Genesis: Discovering the Iron Slave

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” - Mahatma Ghandi

The Gift and the Fire: Living Inside a Neurodivergent Brain

The fire didn't destroy me. It forged me.

I have ADHD. And not the kind people romanticize on TED stages. The real kind—the one that’s blown up marriages, cost me jobs, made me say things before I could process the impact. The kind that made me forget birthdays and hyperfixate on theories. The kind that made me a jack of all trades—master of none. Except maybe... this.

Because this same brain—the one that scattered me across a thousand obsessions—also tuned me to a different frequency. One that let me see patterns no one else could. One that let me hear whispers others couldn’t. One that led me to a truth science hadn’t yet named.

I didn’t just study ADHD. I lived it. And not just in me—but in my son, who has Asperger’s and ADHD too. For years, I’ve been studying psychology, nutrition, exercise, nootropics, biohacking, behaviour, mitochondria, and neuroinflammation—trying to crack the code.  Trying to ease the suffering in my own family; in my own head.

Tuning Into the Signal: A Mind on a Mission

For the last eight months, I’ve been hyper-focused on neuroscience. Not casually—not as a side project. I mean fully immersed. Reading late into the night. Charting pathways. Mapping inflammation like a detective chasing the scene of a crime. Listening to lectures on neurodevelopment while walking, cooking, and driving.

The last thirty days? Full throttle. No turning back. I cleared the decks and gave every waking hour to this mission. Not because I had to. Because I couldn’t not. Something deeper was pulling me forward.

This wasn’t an academic exercise. It was a calling.  You see, thirteen years ago, during meditation, I received a message:

“Free the Iron Slaves.”

When I first heard the phrase on June 22, 2012—“Free the Iron Slaves”—I didn’t know what it meant. I wrote it down like I did with every other message received in meditation and moved on. But it never really left me. It lived quietly in the background, surfacing in moments of grief, in visions, in symbols I couldn’t yet decode. For years it followed me—through heartbreak, through awakening, through the slow burn of transformation.

Then on March 24, 2025, something shifted.  I heard the phrase again in meditation, this time like a thunder-clap!

"FREE THE IRON SLAVES!!"

But still nothing.  No context and no way to understand what to do.  It wasn't until later that day, when I was listening to a Jack Kruse podcast when he started talking about heme and iron, that I opened Grok and began exploring. What is heme? How does it work?

That’s when the language started appearing: pyrroles, porphyrin rings, nitrogen locking iron, and an enzyme called HO-1 that frees it.  Wait. . .  

Locked?  Freeing iron?

And then it hit me.

“Free the Iron Slaves” wasn’t just a poetic metaphor—it was a code. A cipher. A way for my consciousness to deliver a message that, thirteen years earlier, I didn’t yet have the biological language to interpret.  

I went back through my notes and found the following:

“funeral pyre.”
An “emerald near the pancreas.”
A sacred diagram marked “21.”
An iron sword spinning inside an infinity symbol with the incantation “Fire over water, water over fire.”
A voice telling me to “read Deuteronomy.”

And suddenly, all of it pointed to one place: heme—and the delicate, sacred process of properly managing iron inside the body.

I began to see the truth, like Neo suddenly being able to see the code in the Matrix: that the entire Nrf2 → HO-1 → Copper/Zinc axis was mirroring the spiritual metaphors I’d been receiving for years. That heme contained 21 atoms in its ring. That biliverdin, the green pigment produced from broken-down heme, forms in the spleen and liver—right near the pancreas. That the biblical reference to “brass from the hills” was a veiled description of copper and zinc, essential for safely carrying and regulating free iron. That the balance was everything: not too much, not too little. A double-edged sword, spinning in redox rhythm infinitum.

From there, I went all in.

I studied functional disconnection. The collapse of timing. The role of movement in regulating the brain. How light calibrates circadian function. How mitochondria aren’t just power plants—they are quantum clocks, memory nodes, coherence hubs.  I began tracing ferroptosis—iron-driven cell death—and saw its fingerprints across the entire neurodevelopmental landscape.  

And I didn’t do it alone of course, how could I?  I'm not a scientist or a doctor. Instead I poked and prodded the most advanced AI tools available.  I questioned everything, rejected some, accepted others.  Everything was pressure tested, cross-checked, referenced with multiple AI tools using Deep Research engines scanning through ALL of the available published peer reviewed research, blog posts, social media, ANYTHING written on the internet.  I pulled studies, ran pathway analyses, cross-validated every metaphor with mechanism. And what I found was astonishing.

The biology matched the symbolism.
The vision matched the data.
The past met the present.

And slowly, it all came together.
The message. The model. The mission.
The Iron Trap Hypothesis was born.

The Iron Trap Hypothesis: What Happens When Iron Burns

This is the Iron Trap Hypothesis.

And no—this isn’t about adding more iron. In fact, it’s the opposite.

When someone recently asked me flippantly (and most certainly with disdain before actually having read the paper), "Sure, your answer to autism is more iron?!"—they missed the point entirely. The Iron Trap Hypothesis isn’t about supplementing with iron. It’s about what happens when iron gets stuck, unprocessed, and turns toxic inside the cell. The problem isn’t iron deficiency (or anemia)—it’s iron dysregulation. And when that happens, the damage is silent, systemic, and devastating.

This is not a rejection of neurodiversity. It’s a reclamation.

The hypothesis proposes that many children labeled with autism, ADHD, OCD, dyslexia, tics, or “behavior issues” are not disordered by design—but dysregulated by biology. That inside their cells, iron is getting trapped. And when iron is trapped, it burns.

