He got Fired From Harvard For This One Lab Test

Hey Reader, Dr Karl here.

It predicts dementia and heart disease. Almost nobody orders it.
And he got Fired from his lab at Harvard when no one would support his research.

In the late 1990s a researcher named Kilmer McCully was working at Harvard on a marker called homocysteine. He thought it explained a great deal about heart disease — more, in some cases, than cholesterol did.

That was the wrong thing to be right about … and the wrong place to be right about what he discovered. He lost his lab. He lost his position. For a while he had no job at all.

His papers, his work, was supressed here, so they got published in Europe instead — and within a couple of years he was being flown across the Atlantic to speak at medical conferences while still being unemployable in his own country. Eventually the recognition came back around. It usually does, about twenty years late.

Here’s why I’m telling you this. Homocysteine is a real marker with a real signal: it tracks with cognitive decline, with dementia, and with thickening of your blood vessels. And in most people, a high homocysteine isn’t some mysterious fate — it’s a methylation problem, and methylation problems are fixable. Usually with the right form of folate, sometimes B12, occasionally just a dietary change. Inexpensive to measure. Inexpensive to correct.

And almost nobody runs it.

Mine came back at 6.9, with RBC folate just under 700. That’s a good place to be — low homocysteine, decent folate, which lines up with better vascular and brain health. Though I’ll tell you what I told myself: I actually want my folate higher. With the people I work with, I’d like to see 900 to 1,000. So even my “good” result has somewhere to go.

That’s the difference between reading a lab and using one. “Normal” would have ended the conversation. The pattern kept it going.

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I show the whole thing — my numbers plotted against the people I work with — here: [LINK]

To your health,

Dr. Goldkamp

That’s the whole reason I wrote Unlocking Optimal Metabolic Health: A Data-Driven Approach to Thriving at Any Age — to show you how to read your own labs, see the patterns, and act on real data instead of generic reference ranges.

📗 Grab the book Here: website​​

Your labs are the map. The book is the guide. ​
​Start with both.

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