1/5 I'm a cardiologist. Here's why I recommend men take 5 mg of tadalafil — Cialis — every single day.
Not for ED. Not for performance.
I take it for the same reason every serious longevity physician I respect does: to protect my cardiovascular system, my brain perfusion, and my endothelial health at the most fundamental level.
This drug — famous for all the wrong reasons — has quietly become one of the most powerful tools in preventive cardiology. And the data is now too strong for me to keep quiet about it.
2/5 Here's what tadalafil actually does.
PDE5 is the enzyme that breaks down cGMP — the molecule that tells your smooth muscle to relax and your blood vessels to dilate. By blocking PDE5, tadalafil produces system-wide vasodilation: better blood flow to the heart, brain, lungs, kidneys, muscles — every organ downstream of your vascular tree.
Unlike Viagra, which lasts 4-6 hours, tadalafil's effects last up to 36 hours. A low daily dose keeps plasma levels stable around the clock.
Now here's why this matters for your heart.
Endothelial dysfunction — the failure of that thin layer of cells lining 60,000 miles of your blood vessels — is the earliest, most predictive marker of cardiovascular disease. It precedes plaque, heart attacks, and strokes by years. By the time most patients reach my office, the damage is done.
Tadalafil directly improves endothelial function. It reduces arterial stiffness. It shows anti-fibrotic effects on the heart muscle in preclinical models. It's already FDA-approved for pulmonary arterial hypertension.
Most patients come to me when something has already broken. I'm treating the pipes before they clog.
3/5 The population-level data made this decision easy for me.
A longitudinal study analyzing over 500,000 men from the TriNetX database — one of the largest real-world datasets in medicine — found tadalafil was associated with:
34% reduced all-cause mortality. 27% reduced heart attacks. 34% reduced stroke. 21% reduced venous thromboembolism. 32% reduced dementia.
Half a million men. Three-year follow-up. Propensity-matched for demographics and eight pre-existing conditions.
A separate meta-analysis pooling data from over 8 million individuals found PDE5 inhibitor use associated with a 47% reduction in Alzheimer's risk.
A UK study of nearly 270,000 men found that those with 20 or more tadalafil prescriptions had a 44% reduction in dementia risk.
I want to be transparent: these are observational studies, not randomized controlled trials. But the consistency of the signal across multiple large databases, the biological plausibility, and the established safety profile make this a compelling addition to a longevity protocol.
4/5 Your brain is 2% of your body weight but demands 20% of your cardiac output. Any compound that meaningfully enhances cerebral blood flow is, by definition, a cognitive protector.
Tadalafil is being actively investigated in clinical trials for vascular dementia and cognitive decline caused by poor cerebral perfusion. The mechanism is the same — better vasodilation, better oxygen delivery, better nutrient transport to the organ that matters most.
For athletes — better blood flow means better oxygen delivery to working muscle, faster recovery, reduced exercise-induced inflammation, and measurable improvements in endurance. Studies at high altitude show real advantages. This isn't a stimulant. It's superior vascular infrastructure.
Short-term you notice: lower resting blood pressure, sharper mental clarity, better performance in the gym, and yes — stronger erections.
Long-term you're building: the cardiovascular system you were supposed to have.
5/5 My protocol:
2.5-5 mg daily, same time each day. Food doesn't affect absorption. Avoid grapefruit — it can spike levels unpredictably.
Critical safety — do NOT combine with nitrates. Nitroglycerin, isosorbide, poppers. The combination causes a dangerous blood pressure drop. Use caution with very low baseline blood pressure or certain CYP3A4 inhibitors. Always discuss with your own physician.
This drug has 20+ years of clinical safety data across millions of prescriptions. It's well-established. It's generic. It costs pennies a day.
I call it Vitamin C-ialis.
Because in 20 years, when my vascular age is still tracking 15 years younger than my chronological age, I'll know exactly why.
This isn't about the bedroom. It's about keeping the most important infrastructure in your body functioning at peak performance for as long as humanly possible.
And yes — the bedroom advantage is a nice bonus.
Not medical advice. Talk to your physician. But if you're serious about longevity and cardiovascular optimization, this is one of the highest-ROI interventions I've found in twenty years of practice.
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1/6 An American @POTUS just told Israel to lower its sword.
@realDonaldTrump on his 80th birthday. With the enemy cornered.
Half the Jewish world feels betrayed today.
I don't.
And if you feel abandoned, confused, even gutted — hear me first: you're not naïve. You're paying attention. I feel it too.
