Category: Podcast

Medical Monopoly Musings #48
Direct to Consumer Pharmaceutical Advertising

Direct to consumer (DTC) pharmaceutical ads are only allowed in two countries across the world, the USA and New Zealand.

The FDA relaxed rules in 1980 for DTC pharma ads. Then in 1997, the FDA lessened regulations for the industry even more. It is here that we saw these ads become widely prevalent in the US.

In 2015, Big Pharma spent $5.4 billion in DTC ads. The major TV networks, CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox received most of this. At the top of the list was CBS with $511 million.

Make no mistake. DTC ads are only a small portion of their marketing budget. We’ll cover the other marketing aspects in future issues.

Here’s the top drugs advertised in 2015 by ad spend.

A common myth spouted by the drug companies is they must charge so much money to fund research costs. The truth is most of their drug research starts from publicly funded science. Furthermore, they’re one of the most profitable industries. And they spend significantly more on sales & marketing than on R&D.

A spokeswoman for the industry trade-group PhRMA said “Providing scientifically accurate information to patients so that they are better informed about their health care and treatment options is the goal of direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising about prescription medicines. Beyond increasing patient awareness of disease and available treatments, DTC advertising has been found to increase awareness of the benefits and risks of new medicines and encourage appropriate use of medicines.”

The industry says that these ads are for educating the public. To this Diana Zuckerman, President of the National Center for Health Research, said, “If the real goal is to educate, they wouldn’t look like this. The goal is to persuade. These ads educate people as much as the ads for the GAP or ads for makeup educate. It is educating you to tell you that this product exists and that it's great.”

So do the ads work? A 2011 Report by the Congressional Budget Office found that “Drugs with DTC ads had nine times more prescriptions than those that did not.” Yes, these ads are driving customers!

In a study looking at this, Frosch, et al. found that “This advertising has some benefits, but significant risks are evident as well.” As this model shows the advertising leads to a variety of outcomes.

Even the American Medical Association wants to stop DTC advertising, changing their position in 2015.

According to Jerry Avorn, of the New York Times, DTC “advertising promotes only the most expensive products, it drives prescription costs up and also encourages the 'medicalization' of American life — the sense that pills are needed for most everyday problems that people notice, and many that they don’t.”

As you can imagine the scientific complexity of a drug is hard to cover in a one minute commercial. In 2002, AstraZeneca came under fire for their drug, tamoxifen, for overstating the benefits and understating the risks. The FDA didn’t respond to the ad for six months.

“The FDA regulations are drafted and enforced in such a way that encourages drug companies to cross the line — with a lack of resources to identify violations and enforcing these regulations,” said Barbara Brenner, executive director of Breast Cancer Action. “They do not have the resources to monitor drug ads prior to publication, so the burden of monitoring these ads then falls on the public.”

And there is one other big benefit to the drug companies that this advertising buys. We’ll dive into that next time…

References:
https://www.statnews.com/pharmalot/2015/11/17/pharmalot-ama-drugs/
https://www.drugwatch.com/featured/big-pharma-marketing/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2791253/ 

*****

Medical Monopoly Musings #49
Advertising and Harassment Influence News Programs

Last time we covered how direct to consumer (DTC) advertising influences consumers into using more pharmaceutical drugs. This is one in many steps that have led to increased medicalization.

In 2015 we saw $5.4 billion in spend on TV ads. The rates of these ads are ever increasing. The first half of 2018 saw a 6% increasing in TV ad spend in large part aided by Big Pharma which increased its ad budget by 17%. It is possible it is close to $10 billion in 2020.

With TV, ads are marketing to the elderly population which are the people that are still watching (as opposed to younger generations which get their media online…where advertising is also increasing).

But the advertising spend is just one piece in a full court press in order to influence news programs. Award winning investigative journalist, Sharyl Attkisson shares details of what she calls “pushback” from corporate interests while she worked at CBS. In her book, Stonewalled, she details many examples such as Ford Explorer rollovers with Firestone tires. She also talks about pharmaceutical companies…

“Resisting the pushback [on a news report about drug safety], we air the story as planned and [Executive Producer Jim] Murphy asks for more. We continue digging into FDA-approved prescription drugs that are allegedly proving problematic from a safety standpoint.

“When we do, hired guns for pharmaceutical interests flood me and CBS News with emails, phone calls, and requests for meetings. They write letters to CBS attorneys. The spokesman for the Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson calls the CBS News Washington bureau chief to exert pressure to discredit our stories. Pharmaceutical company lawyers set up secretive meetings with CBS officials in New York. Pharmaceutical interests contact CBS executives to complain.

“At one point, when I’m covering safety concerns about the highly profitable cholesterol drugs known as ‘statins,’ whose makers buy advertising on CBS, Murphy receives what he views as a harsh threat from one of the CBS sales bosses. The manager leaves Murphy a loud, angry voice mail saying that the stories could ‘really harm business.’

“My producer and I are also receiving direct pressure from news executives in New York who begin unnaturally inserting themselves into the newsgathering and approval process for the pharmaceutical-related stories as they had never done with me before. Even after our scripts go through the normal editorial process and receive approval from the legal department, the executives enter to dissect and question each fact and sentence…an executive confesses to me in frustration that she’s been given a mission of trying to stop my stories.”

Notice that there are several tactics used by the pharmaceutical interests here. Advertising, and the threat of pulling ads, is just one tool of many. Others include legal action, political allies, harassment, and more. In other sections she also mentions pushback from industry front groups or astroturf organizations.

