Reductionist, Materialist Health and the Crimes of Big Pharma

00:19 Are you enjoying the interviews and specifically the interview format since trying to do about half-hour per episode here, but definitely, I'm getting someone on the phone. I figured it might as well go longer than half an hour, but I like deep dives and by splitting up the topics as we've been doing the last couple of episodes and interviews I feel we can go deeper on a single subject and surrounding stuff around that. But I'd like to hear from you how do you enjoy this process or this format and if so I'll keep doing it. I already have a few others recorded so there'll be like this for the next few, but then who knows who may change it up and still have some more fun stuff to play with in the future. Getting multiple people on and having more debate status perhaps. We'll see what is coming down the pipeline for now.

01:12 We are going to be doing the second to last episode on the health sovereign creed. Today we'll be covering points 13 and 14. These are some big ones, some fun ones and the next time, well I guess we'll have another interview after this, but after that, we'll be wrapping up. Once again, if you haven't checked it out yourself, you can head on over to health sovereign.com and you can find the creed there. You can download it in PDF form if you want to see this for yourself. So let's dive in point 13 I recognize that all of Western medicine was built on a flawed and incomplete model of reductionistic materialism while useful in certain contexts. The flaw is that this one way of seeing the world to the exclusion of all others, it misses the worldviews of psychology, spirituality, holistic or systems thinking, even cultural effects.

02:08 I recognize that all of these are important when it comes who health, where to start here reductionism. This is for the most part how science is based. There is complexity science and different branches and related things to this that do try to see the bigger picture while taking the scientific method into this. But for the most part, our science has been and still is focused on reductionism. So what is that? Well first science itself is kind of a method of exploring through observation how the world works. It has delivered pens of advancements. Even though there are problems with science, some of which we'll be talking about right here. It's still is a very helpful tool or going about the world. I'm not anti-science, I am anti-bad science and that's another issue which we'll touch on in the next point. But anyway, even if it's good science, good reductionist science, there's still a flaw with that.

03:14 So reductionism is this idea of reducing any sort of system, anything down to its component parts in which to understand how that thing works. So with the human body, we reduce it down to the organ systems, then the organs, then the different pathways and the cells themselves. Then we further reduce it down from there. The components of the cells and the DNA. And from that, we've gotten to this idea that DNA is responsible for life and is everything in life. And I'm not saying DNA is not important, but DNA codes for proteins, it really does not explain how a cell works or how a human works and does such things as play music, fall in love, have babies. It does not explain all these. So reducing things down does not get us to the ultimate answers. I mean we can further subdivide, we can just, you know, DNA and the components of cells are all made of atoms or molecules.

04:17 And then Adam's and we can break down the atoms into protons, electrons and neutrons and we can break these further down into corks and by some theories, the corks are then just superstrings and this stuff does not really tell us what it means to be healthy. So reducing down, it definitely has its uses by looking into the cellular function, by looking into how these systems interact. We have absolutely found interesting, helpful things, but in many cases, we have also lost the forest for the trees. When you reduce something down, it is hard to still understand the big picture. So recently I did a deeper dive on hormones than I've done before, specifically around estrogen for men, sex hormone-binding globulin and dihydrotestosterone or DHT with the hormone system. It's very, very complex and there are basically hundreds of different hormones, even just when this within the sex hormone system, but you can't really say a system because cortisol is very closely related to these but not necessarily thought of as a sex hormone.

05:22 So there are relationships between here and that's part of the things that reductionism loses, but even with the best sign, because you can always reduce down further and in so many of these areas we know so little. So those are some of the issues around reductionism. So trying to understand health by understanding the hormones, good thing worth doing, reducing it down to these individual items. And then let's say getting a blood test and saying, Oh, this number is too high, this number is too low, let's just add some of that hormone back in. That is a problematic model because one, we're not even measuring like 50 different other things that actually might matter. Let me one issue. Secondly, who's to say that this is too hard. This is too low for this person because this Western model tries to look at everybody as the same and we know that simply is not true.