It happens when an enzyme called HO-1—heme oxygenase-1—gets suppressed. That enzyme is supposed to clear out heme, an iron-rich molecule essential for oxygen and energy transfer. But when HO-1 is blocked by modern stressors (glyphosate, seed oils, heavy metals, EMFs, blue light, chronic stress), the heme doesn’t break down. Iron stays stuck.

Stuck iron triggers oxidative stress. It damages mitochondria. It shuts down neurotransmitters. It disrupts epigenetic signaling, flipping switches that were never meant to turn off—or on. It accelerates synaptic pruning, stripping away neural connections prematurely. And it sets off a process called ferroptosis—a form of cell death that quietly dismantles the most sensitive systems in the developing brain.

And here’s where it gets real friends: When this pattern plays out, it doesn’t just correlate with behaviour—it actually predicts it.

Because we are looking at iron trapping and its effects on iron-rich areas of the brain, we can predict what happens when those areas are affected negatively; Meltdowns. Impulsivity. Antisocial behavior. Nonverbal regression. Tics. Stimming.  Flapping.  Sleep disruptions. Obsessive loops. Loss of language. Lack of big picture thinking.  Withdrawal.

But it also predicts something else: "Islets of excellence"—those striking, savant-like pockets of brilliance that appear out of nowhere. Hyperfocus. Pattern recognition. Sensory amplification. Deep emotional resonance. Logic.  The parts of the brain that survive the fire can become overdeveloped—compensating for the systems that were pruned or suppressed.

That’s the Iron Trap.

The children are not broken, rather, they are adapting to a biochemically and increasingly unlivable world. Their brilliance is real—but buried in the fire of inflammation. Their gifts are intact—but misfiring inside a rhythm that no longer serves them.

Brilliance and Burden: The False Choice of "Acceptance"

We can’t keep pretending that neurodivergence is just a difference. It’s also a response. A red flag. A survival signal.

These children are reacting to a world that is chemically, electrically, emotionally, and rhythmically hostile to their biology. Their symptoms are not random, they are precise adaptations to overwhelming inputs. And the more sensitive the child, the more obvious the signals.

Yes, we should celebrate the gifts. The pattern recognition. The creativity. The intuitive leaps. The empathy. The hyperfocus that can build entire worlds from fragments. But we also have to tell the truth about the suffering.

Some kids are nonverbal. Some bang their heads against walls. Some rock for hours because their vestibular systems never stabilized. Some can’t sleep. Can’t use the toilet. Can’t trust. Some are self-harming. Some are disappearing right before their parents’ eyes.

To call this just a "variation of normal" is to look away from the fire—and worse, to abandon those still trapped in it.

We need a third path—one that holds both the brilliance and the burden. One that refuses to pretend these are just quirks, but also refuses to pathologize the entire soul.

We need a model that says: these kids are responding exactly as they should in a system that’s out of sync with their biology—and now it’s our job to realign the system.

The Resistance: Censorship, Backlash, and Why I Won't Stop

This is not just a theory. It’s a bridge. Between lived experience and systems biology. Between neuroscience and nutrition. Between fatherhood and the frontier of science. Between the child I was, the father I am, and the future I refuse to give up on.

It’s a model built on pain, refined through obsession, and tested against the hardest questions I could ask it. It didn’t come from a lab—it came from life. From sleepless nights and relentless curiosity. From watching my own son spiral, stabilize, regress, and rebuild—again and again.

And yes—I’ve been mocked, ridiculed, dismissed, and censored. Not by the scientists mind you, but by the ones who say they speak for us. The ones who wrap suffering in slogans and who sell identity as immunity. The ones who would rather market a brand than confront the biology.  Perhaps some of this is because of my confidence that this is the key.  What we've been waiting for and what I was 'bequeathed' to deliver? 

Probably.  But I’ve learned something in this fight: they mock what they don’t understand. They dismiss what threatens their narrative, or perhaps their very identity. And they censor what they’re not willing to look at inside themselves.  Science is never settled, it is forged in the fire of debate fuelled by curiosity and by those willing to look where others won't.  Where they can't.

I don’t have a PhD, I have ADHD.

I haven't written a test in an exam room or gymnasium (or online!), but I’ve put in thousands of hours of study, I’ve read the research, I’ve tested the pathways. I’ve chased the data through the blood, the brain, the mitochondria, and the mother wound, leveraging the best AI systems in the world using the very gifts that others are supposed to accept in 'people like me.'  Like us.

But I intend to ace the test of life—for myself, for my son, and for the kids like us who are still in the flames. Because that fire didn’t destroy me. It forged me.

Redemption Through Fire: This is my Test

I love my brain. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

It’s tuned to a frequency that lets me feel what others can’t—pain, yes, but also pattern, beauty, and connection. It sees what machines miss: the rhythms beneath behaviour, the signals inside silence, the redox collapse hidden behind a single enzymatic meltdown. It senses coherence before science can measure it.  

My brain is messy, impulsive, chaotic—but also intuitive, brilliant, and eerily prophetic. It’s walked through fire and burned its proverbial feet.  But like a lantern on a dark moonless night, it has also illuminated the path that no one else could see.

This isn’t about fixing what was never broken. It’s about finally understanding what was never explained. It’s about claiming the frequency we were given—and learning how to tune it, not mute it.

This is my dharma. This is my redemption. This is the fire I walked through so I could carry light for someone else.

If this resonates, you too may be called to duty.

Stand with Me to Free the Iron Slaves

This isn’t just a movement. It’s a reckoning. A return. A rescue mission for the children still trapped in the fire and the adults who never made it out. I’m not asking for applause. I’m asking for alignment. If you’ve felt the burn, seen the brilliance, or lived the burden—then you already know. 

Stand with me. Shields up, swords drawn.

It is time to Free the Iron Slaves. 

David,

David K. Millar,

Founder & Chief Alchemist

NeuroSynergetics Inc.