Why Are People Injecting Themselves with Peptides?
Then Koniver drove me to the clinic’s IV room, where he treated me to a poke bowl for lunch. The preparations were scribbled on a dry-erase board like restaurant specials; one of these was described as “Dr. Koniver’s Blend” of vitamins, minerals and amino acids. He asked me if I would like a free drop of methylene blue, a chemical dye increasingly marketed to improve longevity and memory. I knew it as a last-resort drug for hypertension that, in high doses, constricts blood vessels so much that it can cause gangrene. I accepted the poke but refused the drip.
After lunch, a new patient, a handsome middle-aged man I’ll call Toby, settled into a recliner with a soft pillow on top. A nurse inserted an IV into one arm; Koniver shook his other hand and said, “Welcome aboard!” Toby and his family were recently in a car accident, but he lost trust in most doctors, he said, after they became “obsessed” with viruses and vaccines during the pandemic. He was happy that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, was putting the country “on the right track.”
“I’m not a big fan of vaccines,” Koniver responded. “A lot of them don’t have the data.”
Toby wasn’t there for a peptide injection, but Koniver advised him to try one during a future visit. “I have seen extraordinary results,” he said. He also said that one of his IVs, which contains methylene blue, makes his patients “feel like they’re plugged into an electrical outlet.”
“I love it!” Toby replied.
I was perplexed, perhaps naively, that poorly studied peptide injections had gained Koniver’s trust, even though they had meticulously studied COVID-19 vaccines had not been. “Anecdotal data means a lot to me,” he said. “Two days after a vaccine, someone has a stroke. Two days later, he is dead… We see that enough, it makes an impression.”
In recent years, federal efforts to control peptides have placed Koniver at odds with public health agencies. In 2023, during Biden’s presidency, the Food and Drug Administration placed nineteen peptides, including BPC-157, on a “do not compound” list, citing “significant potential safety risks” that included immune reactions, pancreatitis, and accelerated growth of cancer cells. In response, Koniver began proposing a peptide that differed by only one amino acid. “So far we’re getting very similar results,” he told me.
In 2024, Koniver was sanctioned by South Carolina public health officials who found, among other things, that he failed to maintain his registration with the Drug Enforcement Administration while prescribing controlled substances, and that he neglected to check patients’ vital signs before administering ketamine. Koniver attributed the failures to mapping issues and said no patients were harmed. “There have never been any clinical complaints,” he added. He paid a ten thousand dollar fine and agreed not to administer ketamine or testosterone for a year. New York State, where he was also licensed to practice, ordered him to surrender his medical license.
When it came to peptides, Koniver appeared to support U.S. public health agencies needing to change direction. “Some of my patients hold very senior positions in government,” he said. “They are extremely concerned about what the FDA is doing to peptides.” In the era of Make America Healthy Again, the popularity of peptides has increased. Many compounding pharmacies are experiencing growing demand; THE Times reported that U.S. imports of gray market peptides and hormones from China roughly doubled last year. Podcaster Joe Rogan credited BPC-157 with curing a case of elbow tendinitis in two weeks. Beauty influencers who want a deeper tan and improved libido take Melanotan II, also known as the “Barbie peptide.” Even new York The magazine recently published an independent writer’s account of self-injected peptides, titled “Life with Peptides is Amazing,” which cites no peer-reviewed or academic scientific research. In February, RFK Jr. said on Rogan’s podcast that he had taken peptides himself and that, under his leadership, the FDA would stop restricting many of them. Kennedy, who denounced the agency’s “aggressive suppression” of unproven treatments, vowed to “end the war.”
The human body produces thousands of peptides. Many are portions of proteins that send messages or regulate body systems, often in ways that scientists don’t fully understand. Researchers have known about some peptides for decades, and dozens of them have been turned into safe and effective drugs. The hormone insulin is a peptide that moves sugar from the bloodstream into cells; GLP-1, or glucagon-like peptide-1, triggers the pancreas to release insulin and slows the passage of food through the intestine. (Peptides are generally defined as containing about fifty amino acids or fewer; more than that, they’re proteins.) But the science behind the current peptide craze dates back to the turn of the century, when Pinchas Cohen, a respected pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, began focusing on age-related diseases. In one project, Cohen attempted to disrupt a protein associated with insulin resistance and diabetes. By injecting human DNA into yeast cells, he was able to produce several chains of amino acids attached to his target. Cohen told me that the first two chains were known proteins, but the third was “this ridiculous little thing” made up of only twenty-four amino acids. Oddly, he couldn’t understand where it came from. According to the conventional wisdom of the time, the DNA he injected should not have encoded him.
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Caricature of PC Vey
The peptide, humanin, was eventually traced to a tiny snippet of mitochondrial DNA, part of the ninety-eight percent of the human genome that had long been labeled “junk DNA.” Cohen’s work has helped reveal that in the book of three billion letters that is our genome, even the most obscure sentences can be an important part of the story. It turned out that the junk DNA was not junk: it contains instructions for many peptides and proteins that had never been studied. “The public understanding of peptides doesn’t understand what’s going on from a scientific perspective,” Cohen told me. “This isn’t about a dozen things you can buy at the gym. This is a scientific revolution. This will usher in a new era of drug discovery.”