06:19 What is a good level of a certain hormone for one person may be a disastrous level for another person. So that's a little bit about reductionism. Then we have materialism. Materialism is saying that the material, the things in life essentially is all that there is that it's all physical reality and nothing else, and this is a philosophy, but most people that are wrapped up in this philosophy do not recognize it as a philosophy. They think of it as how the world works. That tends to be how most people and most philosophies tend to think of things, right is from recognizing that there are so many different philosophies and kind of seeing across the world that we can begin to step back and realize like, Oh one philosophy versus another really dictates how you see and operate in the world. But with materialism, we have so much ideas that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain.

07:16 Well that consciousness is in the brain period. This alone is problematic and not saying that the brain is not important. It does seem to be quite important in the vast majority of cases here, but just because we see some correlates on a brain scan mapping to what a person is thinking about where their mind does not necessarily mean that the brain equals mind. I like the term brain-mind interface. There is definitely a correlation between these two, an interface between these two, but one thing affects the other. How you think affects and can change your physical brain structure in time. Keep thinking the same kind of thoughts and your body, your whole neurology. So not just the brain but the rest of the nervous system and the body will follow and at the same time, we can do things to the body. Whether this is movement or taking certain nutrients and these in turn actually affect the brain structure itself.

08:18 The nervous system which then affects our thinking. This goes both ways. One of the things with reductionist materialism is we tend to think in terms of linear cause and effect. This X happens which causes Y but most of life does not operate so simply. The reason the health science has got kind of wrapped into this model a part of the reason is there are many different factors is essentially like physics, envy, physics. When the hard sciences they are having such great success. Once we figured Newton and kind of the laws that came from that, this is where the enlightenment happened and we had this rapid rise in technology. We could predict things and get great results. A lot of cool things happen from that. Other sciences were jealous of how exact physics were and they tried to fit a square peg into a round hole essentially.

09:18 That is part of the problem because well we need a round peg going into a round hole. So with biology, it really does take complexity sciences. It does take looking at complex systems to see that cause and effect is not linear. It may be bi-directional, it may be tied into 50 different things to where it becomes hard to even say what causes some sort of effects. It can become that difficult both for trying to reduce it down with really trying to peg down what causes one thing. And in doing so we often make a lot of false assumptions or we make assumptions what's later turned out to be false just through more scientific process through learning. So all of this is not to say it's not useful. I mean the material is stick philosophy. I think that has failed and we can look at near-death research and if you actually look at that, we see that there are times when the brain is completely dead, but people are still having conscious experiences.

10:19 We know that materialism does not seem to work with such things as remote viewing, which is extremely well studied and researched, showing that there's non-local effects and that can't be explained with really a materialist philosophy. So there it's been falsified in number of ways, but getting back to what we're talking about, so if we look at the world through this reductionist and materialist philosophy and we see how the world works and what I'm saying here is Western medicine was built upon these shaky foundations, these incomplete foundations. What was not included in these foundational viewpoints was first psychology. Now everyone knows that. How you think, how you feel affects your physical body and vice versa. That's pretty well established at this point. But for how many years was there a clear mind-body divide? We talked about the mind and body and I talked about this, I think it was back in points three.

11:23 It's a system. They're not really separate things. It is intimately tied together, but in our language, in order to talk about these things, we split them up, but mind, body, spirit, all assist them and we know that they affect other things. So for a long time, doctors did not recognize because they came from this philosophy without even recognizing as a philosophy, this foundation of reductionism and materialism that how you think actually changes the physical body outcomes. So that was a whole missing worldview that is certainly much better integrated. Now we recognize the mind, I mean placebos, which we talked about earlier as well. This is the mind having some sort of effect on the body because of the expectation of something happen. We can send this little further to spirituality. So I was saying mind, body, spirit, all of this work together with a materialist philosophy.

