Peptide therapy.
A field with real science and a great deal of noise around it. We prescribe through regulated pathways and tell you which category any given peptide falls into.
Real science, loud marketplace.
Peptides are short amino acid chains that act as signalling molecules. Your body produces thousands of them, and they regulate everything from growth hormone release to inflammation to appetite. Using specific peptides therapeutically to influence a particular pathway is a legitimate clinical approach with genuine science behind parts of it.
It is also an area where the gap between the science and the marketing is unusually wide. Peptides are sold widely online as research chemicals, outside any regulatory oversight, with no verification of purity or dosing accuracy. Contamination and mislabelling in that supply chain are documented rather than theoretical.
Our position is that both things are true. There are peptides with meaningful clinical data used within regulated pathways. There is also a substantial unregulated market making claims well beyond the evidence. Anyone presenting the entire field as uniformly proven — or as uniformly worthless — is simplifying.
At our Jacksonville and Orange Park offices we prescribe in-house following an evaluation, source through regulated compounding pathways, and are explicit about which evidence tier applies to anything we recommend.
History, goals, contraindication screening, and baseline bloodwork. This also establishes whether a peptide is the right tool at all — a substantial share of what people seek peptides for is better addressed by sleep, training, absorption or metabolic work, and we would rather say so than prescribe around it.
The regulatory picture, plainly
Peptides fall into distinct regulatory categories, and conflating them is the most common source of confusion. Some are FDA-approved medications with full trial data behind them. Some are available through compounding pharmacies, which operate under a different framework. And a large volume is sold online labelled for research use only, outside medical oversight entirely.
The FDA has restricted a number of previously compounded peptides in recent years, and the landscape has genuinely shifted. A peptide that was readily available through compounding pathways a few years ago may not be now.
We prescribe within the regulated pathway. If something you have read about is not available through it, we will tell you that rather than pointing you elsewhere — and we would strongly discourage sourcing peptides from research-chemical suppliers, where purity is unverified and contamination is documented.
Why we name the evidence tier
Peptide therapy is often discussed as though it were a single thing with a single evidence base. It is not. The supporting data for one peptide tells you nothing about another.
Some have randomised controlled trials and regulatory approval for specific indications. Some have small human studies and reasonable mechanistic support. Some have animal data and a plausible mechanism, and essentially nothing in humans.
All three can be legitimate to discuss — but you should know which one you are being offered. Presenting a mechanistically plausible peptide with the same confidence as an approved medication is the practice we most want to avoid, and it is common in this space.
What we check first, so it actually works
Fatigue, poor recovery, stubborn body composition and sleep that has stopped working can come from several directions, and peptides work far better when the foundation underneath them is sorted.
So we check that foundation first: sleep quality, insulin and blood sugar, protein intake, thyroid function, training load and stress. These are quick to assess and often produce a noticeable change on their own.
That is the difference between a protocol built for you and an order taken over a counter. Get the groundwork right and the peptide does more, for longer — which is the whole point of doing this properly.
Where peptides sit in our sequence
Our functional medicine work runs in a fixed order — gut and digestion first, adrenal and stress response second, hormones third. Peptides sit alongside that rather than replacing any part of it.
The reasoning is the same one that governs everything else we do. A signalling molecule works on a system, and if absorption is impaired or the stress axis is dysregulated, the system it is signalling to is not in a position to respond well.
In practice that means peptides frequently come later than patients expect, and sometimes not at all — because the work upstream resolved what they came in for.