Just Kidney...

The Silent Epidemic: What Your Lower Back Pain and Puffy Eyes Are Really Telling You

TL;DR

• Kidney disease is now the third-fastest-growing cause of death globally, with 850 million people affected—yet it remains conspicuously absent from public health priority lists

• Forensic data analyst John Beaudoin Sr. has documented a staggering 100% spike in acute kidney injury (AKI) ICD codes since 2020, with 255,000+ excess Americans lost. More life-years than any epidemic in a century except World War II

• The timing of these deaths doesn't match COVID waves—it matches hospital protocols, treatment incentives, and vaccine rollout patterns

• HTMA testing reveals kidney stress through mineral ratios BEFORE conventional labs show dysfunction—your early warning system

• Key HTMA markers: Sodium/Potassium ratio >2.5 (kidney-adrenal stress), Calcium/Magnesium >13 (stone formation risk), high toxic metals (Cadmium, Lead, Mercury = direct kidney poisons), and low Potassium/Magnesium (inability to neutralize oxalates)

• Your kidneys filter your entire blood supply every 30 minutes—they deserve the same verification approach you use for your wealth

Welcome back to the rabbit hole. Now, turn on your headlamp and shine it bravely on today's topic.

You're optimizing your finances. You're securing your Bitcoin. You verify. You don't trust. But have you self-custodied the one asset that determines whether you'll actually be around to enjoy the future gains?

Yup. I'm talking about your health again.

Specifically, your kidneys. And right now, they might be crying for help while you're ignoring the signals.

What Hidden Epidemic Is Centralized Medicine Refusing to Acknowledge?

A quiet epidemic is building around the world. It's the third-fastest-growing cause of death globally. By 2040, it's expected to become the fifth-highest cause of years of life lost. Already, 850 million people are affected worldwide. Yet in discussions of global public health priorities, the words 'kidney disease' rarely feature.

This comes from Nature—one of the most prestigious scientific publications—sounding the alarm in April 2024. The WHO doesn't even include kidney disease on its list of priority non-communicable diseases, despite the fact that treating kidney disease drains U.S. Medicare of $130 billion annually.

But here's where the story gets truly disturbing. Forensic data analyst John Beaudoin Sr. has been screaming into the void for over three years, armed with 1.6 million non-redacted death certificates—complete documents with names, addresses, physicians' notes, and cause-of-death details intact, not just anonymized statistical codes. His analysis reveals something centralized medicine refuses to acknowledge:

Acute kidney injury deaths have exploded by 100% since 2020.

Yes. you read that right. Beaudoin tracked death certificates using ICD-10 code N17—the medical classification for "Acute Renal Failure," what hospitals call Acute Kidney Injury (AKI). He analyzed this data across multiple timeframes using rolling averages to smooth out noise and reveal true trends.

A rolling average takes data points over a set period (3 months, 7 months, 13 months) and averages them together as the window "rolls" forward through time. This filters out random spikes and seasonal fluctuations to show the underlying pattern. The longer the rolling average window, the smoother the line—and the clearer the long-term trend becomes.

What he found is startling.

Each horizontal line represents the same data (AKI deaths spanning January 1999 through June 2025, as noted in the title), but smoothed differently. The top line shows raw monthly data—you can see seasonal waves. Each line below uses progressively longer rolling averages to reveal the underlying trend.

Focus on that bottom line—the 13-month rolling average. For roughly the first four-fifths of the timeline, you see remarkable stability. Then something changes. The line climbs sharply, and while it appears to be declining slightly at the far right edge, it remains dramatically elevated compared to the historical baseline.

The title tells us this graph spans 26.5 years. That stable portion represents about 20 years of predictable patterns (1999-2019). The dramatic rise begins around the 80% mark of the timeline—late 2020/early 2021. Even with the recent decline, deaths remain far above the two-decade norm.

The raw monthly data at the top shows two massive spikes in that same period—these are Signal 1 (hospital protocol deaths during COVID waves). But notice how even when those spikes settle and the line trends downward, it never returns to the stable pattern we saw for the first two decades. That's Signal 2—deaths remaining significantly elevated independent of COVID waves.

From Connecticut alone: 500 AKI deaths annually was normal. Then 625 in 2020. Then nearly 1,300 in 2022. Even if trending down from that peak, it remains roughly double the historical baseline.

Not diabetes complications. Not heart disease. Acute kidney injury—sudden, catastrophic kidney failure. Writing in his Substack "The Real CdC," Beaudoin shows 255,000 excess deaths involving AKI across just three states (Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota).

Extrapolate that nationally? We're looking at more life-years lost than any epidemic in a century, except World War II.

The timing? It doesn't match COVID waves. Not even close.

What Does the Data They're Hiding Actually Show?