12:17 You don't recognize spirit as all, it's not a thing. You can't cut open the body. We can never have successfully found the soul somewhere in the body. Therefore it does not exist. That is how a material list looks at such a thing. Not recognizing that there is things operating that work differently than what seems to be happening in the material world. So this whole spiritual health aspect, how that plays into everything is not even recognized by some people, but fully recognized by other people and utilize and leading to good effects. So that's another missing part of the dominant worldview in Western medicine. It's going back to that division of power. Like you can have your spirituality, but this doesn't matter at all for the cancer or the depression that you're having is essentially what people wrapped up in this mindset will say in holistic or systems thinking.

13:11 So touch on this, that complexity sciences, recognizing how biology works and even beyond it, right? So in the one the earlier episodes was talking about how we interact with the environment and we can actually see from a systems viewpoint how we are part of the environment. The environment is part of us, there is relationship between them. And there is feedback loops between these different things that cause certain effects that are very complicated. So when we reduce things down, we try to get to this linear and reductionist paradigm. But that is not how life works. That is not how biology works. It's a very complex system. And without understanding all these parts and relationships and processes, it tends to be a very flawed way of looking at things and even cultural effects. So one of the areas that science has begun to recognize is that the social effects on health are huge.

14:12 The people we interact with, I mean we share bacteria with them. There's all kinds of different things. But if you, all your friends are obese, chances are you're going to be obese. So there are these social effects. There are cultural effects that we're only beginning to understand because once again, this is not a reductionist thing. The doctors of old would say that you know, it has to do with this chemical pathway. So let's take this drug. Then, your relationship with your mother or your husband or wife or children doesn't matter at all for your health. We know that is not true now. So we have to see all these things and it's difficult to see all these different things. Very, I mean, that's the name of complexity science, right? But all these different aspects affecting each other. Again, the main point here is our whole Western medical model is built on the foundation of reductionism and materialism.

15:08 So it disregarded all these other effects for a long time and they're beginning to come back into it. But still, so much of that momentum over the decades, over a century roughly has been built in this way of doing things that didn't look at any of these other areas. That is a problem. That is, this is the large, so many different things that are missing. So that is very important. Now we get to point number 14 I recognize that big pharma has a track record of criminal and harmful activity while drugs have their place. That place has been inflated through advertising, incentivizing doctors, lobbying and successfully passing certain legislation, public relations campaigns, and more. I will strive to understand that proper place. This is a deep one. Something we'll probably cover in future episodes even more so when I'm saying big pharma, I am talking about all the different pharmaceutical companies and I'm sure some are better than others, especially small ones, but we see this in the pharmaceutical industry.

16:15 Basically the big companies buy up. The small ones happen all the time. So there really are not that many of the big players out there because this is just how they roll. So I'm not trying to be libelous here, but we can actually see there is a track record of criminal and harmful activity. So there's not that many criminal cases though I will touch on some, but we can certainly see a lot of harmful cases. There's many civil cases that have been brought against the pharmaceutical companies. One, I can think off the top of my head is a case of Merck with Vioxx. And what we saw with that was they falsified the research, they downplayed the side effects and what happened from that was that people died. It basically caused heart problems and many people had heart attacks and died from this medication. I would say that is criminal behavior.

17:13 And harmful behavior. Absolutely. So what happened? Merck had to pay a large fine, but even though I think this was over a billion dollars might have been hundreds of millions, forgive it. Exactly. No one within the company was held liable for the criminal activity itself. Essentially they got a slap on the wrist and that's all it was. Even though this sounds like a whole lot of money, the amount of profit they made off the drug in the time where they delayed things from actually being pulled or they did personally pull it down the road, but they were able to sell it for years and years and pull in a lot more profit then what they were ultimately fined for, and this is part of the thing you need to understand when we say track record, they do this things again and again because they can get away with it. If the CEOs or the people involved, the people that made decisions to suppress this research or falsify this research do not get held liable.

