The Healing Algorithm

Some books begin with a big idea. This one began with kidney stones. I've had them for over 25 years. Developed them three times, had them removed or blasted three times. For anyone who's never experienced one, my doctors put it this way: it's the closest thing to childbirth a man will ever feel. I believe them. Mine were calcium oxalate stones, driven by a combination of genetics, poor diet, being overweight, and simply not drinking enough water. Eventually I wised up. Made some changes, started listening to my urologist, and began getting monitored every four to five months to make sure nothing new was forming. That routine monitoring saved my life. In 2018, during one of those checkups, my urologist noticed something. It wasn't a kidney stone, it was a spot in my bladder. He didn't ignore it. He looked closer, performed a cystoscopy, and took a sample. The spot was a tumor. Papillary urothelial carcinoma. Bladder cancer. The good news: he caught it early. In January 2019, I had surgery. The tumor was removed and treated with chemotherapy.

A word of advice. Don't hide a cancer diagnosis from your spouse. I learned this the hard way. Judy found out I had a tumor, and that it was being surgically removed, while I was already being prepped for the procedure. She heard it from my doctor. In real time. In the pre-op room. She let me have it. And she was right.

I thought I was protecting her. What I was actually doing was making a decision that wasn't mine to make. When you're facing something serious, the people who love you deserve to be in the room, not just physically, but in every conversation that matters. Don't make my mistake. Keep your people close and keep them informed.

I've been in remission ever since. I still get checked every three to four months, and I'm happy to report I remain bladder cancer-free. I credit my urologist entirely. Not just for monitoring my kidneys, but for paying attention, asking the next question, and acting on what he saw. That combination of vigilance and instinct changed the outcome of my story. But my story was only the beginning.

Judy

Judy's story started with back discomfort. Nothing dramatic at first. Just an ache she assumed would pass. But it didn't pass. Over the next few months, it got worse, and one day it became bad enough that she couldn't stand up straight. I took her to an urgent care clinic. They ran tests, checked her vitals, and found elevated liver enzymes. Their advice: if the pain continues, go to the ER.

She made appointments with both a gastroenterologist and my urologist. The gastroenterologist couldn't see her right away. The urologist could. He ran tests, found nothing out of the ordinary, and since the pain had subsided, suggested a follow-up to monitor her progress. A month later, the pain came back. Severe this time. We went to the ER. The liver enzymes were still elevated but trending down. The pain subsided again. She finally saw the gastroenterologist three weeks later, and the decision was to keep watching the enzyme levels. That became the pattern. Pain, then relief. Discomfort that never fully went away. Digestive issues that lingered in the background. In December, another painful episode. Another ER visit. Six hours in the waiting room. By the time a doctor saw her, the pain had already subsided. They told us an ultrasound would take 24 to 48 hours. We went home. On January 11th, Judy was scheduled for a colonoscopy and a urologist follow-up. During the ultrasound, our urologist noticed something else, fluid buildup in her abdominal cavity. He didn't wait. He sent her directly for an MRI.

The MRI showed a mass. He suspected cancer. He contacted an oncologist he trusted to confirm his findings. On January 24th, we sat down with that oncologist to go over what they had found and what came next. Surgery was scheduled within a week. Biopsy results came back within another week. Stage 3 ovarian cancer.

Why I Started Questioning Everything

The moment you hear the words 'you have cancer,' the world changes. Not just for the patient, but for everyone who loves them. I still remember sitting in the doctor's office as we heard the diagnosis. The room was quiet, almost strangely calm, while our minds were racing. Words like treatment, staging, surgery, and chemotherapy floated through the air. We listened carefully, asked questions, and tried to absorb everything we were being told. But the truth is, in moments like that, no one really hears everything. You hear enough to understand that life has just shifted. On the drive home, my mind was already searching for answers. When my wife was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, I did what most husbands would do. I went into problem-solving mode.