Beaudoin didn't cherry-pick data. He obtained official death records through FOIA requests and personally read thousands of death certificates. His work has been featured on many podcasts and is documented extensively in his Substack and YouTube presentations. What he discovered would make any honest epidemiologist's blood run cold.

From his Connecticut memorandum to state officials, Beaudoin writes:

"The pattern of acute kidney injury seems man-caused, like from policy changes, CMS.gov NCTAP (New COVID-19 Treatments Add-on Payment) program, and coercion of doctors by hospital administrators and medical certification boards to use the deadly NIH COVID-19 treatment protocols."

Translation: When the federal government incentivized specific treatments—Remdesivir, ventilators, certain drug cocktails—kidney injury deaths didn't just rise. They exploded. And it started precisely in November 2020, when the NCTAP program kicked in. Not with COVID. With the treatment protocols.

The first COVID wave in spring 2020? Minimal kidney signal in Minnesota. Massachusetts saw some, but that's where the Remdesivir trials happened. What a coincidence. Then November 2020 hit, and the gap between normal kidney deaths and actual kidney deaths started widening like a chasm that never closed.

On his YouTube channel, Beaudoin's presentation entitled "Kidney Failure Epidemic" reveals something even more damning: in the first three COVID waves, 50% of acute kidney injury deaths had COVID listed on the death certificate. After March 2022? That percentage dropped to under 13%. Yet kidney deaths kept climbing.

Two distinct signals emerged:

Signal 1: Hospital protocols killing people who tested positive ("tested positive in hospital, immediately administered Remdesivir, then prepped for mechanical ventilation")

Signal 2: A steadily rising baseline independent of COVID—correlating instead with vaccination uptake and multi-organ failure patterns

Beaudoin's conclusion:

"Multi-organ failure often includes acute kidney injury, and multi-organ failure is a known effect of COVID vaccination."

The families who lost loved ones haven't forgotten. Over 1,200 hospital deaths are forensically documented at the Covid 19 Humanity Betrayal Memory Project. Medical records, timelines, witness accounts. Beaudoin references this extensively in his work, noting that families are pursuing criminal prosecution and will never give up seeking justice.

Why Does Self-Custody Apply to Your Biology Too?

You wouldn't trust a centralized exchange with your Bitcoin. You self-custody because you understand counterparty risk. You verify transactions. You run your own node. You don't trust—you verify.

So why are you trusting centralized medicine with your biological treasury?

Your kidneys run a proof-of-work system. They filter 180 liters of blood daily. Every 30 minutes, your entire blood supply passes through them. They maintain electrolyte balance, regulate blood pressure, produce hormones, control pH, and excrete waste. They demand 25% of your cardiac output to do this work—more metabolic demand than almost any other organ.

When kidneys fail, everything cascades. Energy production crashes. Waste accumulates. Blood pressure spikes. Hormones dysregulate. Your entire system goes into failure mode.

But there's a problem: by the time standard blood panels show kidney dysfunction, you've already lost 50-75% of kidney function. The check engine light doesn't come on until the engine is halfway destroyed.

Functional testing lets you verify rather than trust.

What Can HTMA Reveal About Your Kidneys Before It's Too Late?

Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis gives you something blood tests can't: a 2-3 month window into how your body has been handling minerals—the very minerals your kidneys desperately need to function.

Blood tests show this morning's snapshot. HTMA shows the trend. The pattern. The story.

Here's what kidney stress looks like on HTMA:

Sodium/Potassium Ratio >2.5: Your adrenal-kidney communication system is breaking down. Your body is stuck in sympathetic overdrive, retaining sodium while dumping potassium. Clinical patterns observed by practitioners consistently correlate this ratio with increased acute kidney injury risk. It's a proxy for the inflammation and tissue breakdown that precedes full kidney failure.

Calcium/Magnesium Ratio >13: Your parathyroid glands are working overtime trying to manage minerals, you're struggling to buffer acid properly, and you're primed for calcium phosphate stones. Low magnesium cripples the enzyme that keeps oxalates soluble in your urine. Without adequate buffering, oxalates crystallize. Kidney stones follow.

Elevated Toxic Metals (Cadmium, Lead, Mercury, Aluminum): Direct kidney poisons. Cadmium shows the strongest correlation with kidney injury in clinical observations. These metals damage the tiny energy-producing structures inside your cells (mitochondria), creating inflammatory molecules that scar your kidney's filtering units (nephrons—the microscopic structures that actually clean your blood, about 1 million per kidney). They also pretend to be essential minerals, forming complexes with oxalates and speeding up crystal formation.