18:11 They don't even lose any money personally themselves. Why would they change behavior? Right now being in the news, we have the opioid epidemic. I'm going to try to find someone that knows this area super well to get an interview. I think that'd be fun because I've read a little bit about it, heard about little things here and there, but it's definitely a huge case. Lot of things going on there. What do we see? We see pharmaceutical companies multiple involve that pushed this drug. They said it was safer than it was. That is a recurring theme with drugs. Say it's safe. Say it works for the things they often say they're more efficacious than they actually are and it's safer than it actually is. And both of these things can be falsified through different methods of manipulating scientific research. So that's their two tricks and in many ways of applying these things.

19:03 So they push these drugs out, they sold a whole bunch of them and this is one of the most addictive substances in the world that causes massive problems and lots of people died and had lives ruined for the sake of profit. And we're seeing fines being levied. All kinds of stuff. Will this case be any different ultimately or just a slap on the wrist and business continues as usual. So in this aisle, drugs have their place. Once again not saying drugs don't have their place, opioids, they have their place. I think it might be better if we just went back to the old opium and smoking that having the dense, I mean as long sorted history with that too. And now the British purposefully did that to the Chinese people don't know a whole lot of details on that but certainly seen some things.

19:49 So we have these drugs and painkillers are great and I'd say necessary different things. Even within more normal urbanism, there's many analgesic herbs out there that can be used that don't work quite to the same level of opioids but also don't quite have the same side effects either. So these drugs have their place, but should we be using these drugs so much for chronic pain that's happening and getting people really hooked on these things, especially when there's better stuff. I mean Kratom that's been a lot in the news and getting a lot of buzz and a lot of kind of gray area stuff. Is this legal? Let's make it illegal because it's going to take away these opioid profits perhaps. But it seems to have less effects. But yeah, very interesting stuff. So drugs have their place, but we have to understand that proper place and when this is inflated because we can make profits by manipulating research, insane, huge amounts of profits.

20:44 That is a problem. So they manipulate through advertising, right. Turn on the TV. What do you see advertising for pharmaceuticals left and right. I don't know anyone that has watched one of these than gone to their doctor and actually said like, Hey, what about this drug? I want to be on that. I'd be curious how much that actually happens, but is this not just another control mechanism? So they are paying lots of money to advertise on these TV channels, including new stations and are they able to use this saying, we're pulling our advertising because you're trying to say something that we don't want you to say. This is the way the world works. They incentivize doctors all kinds of different ways. Hey, come on, have a trip down to canned Coon so you can learn about our drugs, or we'll give freebies to your staff and all kinds of things.

21:32 Lots of different ways that they incentivize doctors short of outright paying them. Although they may do that for serving on boards or Hey, we'll give you some money if you put your name on this research paper to show that different people are involved on this. All kinds of different ways. I can do that. Lobbying. When you make hundreds of millions and billions of dollars, you can afford to hire lobbyists. You can afford to then have legislature made that supports you doing what you do. And there's so much of this going on and this has been going on for decades and decades. Once again, we have the momentum of the system. We have all this stuff in place that just allows them to continue in this one direction. So when they pass legislation, something that may have been illegal in the past is made legal think about that. So even though sure they haven't been caught for criminal activity or charged for criminal activity all that many times.

22:31 How much of that is because they can actually change the laws in their favor. Once again, not saying all pharmaceutical companies are bad. I mean the companies themselves, probably the big ones, not all the people there are working a bad, I think probably the majority of people there are good, but if you have just a few key people in key decision making places, then that's all it takes to manipulate things towards profit away from health for the people. We can see quotes from pharmaceutical heads themselves saying it's about profit for our shareholders, not for health, for the people. That's why they just Jack prices of the drugs up left and right. Oftentimes because they can, they are a monopoly. No one can compete against them legally. No one can compete against them. I cannot say herbs, cure anything. Treat anything now possible. I can sell them in this country.