I'm just not going to stop there. Let me tell you what history is going to say about this moment.
2/6 For forty years, American presidents talked tough on Iran and did almost nothing.
Red lines drawn in disappearing ink. The mullahs learned that U.S. threats expire faster than milk.
Trump broke the pattern. He didn't speak — he struck.
He battered the IRGC's command and shattered the myth that Iran was untouchable. That myth was Iran's most powerful weapon. He took it.
For the first time in a generation, the regime is bargaining from fear instead of swagger.
That is not a small thing. That is the deepest wound Iran's empire has suffered in forty years.
3/6 So why pull back now? Why the deal, the ceasefire, the restraint?
Because Trump isn't only Israel's friend. He's America's president. And a president has to read more than one map.
He needs oil prices down and grocery bills lower. He needs the economy humming into autumn. He needs to win the midterms — or the next two years become a tribunal that buries his entire agenda.
A long Middle East war does to him what no opponent could: spikes energy prices, rattles markets, drains his capital, hands his rivals chaos on a plate.
He isn't abandoning Israel. He's protecting his ability to keep standing with her.
1/5 An open letter to @TheLancet from an Iranian-Jewish cardiologist.
Today, one of the world's most prestigious medical journals published a campaign to suspend the Israeli Medical Association from the World Medical Association — the body founded after WWII to ensure physicians would never again be weaponized by political ideology.
I'm a cardiologist. I'm an Iranian Jew who grew up under a regime where medicine was subjugated to the state.
What The Lancet just did is a disgrace to my profession.
Here's what they published — and what they deliberately left out.
2/5 What The Lancet didn't mention:
The World Medical Association itself opposes this suspension. The WMA stated explicitly that suspending members because of their governments' actions would undermine its ability to promote medical ethics globally.
The Israeli Medical Association has advocated for humanitarian aid into Gaza, demanded protections for hospitals, and called these accusations "false or contested claims presented as facts." The IMA is a professional medical body — not a branch of the Israeli government.
Hamas systematically used hospitals as military infrastructure — tunnel entrances, command centers, weapons storage. Extensively documented. One of the gravest violations of medical neutrality that exists.
The Lancet's campaign says nothing about it.
3/5 What the boycott would actually destroy:
PillCam — revolutionized GI diagnosis. Developed in Israel.
ReWalk — robotic exoskeletons for paralyzed patients. Developed in Israel.
Breakthrough AI diagnostics for cardiac imaging and cancer detection used in hospitals on every continent.
Israel has among the highest per-capita rates of medical innovation on earth. These technologies save lives in London, Johannesburg, São Paulo, and New York.
Suspending the IMA doesn't punish a government. It severs research collaborations and training partnerships. The patients who lose aren't Israeli. They're everyone.
1/7 I'm a cardiologist. I'm also an Iranian Jew who grew up under a regime that promised equality for the people.
I stand with @elonmusk.
And @BernieSanders, @AOC, and politicians like NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani are wrong. Not just politically wrong. Historically, economically, and provably wrong.
Here's why — with the receipts.
2/7 This week @SpaceX created over 4,000 new millionaires in a single day. Engineers. Technicians. Hourly workers. People who built rockets that land themselves — rewarded because the company they helped build became enormously valuable.
Bernie Sanders responded by attacking the man who made it happen.
So let's compare.
Elon's companies injected $338 billion into the U.S. economy over 2021-2025. $110 billion in wages. $46 billion in taxes. $182 billion in supplier spending. Over 200,000 jobs. Launch costs down 90%. Internet to a billion people who had none.
Every dollar reinvested. No dividends. No extraction.
3/7 Bernie Sanders. 50+ years in Congress.
Zero companies built.
Zero private-sector jobs created.
Zero products shipped.
Zero breakthroughs that improved a single life.
Became a millionaire on government salaries and book deals — while telling you that millionaires are the problem.
AOC endorsed the Green New Deal — estimated $50-93 trillion. Elon actually built the electric vehicle revolution and the largest solar energy systems on earth.
One talked about saving the planet. The other did it.
Mamdani took office promising to tax the wealthy out of New York City — the same playbook that's been driving talent and capital out of every jurisdiction that tries it.
The pattern is always the same: people who never built anything telling builders they've taken too much.
Post 1/5
I'm a cardiologist. Let me tell you about the bravest and most reckless experiment in the history of medicine.
In 1984, a 32-year-old junior doctor in Australia walked into his hospital laboratory on a Tuesday morning, picked up a glass beaker containing one billion live bacteria suspended in beef broth, and drank it.
