and thank you if you stuck with me thus far. I needed to exorcise some of this.
That's what I've learned in an afternoon of looking things up after coming across the ridiculous promotional video from Brecka and White. White repeatedly
ridicules the idea that he is being scammed or
participating in a scam and his exclamations are so lacking in basic self-awareness, it is almost embarrassing. As if people *choose* to be scammed.
Brecka is selling the most basic of health maintenance advice as though it is revolutionary or distinct from standard medical care and he is using those basic fundamentals as a vehicle that a whole host of expensive snake oil can piggy-back on top of to make money from gullible people with money.
And as far as I am concerned, Dana White is either completely taken in by this, likely bamboozled by some fancy sounding blood work and hooked by the sprinkling of facts thrown in, or he's benefitting financially from this endorsement, or both.
to all