23:22 Other countries, it's a bit harder. No legal competition. Public relations campaigns and you're listening to this either nodding along, agreeing with me or you're not, or not anywhere in between there, maybe you're open to the possibility. Understand when you can control or influence media, you can do so through public relations people. This is what they do. They spin things. You can go and look up Merck's PR spin of this Vioxx case and they got other cases against them. There's a whistleblower case saying they falsified data again against some of the other things they produce out there, but they can spend this in their direction and they can do things like AstroTurf organizations. Let's create a grassroots organization make it looks like the people are for this thing that the pharmaceutical companies happen to want and we can make this appearance and then get PR based around that and unless people investigate thoroughly, they don't know that that organization is actually tied to the pharmaceutical company.

24:29 So all kinds of tactics, manipulations that they use. This stuff has been going on for decades. Long-time allows a lot of momentum to build. Once again, drugs have their proper place. We as health sovereigns need to understand that proper place and that proper place is much less than is done in the standard worldview right now. So if you're on any drugs, not saying you get off them cause there can be problems with that. And once again it's illegal. I can't practice medicine without a license. And not saying that this should not be a licensed profession, just understand how things work. Is there a good reason for you to be on them? I remember a couple episodes back, we talked about only 10 to 20% of interventions in our medicine are shown to be actually efficacious by science. Further complicated because we can manipulate science.

25:22 Half of it's wrong. That's what I Oneidas and other people I've said half of our science is wrong at least half. How much of that is around pharmaceutical medicine and I'm picking on them now, but I think they deserve picking on their one little or at least trusted industries out there for very good reason. They do not deserve our trust with their track record of criminal and harmful behavior. So understanding their proper place is something we need to strive for much better. Some drugs absolutely do have a place. Most of them now they don't. I'm sorry. That's just the way it is. And many of the biggest and most prescribed ones are in that latter category. I don't think we need Staten's cholesterol medication because cholesterol, well one, this goes back to the reductionist model. We reduce things down to say, Oh heart attacks, plaque on your arteries is because of cholesterol.

26:20 This reduced down, we're saying cholesterol equals heart attacks essentially. Is it that simple? We have a very complex body and even if it were that simple, let's lower cholesterol. What are the other problems that come from having that lowered? Because there are others, cholesterol does not equal one single thing equals many different things and if cholesterol doesn't need to be lowered so much easier to do it through diet and lifestyle interventions now, of course, many people will not do so. That's cause they think they can just pop a pill and get by without any problems. Part of the world view that is reinforced the advertising, the incentivize doctors, the laws in place that allow this all to happen and the PR that pharmaceutical companies get. So yeah, proper place. Try to get that and it's true of all these other interventions. Here's the thing, the homeopaths do not have a what, hundreds of billion-dollar industries.

27:20 The herbalist do not have hundreds of billion-dollar industries in which to do similar sort of things. The energy medicine people do not have $100 billion industries. All of the other health interventions, are they smaller industries because they work less or because there's this success to the successful loop that the rich get richer because they can put laws in their place, they can manipulate the media towards what they want to say. I invite you to do your own research to look into this deeper. We will be covering it deeper, but I want you to understand these patterns, all these things that lead us to understanding this. Very important to understand that's going to cover it for this episode. I could keep ranting and raving about pharma and I will in the future for sure cause it's a fun topic. Although I do want to keep this mostly positive. I think we have to address the darkness for people to understand that.

28:16 That's my feeling. Do you agree? Do you disagree? Well, let me know. Send an email my way, [email protected] or leave a review. You can let me know in those comments as well. I'll be sure to read all of them. If you've enjoyed this, lost empire, herbs.com they make this podcast possible and just in relation to what we're doing, same sort of thing can happen there. Herbs can be reduced down to their so-called active constituents, but this is nature being statistically significant. As we talked about in earlier thing. These have been used for thousands of years. They're doing something in a more holistic way than we can even possibly understand. We don't know all the different synergies that happen with all the chemicals in there. And that's just thinking of it biochemically. That's thinking of it in a materialistic way. What about the spirit of these plants? We can work with those too in certain ways. We can do much more. Let's change the culture. Let's bring awareness and have more health sovereigns out there. We'll all be healthier and we'll all be much better for it. I'll talk to you next time. Thank you.