He told no one. Not his wife. Not his ethics committee. Not his hospital.
He had a theory that the entire global medical establishment had been treating one of the most common diseases on earth incorrectly for nearly a century.
He had run out of other ways to prove it.
His name was Barry Marshall. This is the story almost nobody tells you — and the reason I think about him every day in my own practice.
2/5 In 1979, a quiet pathologist named Robin Warren was looking at stomach biopsy slides at the Royal Perth Hospital when he noticed something impossible. Spiral-shaped bacteria, alive and active, living on the stomach lining.
Every textbook said the same thing: nothing survives in the stomach. Hydrochloric acid strong enough to dissolve metal. Bacteria could not colonize that environment. Every professor said so. Every pathologist who'd ever seen something strange on a slide had assumed contamination.
Warren kept looking. He kept finding them. For three years, almost no one in the hospital would listen.
In 1981, a 30-year-old trainee named Barry Marshall rotated through his department. They biopsied a hundred patients together. Every patient with a duodenal ulcer had the bacteria. Every single one.
Marshall presented the findings at the 1983 Royal Australian College of Physicians meeting. He proposed that these bacteria — later named Helicobacter pylori — caused most peptic ulcers. The disease the world had been calling a stress disorder for decades was an infection. Curable with two weeks of antibiotics.
The room laughed at him.
Senior gastroenterologists had built careers on the stress theory. The pharmaceutical industry had just launched H2 blockers — headed by Tagamet, soon to be the best-selling drug on earth. Acid-suppressing drugs would peak at $6 billion per year. Telling that industry their products treated the symptoms of an infection curable with $30 of antibiotics was professionally suicidal.
3/5 Marshall spent a year trying to prove the theory with animals. The bacteria refused to colonize rats. Refused pigs. It was so perfectly adapted to the human stomach that it wouldn't live anywhere else.
Without an animal model, the establishment had a perfect reason to keep dismissing him.
On July 12, 1984, at 10 AM, in the laboratory at Fremantle Hospital, Marshall had himself endoscoped first. His stomach was confirmed completely healthy. No bacteria. No inflammation. No disease.
Then he mixed a culture from a patient — one billion live organisms — into warm beef broth.
And he drank it.
He went home that evening and had dinner with his wife and four young children. He told no one.
Three days: nothing. Day four: bloating. Appetite gone. His mother visited and recoiled — his breath smelled like something had died inside him.
Day five: vomiting every morning at 6 AM. Clear liquid. No acid at all. The bacteria had colonized so successfully that they'd shut down his stomach's acid production — the very acid they supposedly couldn't survive in.
Day ten: a camera down his throat. His entire stomach lining was inflamed. Helicobacter pylori everywhere. Severe active gastritis. The exact disease pattern he'd been seeing in patients for three years.
He had given himself, in ten days, the disease the world said couldn't be caused by a bacterium.
He still hadn't told his wife.
She found out at dinner. Her response: "You idiot." She made him take antibiotics immediately.
I'm a cardiologist. I've held dying hearts in my hands in the cath lab at 3 AM. And I need to tell you something that changes everything about how we prevent heart attacks.
For decades, the entire field was built on one target: lower LDL cholesterol. Statins save lives — that's settled science. But too many of my patients did everything right — took their statins, hit their numbers, lived clean — and still ended up on my table with a ruptured artery.
We were treating the smoke while the fire kept burning.
The fire is inflammation. And the evidence is now overwhelming.
The CANTOS trial proved it first — lowering inflammation independent of cholesterol reduced cardiac events. But the newer data is what keeps me up at night.
AI-enhanced CT angiography can now detect inflamed arteries by measuring changes in the fat surrounding your coronary vessels — the perivascular fat attenuation index. Higher inflammation in the fat around even one artery independently predicts cardiac death. When multiple arteries show inflammation, the risk multiplies dramatically — even in patients whose cholesterol looks perfect.
This isn't theoretical. This is measurable. Right now. On a scan you can get this month.
Low-dose colchicine — a drug that's been around for centuries for gout — is now FDA-approved specifically for reducing cardiovascular events. It works by quieting the inflammatory cascade that destabilizes the plaque sitting in your arteries. A pill that costs pennies is saving lives the statins couldn't reach.
And the next wave is already in Phase 3 trials. Ziltivekimab — an IL-6 inhibitor — targets the central inflammatory pathway driving atherosclerosis. Phase 2 data showed a 90% reduction in hsCRP. The ZEUS cardiovascular outcomes trial is enrolling now, with results expected late 2026 into 2027. If positive, anti-inflammatory therapy will become standard in managing heart disease alongside lipid-lowering. The era of inflammation-targeted cardiology is arriving.