Coincidentally, I had just enrolled in a nine-month course in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas. Many of my projects were about how AI was helping solve many of the medical problems people faced. Almost immediately, I began diving into everything I could find about cancer. What is it? What causes it? How does it develop? And what treatments are doctors relying on today? Very quickly, I realized something. Understanding cancer meant learning an entirely new language. Biology. Chemistry. Cellular metabolism. Genetic mutations. Immune responses. Every answer opened three more questions. Why did this happen? Could it have been prevented? What makes a treatment work for one person but fail for another?

Like many families, we suddenly found ourselves living in a world where medicine, fear, and hope collided. Our doctors were brilliant and compassionate, some of the best anyone could hope for. But the system itself often felt mechanical, designed to treat the disease, rather than to explore the deeper question of why it happened in the first place.

Between appointments, I began digging deeper into the biology of the disease. I read scientific journals, medical papers, books, and yes, even alternative health blogs. I was trying to separate what might actually help from what sounded convincing online. That's when I realized something unexpected. I wasn't just studying cancer. I was studying healing itself. And the deeper I went, the more questions I had. Why do some patients respond dramatically to treatment while others don't? Can nutrition, metabolism, stress, or mindset influence recovery? Do emerging therapies hold real promise, or are some drifting into pseudoscience? And perhaps the biggest question of all: how can any patient, caregiver, or even doctor expect to keep up with the avalanche of new research being published every day? That's when artificial intelligence entered the picture.

AI became my research assistant, translator, and sometimes my skeptic. It could process thousands of studies, summarize complex ideas, and help identify patterns I might never have noticed on my own. Suddenly, I could ask better questions and explore answers faster than traditional research alone would allow. In researching the material for this book, I used AI tools such as Claude and ChatGPT to help me locate studies, summarize medical literature, and explore different current perspectives on cancer and healing. I then reviewed, edited, verified, and organized the material, compiling it into the chapters you are about to read.

In many ways, this book represents a collaboration between human curiosity and artificial intelligence. What started as a personal journal documenting what I was learning about cancer turned into The Healing Algorithm.

This book isn't about rejecting traditional medicine or embracing every new idea that appears on social media. It's about finding the middle ground, the place where science and curiosity meet. It explores the frontier between what's proven, what's promising, and what remains speculation, using AI as a flashlight to help navigate both the science and the noise.

My goal was to create a resource someone could turn to while navigating their own journey, a guide that explains complex ideas in plain language while encouraging thoughtful curiosity. Some of what you read here may give you hope. Some may make you skeptical. That balance is intentional. Healing rarely comes from a single answer. In many ways, healing behaves like an algorithm, a complex system of inputs, feedback, and adjustments constantly trying to restore balance. If you've ever felt caught between conventional medicine and alternative claims, or simply wanted to understand what is real and why, this book is for you.

I am not a scientist. I'm a lifelong technologist who suddenly found himself facing questions I needed to understand. I wrote this book for people like me, patients, caregivers, and curious readers who want to understand cancer and healing in clear, accessible language.

In the pages ahead, I will take you through the science, the research, the promising ideas, and the controversial ones that reshaped how I think about cancer and recovery. Because in the end, this book isn't just about curing disease. It's about understanding how life heals, and how intelligence, both human and artificial, may help us get there.

How to Read This Book

Some of what you will read comes from well-established medical research. Some of it comes from emerging scientific fields that are still evolving. And some ideas are exploratory, questions that scientists, physicians, and researchers are actively investigating but have not yet fully answered. My goal in writing this book is not to replace medical advice or prescribe treatments. Instead, it is to help readers better understand the rapidly expanding landscape of health, cancer research, metabolism, and healing.

Throughout this book, you will encounter ideas that exist on a spectrum. Some are well supported by decades of clinical research. Others are promising areas of ongoing investigation. A few remain controversial and should be approached with thoughtful skepticism. Science progresses through questions, experimentation, and debate. Progress often happens when people are willing to examine new ideas while still respecting evidence and critical thinking. This book invites you to explore that process.

