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There is a patch on my arm and I have decided to write about it. Before I do, I want to be clear about what kind of writing this is going to be, because there is a lot of the other kind out there and you have probably had your fill.
I am not going to tell you it fixed me. I am not going to post a photograph of myself from two years ago beside one from this morning and let you draw a conclusion I did not earn. I am not going to tell you what you could make selling it, because I do not know what you could make and neither does anybody who says they do.
What I am going to do is pay attention and write it down. That is the only thing I have ever been any good at.
It is a non-transdermal patch. Nothing crosses your skin. It sits on the outside and stays there.
It uses a patented form of phototherapy. Light, not chemistry. That is the mechanism the company describes, in their words.
There are no drugs in it and no stimulants. Nothing to swallow, nothing to metabolize.
And LifeWave's own approved wording is that X39 supports healthy stem cell activity and supports copper peptide production. Those are their words. I am telling you plainly that they are their words, because I think you are owed the difference between what a company says about its product and what a man has personally verified. I have verified none of it. I have been at this a week.
There is one piece of research I can hand you without embarrassment.
A double-blind, placebo-controlled study of sixty people aged forty-one to eighty found that seven days of wearing the patch significantly raised GHK-Cu levels in the blood. Sixty people is not many and seven days is not long, but it was randomized, it was double-blind, and it had a sham patch as a control. That is a real study design, not a testimonial in a lab coat.
Now here is the part that usually gets trimmed off before it reaches you.
That study did not measure pain. It did not measure sleep, or energy, or healing, or aging. Not one of them. It measured a level in the blood. It does not tell you that changing that level does anything for anybody. So when somebody online tells you the science proves this will fix what ails you, they have gone further than the evidence goes, and the evidence goes exactly that far and then it stops.
I am not going to step over that line for you. If I ever do, you have my permission to stop reading.
I have published nearly four hundred pieces over the years, mostly about people trying to build something of their own. Writing does something that talking does not. It leaves a record you cannot quietly edit later.
If I tell you in August that I expect something, and by November nothing has happened, that August sentence is still sitting there with my name on it. That is uncomfortable. It is also the only reason any of this is worth reading. Anybody can tell you a story about how something worked for them. Almost nobody will show you the whole run, including the boring middle where nothing happens at all.
The boring middle is where I intend to keep the receipts.
I am writing them as I go. What I try, what the research says and where it stops, and what I notice — including the weeks where I notice nothing, because those weeks count and they are the ones that get left out of everybody else's version.
If you want them as I write them, they go out by email. If you ever want out, reply to one and I will take you off myself. I will not chase you and I will not sell your address.
Here is where to get them: https://markethive.com/richardgarcia/page/thepatchjournal
Read for a year and buy nothing. I mean that. It is the reason I can write this honestly in the first place.
— Richard Garcia