But it goes deeper than drugs. AI is now predicting heart failure and cardiac events 5+ years before symptoms — integrating CT imaging, electronic health records, and genetic data with accuracy that jumps far beyond traditional risk calculators.
And polygenic risk scores — a simple genetic test that flags inherited cardiovascular risk — are now formally recognized as a risk-enhancing factor in the 2026 ACC/AHA guidelines. A single blood draw can reveal risk that's been silently building since birth. Decades before the first chest pain.
Here's what this means for you right now — today:
Ask your doctor for a high-sensitivity CRP test. It's cheap, routine, and measures the systemic inflammation that standard cholesterol panels completely miss. You can have perfect LDL and inflamed arteries that are quietly preparing to rupture.
If your hsCRP is elevated, discuss low-dose colchicine with your physician. It's FDA-approved for exactly this.
Push for a coronary CT angiography with AI plaque and inflammation analysis if you have risk factors. This isn't the stress test your parents got. This is 3D visualization of your actual arteries — with AI quantifying not just how much plaque you have, but what kind it is and whether the surrounding tissue is inflamed.
Consider polygenic risk score testing — especially with a family history of early heart disease. It's now guideline-supported.
And the foundation that never changes: move daily, eat real food, sleep 7-9 hours, manage stress, and know your numbers — ApoB, Lp(a), hsCRP, fasting insulin.
I left Iran as a child with nothing. I rebuilt everything in a country that gave me the freedom to become a physician. I've spent twenty years watching patients get second chances.
The ones who haunt me aren't the ones who died on my table. They're the ones who survived but never acted on what the science was telling them — years before the event that didn't have to happen.
You can have perfect cholesterol and still have a heart attack. Inflammation plus genetics can drive plaque rupture in arteries that look "fine" on a standard panel.
The myth that normal cholesterol means you're safe has cost more lives than I can count.
We now have the tools to detect the fire — not just the smoke. AI to see it. Genetics to predict it. Drugs to quiet it. And the ancient basics — movement, real food, sleep, purpose — to prevent it from starting.
Prevention is the new cure. And the science to make it real is no longer coming.
It's here.
1/5 I'm a cardiologist. I'm 58 years old. I was born in Iran, exiled as a child, and rebuilt my life from nothing in a country that owed me nothing.
It took me decades to understand what I'm about to tell you.
I learned some of these lessons in medical school. Some in the cath lab at 3 AM. Some from Rumi and Rabbi Nachman. Some from patients who taught me more about living in their final hours than I learned in four years of residency.
I wish someone had given me these words at twenty. No one did. So I'm giving them to you now.
2/5 The less you say, the more your words carry. I've spent thousands of hours in ICU waiting rooms. The person everyone turns to is never the one who talked most. They're the one who waited, listened, and spoke only when it mattered. Silence isn't emptiness. It's precision. The Kotzker Rebbe said: not everything that is thought should be said. Not everything said should be written. Not everything written should be published.
Don't take everything personally. Most people are far too consumed by their own fears and insecurities to think about you as much as you imagine. I spent years believing the world was scrutinizing my every misstep. It wasn't. It was busy with its own. The freedom that comes from truly understanding this is one of the most underrated gifts of getting older.
What you focus on becomes your reality. The Kabbalists mapped this centuries ago — where your attention goes, your life follows. I've watched patients with terrible prognoses outlive patients with better numbers, because one group focused on what they could still build and the other focused on the verdict. Your mind is not a passenger in your life. It's the steering wheel.
3/5 One day, your pain will make sense.
My family lost a 2,700-year home in Iran. We left with almost nothing. For years that felt like pure destruction — a story with no redemption, no purpose, just loss.
That exile became the reason I practice medicine in freedom. Write books in English. Raise my children in safety. Stand here today speaking to you.
The heartbreak, rejection, failure, and disappointment you curse right now may become the very foundation you build everything on. You cannot see it from inside the pain. But I'm 55 and I'm telling you — from the other side — it was all curriculum. Every last piece of it.
Rabbi Nachman said: if you believe you can break, believe with equal force that you can repair. The breaking was never the end of the story. It was the opening.
Every person enters your life for a reason. Some come to love you. Some to teach you. Some to wake you up. And some to show you exactly what you should never accept again. The Baal Shem Tov taught that every encounter is a divine appointment — even the ones that shatter you. Especially those.