Low Potassium (<5 mg%): Poor urinary citrate excretion. When aldosterone (a hormone that regulates sodium and potassium) dominates, you're at higher risk for forming both uric acid stones (from excess purines breaking down) and oxalate stones. Muscle cramps during exercise. Your cells struggle to maintain proper electrical gradients, which tanks energy production across the board.

Low Magnesium: Your body can't handle acid loads well. Your cellular energy factories can't produce ATP efficiently. Your kidneys can't buffer the acid that comes from high-protein diets. Magnesium is essential for the enzyme that helps your cells use light energy—one reason morning sunlight exposure helps kidney function.

Zinc/Copper Ratio <8: Oxidative stress throughout your system. Poor function of metallothioneins (proteins that grab and remove heavy metals). Impaired oxalate-degrading bacteria in your gut. When zinc is low, your body can't make the enzymes needed to handle toxins or process oxalates properly.

"Four Lows" Pattern (Low Sodium, Potassium, Calcium, Magnesium): End-stage exhaustion. Your adrenals are tapped. Your kidneys are struggling. This pattern shows up in 90% of people with documented low cortisol levels and typically precedes serious kidney decline.

Why Aren't Carnivore and Keto Always Enough?

You switched to carnivore or keto. You're eating nose-to-tail. You feel better than you did on the Standard American Diet. But you're still hitting walls:

• Muscle cramps during workouts
• Poor sleep, waking at 5 AM and can't get back
• Persistent skin issues despite "perfect" diet
• Blood pressure creeping up
• Low energy despite optimal macros

Here's why: high-protein diets create an acid load. Sulfur-containing amino acids break down into sulfuric acid. Your kidneys buffer this with minerals—primarily magnesium, potassium, and calcium.

If you're not replenishing these minerals faster than you're depleting them, your kidneys enter hyperfiltration mode. They're working overtime. Your Sodium/Potassium ratio climbs. Calcium leaches from bone to buffer acid. Magnesium gets excreted in urine.

What Does My Breathing Have to do With My Kidneys?

But there's another way your kidneys lose minerals that has nothing to do with diet: chronic stress and overbreathing.

My Spicy Take:

When you're chronically stressed—hours to days of elevated cortisol, rushing thoughts, shallow breathing—your breathing rate increases subtly. You might not even notice it. But this drives up blood pH beyond what your body needs. Your kidneys respond by dumping bicarbonate to normalize pH. The problem? Bicarbonate doesn't leave alone. It takes magnesium, sodium, and other minerals with it.

Bicarbonate is your body's pH buffer—it neutralizes acid by binding with hydrogen ions. Lose too much bicarbonate, and you lose your resilience. You feel like you can't catch a full breath. Small stressors that wouldn't normally affect you suddenly trigger anxiety or panic. You're teetering on the edge, metabolically exhausted.

This is why breath work matters. Not just meditation or relaxation—actual functional breathing that maintains proper CO2 levels and prevents your kidneys from hemorrhaging minerals to compensate for respiratory alkalosis. Your breathing volume determines your CO2 levels. Your CO2 levels determine your blood pH. Your blood pH determines whether your kidneys are quietly dumping the very minerals your body desperately needs.

At Sleuth Wellness, functional nasal breathing is foundational to every health transformation program—not as an afterthought, but as a core pillar alongside mineral optimization, circadian alignment, and targeted nutrition. Because you can eat perfectly and still drain your mineral reserves if you're breathing dysfunctionally.

Meanwhile, modern environmental toxins add another layer of stress. Glyphosate (the herbicide in non-organic grains and produce) directly damages kidney tubules while also increasing your body's oxalate burden. If you're still eating any high-oxalate foods (spinach, almonds, chocolate, berries), you're dumping oxalates into an already-stressed system that can't produce enough citrate to keep them soluble.

One X thread from Metabolic Uncle [@metabolicuncle] put it perfectly:

"Dairy and cheese are ideal. My average daily potassium intake is only based on food without supplements for the past three months."

He gets it. You need 3,000-4,000+ mg of potassium daily if you're eating mostly meat. A pound of beef gives you ~1,500 mg. A medium potato? 900 mg. But who's tracking this?

Most people aren't. They assume meat alone covers everything. Your body runs on electricity—sodium and potassium creating voltage gradients across cell membranes. Your kidneys manage this balance constantly. When potassium runs low, your kidneys trigger sodium excretion to maintain ratios. Blood pressure drops, then spikes as your body overcompensates. The system destabilizes.

And here's where it connects back to the epidemic: The spike proteins from both COVID and the mRNA vaccines may complex with heavy metals, overwhelming kidneys that are already mineral-depleted and dealing with high acid loads from modern diets.

Pattern recognition from the data suggests this connection.

What Warning Signs Is Centralized Medicine Ignoring?

