Why I Created ZnPaC

This did not come from a brilliant idea. It came from frustration — years of it, accumulated one patient at a time in an urgent care exam room. I want to tell you where it came from, because I think it matters. And because I think you deserve to know who built this and why.

What I Saw Before Urgent Care

I trained in Emergency Medicine and Internal Medicine. For the first half of my career — outside of training — I practiced Emergency Medicine. The kind you see dramatized on television. High stakes, high volume, the full spectrum of human crisis. Early in that career I saw the other side of antibiotics — not the dramatic side, but the quiet, devastating one. Young, once healthy patients with antibiotic-associated colitis — at times from antibiotics they never should have been given. Crippling abdominal pain, severe diarrhea, dehydration, hospitalization. In some cases leading to surgery — and when surgery becomes necessary, it almost always means a colostomy bag. Allergic reactions ranging from a minor rash to Stevens-Johnson syndrome — a life-threatening skin condition that can leave permanent damage. And perhaps most troubling of all: bacteria that were once simple to treat becoming difficult, and at times near impossible, to treat. Organisms that no longer responded to the antibiotics we had always relied on — at times because those antibiotics had been overused, overprescribed, and handed out for viruses they were never designed to touch. Young, once healthy people with their lives disrupted — sometimes permanently. That stayed with me.

Then life happened. For the sake of my own well-being, I was somewhat forced to retire from the big leagues. I found myself in urgent care — what I like to call the minor leagues. What I found there surprised me.

The Everyday Battle

From patient zero, urgent care felt like a fight. Not with patients — with a system that had conditioned them, and many of the physicians around me, to treat a viral upper respiratory infection with an antibiotic as a matter of course. URI patients can make up 80 to 90 percent of what we see in urgent care. That is not an exaggeration. It is the reality of the practice — and it made every day feel like the same battle, fought over and over again.

I worked in an office in my hometown. A mile down the road, there was another office — open longer, double-covered daily, with an established patient base and an established prescribing culture. The local community figured out quickly that antibiotics were not going to be handed out at my office unless they were genuinely warranted. Some patients appreciated that. Others did not. Over time, the patient population self-selected. Those who came to my office came for good medicine. Those who wanted a prescription without a conversation knew where to go. There were times I had to be direct — letting a patient know, respectfully but clearly, that if an antibiotic for a viral illness was going to be a condition of their care, I was not the right fit for that particular visit. The mile down the road was always there. I said it without judgment. I meant it without apology.

It took five to seven years — nearly leading into COVID — before the patient culture in my practice had shifted enough that this was no longer the daily battle it had been. What I didn't expect was that one of the physicians from the other office would, within the first three years, come to work alongside me. He had grown frustrated with a way of practicing that didn't sit right with him either. Together we created a more uniform practice — and I'm not sure we would have been as successful without that consistency.

I tell that story because it matters: physicians are not all the same. Many of us know the evidence. Many of us want to practice differently. The system makes it very hard.

The Mirror

I have always had a healthy respect for antibiotics. Used correctly, they save lives. Used incorrectly, they can and not uncommonly do cause real harm — harm I watched play out firsthand early in my career. From the first day of urgent care to today, I have never prescribed them haphazardly. Even on borderline calls, I think carefully. I weigh the risks and the benefits with every single patient interaction. I have given in — albeit rarely — and never before what I would describe as intense negotiation with the patient regarding the risks and benefits. The conversation always comes first.

My question to patients, when the pressure is there, is this: how can you expect me to prescribe a medication that I just told you will have no benefit and may harm you? If you are familiar with the work of negotiation expert Chris Voss, you may recognize the technique — a calibrated question that puts the burden of reasoning back where it belongs.

Early in my career, when I was still the young and unencumbered Russ Raskin — those of you who knew me will know what I am talking about — the answer was no. Full stop, consequences be damned. It took years to understand that conviction without communication is just stubbornness. The real education was learning to bring patients with me rather than simply refusing to follow them. That required emotional intelligence I had to develop, tools I had to build, and patience I had to earn.

My training landed at the transition from paternalistic medicine — where what the physician said was final — to shared decision-making, where patients have a much bigger voice. That shift is generally good medicine. But it also created a new pressure point. And navigating that pressure, every day, for years, played a role in what ultimately led to this.

What I Wished I Could Do

For years, standing in that exam room, I thought about the placebo effect. Not as a trick — as a clinical reality. There's real value in having a plan when you're sick, acting with intention may itself be part of what helps you feel better. Patients who have a plan recover differently than patients who don't. And for decades, the antibiotic prescription was that plan. It gave patients something to do, something to take home, something that felt decisive. That it wasn't helping the virus was beside the point — it was filling a very human need.

I wished I could give patients something structured to do. Something safe. Something that said: here is your plan. Here is what you take, and when, and for how long. Here is what to expect. Here is why this is the right move. Unlike the antibiotic prescription — which is neither safe nor beneficial for a viral illness — I wanted to give patients something that actually made sense.

But you cannot in good conscience prescribe a placebo. So I built something better — a structured protocol with four ingredients that have their own evidence base, designed to support the immune response during a viral URI, packaged in a way that gives patients exactly what they needed from me all along: a plan.

That is ZnPaC — and the platform you are reading right now.

Why Now

This project took many years to get fully off the ground. The frustration was always there. The motivation built slowly. If I am being frank, it took a period of significant personal change — the kind that forces you to rediscover who you are and what you are meant for — to create the space for something like this. My daughter Jessica played no small role in keeping me grounded through that. And the advent of AI gave me something I hadn't expected: the ability to organize years of accumulated clinical thinking, to build a platform, to create content, to move forward — without needing to hire a team or wait for the right moment. The right moment turned out to be the moment I stopped waiting for it.

What ZnPaC Is

ZnPaC is a proprietary blend of Zinc, Quercetin, NAC (N-acetylcysteine), and Vitamin C — each with published clinical evidence supporting potential benefit in the setting of a viral upper respiratory infection. Together, their effects may be greater than the sum of their parts. Each ingredient works through a distinct mechanism — and those mechanisms complement rather than duplicate each other, creating a stack that may support the immune response in ways no single ingredient could accomplish alone.

A note on formulation: The original ZnPaC formulation included elderberry extract. We removed it because the most rigorous clinical trial — a double-blind, placebo-controlled RCT conducted under FDA IND — showed no benefit for influenza duration or severity. Standardization of elderberry products varies up to five-fold across commercial suppliers, making consistent dosing unreliable. Elderberry did not meet our core principle: possible benefit with little to no risk. NAC was added in its place — in a landmark trial, people taking NAC during peak cold and respiratory illness season experienced far fewer symptomatic illnesses than those on placebo, a difference researchers called dramatic. It also has a strong safety profile and a direct mucolytic mechanism relevant to viral URI. The door remains open for elderberry as a future standalone product.

Earlier is better. But better is still possible from wherever you are. A named protocol, with a defined daily commitment and a clear endpoint, is itself part of what helps. Patients who have a plan recover differently than patients who don't.

Why This Name