The Healing Algorithm Model

Step back far enough and the human body reveals itself as something remarkable, not a collection of parts, but a system. A living, adaptive, self-correcting system that has been running longer than any technology we've ever built. Health, it turns out, is not controlled by any single factor. It emerges from countless inputs: genetic, environmental, emotional, behavioral, all interacting in ways we are only beginning to map. In computer science, an algorithm does something deceptively simple: it takes inputs, processes them, and produces an output. Your body has been doing exactly that since before you drew your first breath.

You can think of it like this: Inputs → Biological Processing → Output

Inputs are the signals your body receives: nutrition, oxygen, movement, light, sleep, emotional state, stress, environmental toxins, temperature, and social connection. Every one of these sends chemical and electrical messages into the body, influencing hormones, immune activity, metabolism, and gene expression. Biological Processing is how the body handles those inputs: through mitochondria and cellular energy production, hormonal signaling, immune system responses, the nervous system, inflammation regulation, DNA expression and cellular repair, and metabolic pathways.

The Output is the result: health and resilience, adaptation and repair, or, when the system is overwhelmed, chronic inflammation, metabolic dysfunction, and disease progression. Healing occurs when the system regains balance.

Throughout this book, we will explore how different inputs influence the healing algorithm, from metabolism and fasting to sleep, emotional health, and emerging therapies. Understanding these interactions may help us better understand one of the most important questions of all: how does the body heal?

When you look closely enough, every living thing is a motion equation. Your heartbeat, your breath, your thoughts, all are data points in a constant feedback loop. The body isn't just a biological machine. It's an intelligent system designed to gather information, adapt to change, and maintain balance. Some people call that balance health. Scientists call it homeostasis. Since learning about artificial intelligence, I've come to think of it as the algorithm of life, a dynamic biological code constantly calculating the next-best move to keep us functioning and alive.

Think about this. Every second, your body is performing billions of micro-calculations, monitoring oxygen, nutrients, temperature, hormones, and electrical signals. DNA isn't simply a static blueprint. Genes can be turned on and off in response to signals from inside and outside the body. Every cell receives chemical messages, interprets its environment, and adjusts its behavior. Inside nearly every cell are mitochondria, microscopic structures often described as the cell's power plants. They convert nutrients and oxygen into ATP, the chemical energy cells use to perform much of their work.

Their story is remarkable. Scientists believe mitochondria descended from ancient bacteria that entered into a symbiotic relationship with other cells more than a billion years ago. That partnership became essential to complex life. But mitochondria do more than produce ATP. They participate in cellular signaling, metabolism, immune responses, oxidative stress, and programmed cell death. When mitochondrial function is disrupted, whether by disease, inflammation, aging, certain medications, environmental stressors, or other factors, the effects can ripple throughout the body.

That leads to one of the important ideas I want you to remember from this book.

Mitochondria sit at the center of how our cells produce and manage energy. Supporting metabolic and mitochondrial health is therefore an important part of supporting the body as a whole. I understood the science of cellular energy long before I truly understood what losing energy could mean. Then Judy went through chemotherapy. There is a difference between being tired and experiencing the kind of fatigue that can accompany cancer treatment. I have watched Judy have days when something as ordinary as getting dressed, walking through an airport, going to an appointment, or simply being on her feet for too long can consume an enormous amount of the energy she has available.

You begin to think about energy differently when you watch someone you love ration it. We've learned not to treat every good day as an invitation to do more. Instead, we're learning to manage what I think of as Judy's "energy budget".

If she has ten units of energy available today, we don't want to spend eight of them before lunch. That means planning appointments carefully, reducing unnecessary walking, using mobility assistance when it helps, building rest into the day, paying attention to nutrition and hydration, and choosing gentle movement when she feels capable of it. Most importantly, we're learning to listen to what her body is telling us rather than demanding that it operate according to our schedule.

We pay attention to symptoms, treatment cycles, laboratory results, sleep, nutrition, medications, and changes in how she feels. When something changes significantly, the answer isn't simply to push through it. Cancer-related fatigue can have many causes, including the treatment itself, anemia, inadequate nutrition, dehydration, sleep disruption, pain, infection, medication effects, and the cancer itself. Those possibilities belong in conversations with her oncology team.