Noah Ryan [@NoahRyanCo], a health professional who writes the Health HQ Substack and produces high-value content on X, laid out some sneaky symptoms many people miss:

• Lower back pain (specifically right side)
• Puffy eyes, especially in the morning
• Tinnitus (ringing in the ears)
• Brain fog and low willpower
• Foamy urine
• Fatigue after high-protein meals
• Cramping despite adequate hydration
• Dry mouth regardless of water intake
• Salt cravings

As Ryan points out:

"Weak kidneys = poor circulation, electrolyte imbalance & waste build up." Your drainage system works as a matrix—liver, lymph, kidneys, gut, back to liver. If one bottlenecks, the others compensate. Waste backs up. You start excreting toxins through secondary pathways like your skin (breakouts, bad odor)."

George Ferman [@Helios_Movement], a former physical therapist whose epic X threads and newsletter deliver deep functional knowledge, expanded on the environmental assault kidneys face:

"Besides this, glyphosate also contributes to the oxalate load and also negatively affects our gut health so it harms the kidneys both in direct ways but also indirect but equally dangerous."

Everything connects. Gut dysbiosis reduces oxalate-degrading bacteria. More oxalates reach your kidneys. Glyphosate directly damages kidney tubules. Insulin resistance impairs mineral metabolism. B vitamin deficiencies prevent proper oxalate conversion. It's a cascade.

And now there's this: Researchers at Harvard and UCLA just discovered that kidney stones—long thought to be inorganic mineral formations—actually contain live bacterial biofilms.

They cultured the bacteria. They're alive, embedded in the structure of the stones themselves, secreting calcium and extracellular DNA to form nucleation sites.

According to the Harvard/UCLA study published in January 2026, this explains why lithotripsy (stone-breaking treatments) sometimes causes sepsis even when urine was sterile. Breaking the stone releases entombed bacteria into your bloodstream. The study authors also note this is why stones keep recurring—the biofilm persists, seeding new formations.

Andra [@BioavailableNd], a certified naturopath and independent researcher, an account I highly recommend following, put it this way:

"Just as earlier research demonstrated that gallstones can contain parasitic eggs and bacterial biofilms, newer findings now confirm that kidney stones are often accumulations of bacterial material rather than purely mineral deposits... Kidney stones may therefore reflect unresolved toxicity, impaired clearance, and chronic stagnation rather than isolated mineral imbalance alone."

How Do You Verify Rather Than Trust?

You're not powerless here. The system failed. Centralized medicine is still pushing the same protocols that caused this. But you can verify your own biology. You can self-custody your health.

Step 1: Test

Get an HTMA. You'll get mineral ratios, toxic metal levels, and metabolic typing. Your baseline. Your starting proof-of-work.

Step 2: Optimize

Based on your HTMA results, work with mineral-rich whole foods (bone marrow, oysters, grass-fed dairy, mineral-rich bone broth), support your body's natural detoxification pathways, align with circadian rhythms for optimal kidney function, and address the specific imbalances your test reveals. Each person's mineral landscape is unique—your protocol should be too.

Step 3: Track Your Progress

Follow-up testing gives you proof that the changes you've made are working. Watch your ratios normalize. See toxic metals clear. Verify your metabolic type stabilizing.

Step 4: Go Deeper If Needed

If symptoms persist or HTMA shows ongoing dysfunction, comprehensive testing provides more data: DUTCH (hormones), GI-MAP (gut microbiome), OAT (organic acids for metabolic function), food sensitivity panels. Each test adds another layer of verification. Each one guides more precise interventions.

What's Your Next Move?

Are your kidneys in crisis? The data suggests many people's are—they just don't know it yet. Centralized medicine either doesn't see it or doesn't want to admit what caused it.

But you're not waiting for permission. You verify. You self-custody. You take responsibility for the one asset that matters more than financial sovereignty—the biological infrastructure that determines whether you'll be around to enjoy it.

John Beaudoin Sr. is still fighting. Still showing the data. Still demanding investigation. As he wrote to Connecticut state officials:

"Notice raises [your] knowledge... destroys the ignorance of fact defense for the future... If you do nothing then you are betting that National Institutes of Health hospital protocols and COVID gene drug vaccines are not causal in the deaths of a million people in the United States, or you are betting there will never be an administration that comes into power that will investigate and prosecute deliberate indifference murder with a depraved heart."

He's right. The families whose loved ones were killed by hospital protocols will never give up seeking justice. Beaudoin has the receipts. The patterns are undeniable.

And you? You don't need to wait for institutional medicine to wake up.

Verify your biological status now. Before an acute crisis leaves you with no choice but emergency intervention.

Don't trust. Verify.

Note: This newsletter is for educational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any medical condition. Always consult with qualified healthcare providers regarding any health concerns.