This is where my fascination with systems suddenly becomes very personal. Judy isn't a machine, and she isn't an algorithm. But thinking in terms of inputs, outputs, feedback, and limited resources has helped us ask a better question.

Not, "How do we make her push through the fatigue?" But, "What is her body telling us, and how can we use the energy she has in the best possible way?" That is a very different way of thinking about healing.

Every biological process requires energy. The body also uses electrical signals constantly, from neurons firing in the brain to the coordinated electrical activity that keeps the heart beating. Mitochondria are at the center of much of this story. They're both energy producers and biological sensors. They respond to oxygen, nutrients, hormones, inflammation, physical activity, stress, and other signals, translating changes in the environment into cellular responses.

This is one reason something as simple as appropriate physical activity can have surprisingly complex biological effects. Movement doesn't merely burn calories. It sends signals throughout the body that influence circulation, metabolism, muscle, insulin sensitivity, and mitochondrial function.

Researchers are also investigating therapies such as photobiomodulation, often called red or near-infrared light therapy, hyperbaric oxygen, and electromagnetic approaches such as PEMF. Some have established medical applications, while others remain under investigation for particular conditions. Their potential benefits, limitations, and safety depend heavily on the disease and the individual. That's an important distinction, particularly with cancer.

Something that influences cellular metabolism isn't automatically beneficial simply because it is described as "energy therapy." Cancer cells are living cells too. Any complementary approach during cancer treatment needs to be evaluated for evidence, potential interactions, and safety with the patient's oncology team.

Enter Artificial Intelligence. Artificial intelligence is changing the way we understand these connections. Traditional biomedical research often examines individual pathways, molecules, treatments, or patient populations. AI can analyze enormous datasets and look for patterns humans might miss. It's already accelerating research in oncology, drug discovery, imaging, genomics, nutrition, and metabolic medicine.

Researchers are using machine learning to classify cancers, analyze tumor metabolism, predict treatment responses, identify potential drug targets, and understand how different biological systems interact. This is especially important because cancer doesn't follow one simple metabolic rule. Tumors can adapt. Their metabolism can change depending on their genetics, environment, oxygen availability, nutrients, and treatment pressure. AI gives researchers another tool for understanding that complexity.

It may eventually help us move away from asking, "What works for cancer?" toward the much more useful question, "What is most likely to help this particular person, with this particular cancer, at this particular moment?" But healing isn't purely mechanical.

Watching Judy go through treatment has made that clearer to me than any scientific paper ever could. Science can measure hemoglobin, oxygen saturation, glucose, ATP, heart rate, inflammation, and thousands of other biological signals. But those measurements don't completely capture what happens when someone wakes up exhausted and still decides to get dressed and face another treatment. They don't measure the value of sitting beside someone. They don't completely measure hope, fear, determination, laughter, family, music, or love.

Yet these experiences are part of being human, and some emotional and behavioral states can influence measurable physiology through stress hormones, sleep, immune signaling, cardiovascular responses, and other pathways. AI may eventually help us understand more of those relationships. Wearables already measure sleep, activity, heart rate, and heart-rate variability. Algorithms can identify patterns across enormous amounts of biological and behavioral data.

But there is something important that I don't want technology to make us forget. The data can tell us what is happening. The person tells us what it means. The future of medicine shouldn't be about replacing doctors with algorithms or human judgment with data. It should be about partnership. Doctors, patients, caregivers, scientists, technology, and artificial intelligence each see a different part of the picture. And perhaps that is the real human algorithm.

Our bodies constantly sense, respond, compensate, repair, and adapt. Sometimes they succeed. Sometimes disease overwhelms those systems, and medicine has to intervene. Sometimes the smartest thing we can do is stop trying to force the body and start listening to the information it is giving us.

Judy has taught me that energy isn't an abstract concept. When you don't have enough of it, energy is life itself. And when someone you love is fighting for more of it, every bit matters.