It was problems like these that caused Sharyl to leave CBS and become independent. The reason I follow her work is that she is actually a great journalist that does not succumb to these pressures. (She’s now labeled a rightwing conspiracy theorist by her detractors of course…despite the above stories occurring during the Bush administration.)

Next time, we’ll dive into the power of an interlocking directorate which may be the biggest reason that mainstream journalism is as broken as it is today. It’s really not often the journalists themselves but the managerial and executive layers where we need to look.

References:
https://www.drugwatch.com/featured/big-pharma-marketing/
https://magnaglobal.com/magna-advertising-forecasts-fall-update-executive-summary/
Attkisson, S. (2015). Stonewalled: My fight for truth against the forces of obstruction, intimidation, and harassment in Obama's Washington (pp. 69-70). New York: Harper.

Welcome. Welcome. Got another solo episode for you today where we're talking about health conscious. What does that phrase mean? Why do some people seem to have it and others don't. Do we have some great interviews for you coming up? So be sure to stay tuned for those. First of all, I want to talk about why should a person be health conscious in the first place?

(00:44):
Well, for me, compare this to not being health conscious health unconscious, right? Which would be being unconscious about your health. And for this, it goes back to why I named this, the health sovereign podcasts. Some people lack any responsibility for their health. They abdicate their health to a doctor. The doctor is a specialist that doctors, the person that's supposed to take care of them. If they have a problem, they go to the doctor, the doctor treats them in some way. It gives them a pill, whatever it happens to be. And that is how a health unconscious person thinks about their health. And this is understandable in that. Uh, we have authority figures and we're meant to trust these authority figures. The world is a very complex place, extremely complex. Like you cannot understand everything going on. So people in focusing on other things, they don't want to think about their health.

(01:42):
So like I said, this is understandable that many people do at least start here. And our culture definitely enforces this view. Someone we're going to talk about is like determinism, but we'll get there in a moment. So there's this trust in authority for the health unconscious, but the benefits of being health conscious, why should a person be that is that you can, when you take this responsibility yourself, you can not only better heal yourself. So I'm not saying we don't need doctors at all. We definitely do need people that are into the healing arts and many different healing arts. This is something we've talked about. Go back to the health sovereign creed, which is on the health sovereign.com website. You can download the PDF there, but also the earlier episodes in this podcast where I detail the principles that go into this, you can not only heal yourself or help heal other people, but thriving health is what I really aim for.

(02:38):
So it's not just absence of disease. That is what the standard allopathic model is all about. If you have disease, we can treat you or manage symptoms at least. But true health is really about thriving and the ability to handle greater stressors. So if you're health conscious, I feel it's, it's not only helping with that part, which is where many people start, but getting to this higher level of thriving and that's what we're going to go for. So I had an interesting coaching call the other day with a client where we weren't focused on the person's health issues themselves, but someone they knew who was going through, uh, early stages of Alzheimer's and what could be done for this. It was really interesting because, you know, I can lay out all the different things that I would personally do if I was having that myself or someone close to me without recommend for them. But we had to look at it from the frame of what is this person willing to do. If they're not very health conscious, they'd just done the standard American diet in this case, Canadian. Uh, but you know, that's one of our chief exports, the American diet out to the rest of the world. So if a person's following that, they're not thinking about their health at all. They're focused on other things, what are they actually willing to do when they start having these symptoms in their life? Yes.

(04:01):
This goes to what I like to call the health journey, right? So we're all human beings. We come on this earth and at some point we have some sort of healing crisis it's going to happen. I mean, we're all going to die in the end, unless you believe the technocrats, the dream of uploading our consciousness, we will have a mortality. Uh, but that's another topic for another time. So we all have some sort of health journey. Most people do not think about their health. Once again, this is culturally enforced until something really bad with health occurs. And this happens there, there's some point of rock bottom. It's either for the person themselves, such as getting diagnosed with cancer or some undiagnosable disease that is happening more and more as the chronic illness and autoimmunity. Although troubling things with that Lymes disease, these sorts of things going on

(04:52):
A person either has that themselves. Or oftentimes it's someone really close to them, uh, such as a family member.

(05:00):
And this is, if it is rock bottom, this can often be the point where a person loses hope, right? Where, uh, they, they buy in more into the system, even if it fails them. Oh. Or they kind of go the other way. So me personally, and this is something I wrote in my book powered by nature. So I was really focusing on the performance aspect and I understand that I'm quite rare in that regard that I was really focusing on my health in order to perform better in the world, really focused in the gym, the strong man stuff I was doing in the beginning, but also having energy and mental clarity for business. Uh, but I'm not a normal person in that way. So I started with my health there, but even so I had that, that rock bottom point. And that was when my mother passed away from breast cancer.

(05:51):
My perception on this is interesting, cause she had breast cancer before she did the standard Western treatment and that was successful. Then she went into remission. She was a breast cancer survivor, according to the statistics, which is how they rate it. Uh, this was back then. I don't know if it's still the same, but she survived for five more years. Uh, so she was a breast cancer survivor, even though the breast cancer came back, spread to all of her body and eventually killed her. So that that's some of the way we can have fun with statistics, right. Uh, call her breast cancer survivor even though killed her. So it was this point that really launched me further down this path. So even though I was focused on performance, that really, that suck quite honestly, it's not fun to do so, uh, that was a pivot point for me, where I began going much deeper into the alternative health path and understanding that, uh, there's a lot of other options out there.

(06:48):
So that was my personal journey. And almost everyone like had just had just Mason on the podcast the other week, his amazing health journey. Right? So he was involved in health a little bit once again, high-performing type of guy, but has this massive turnaround in his life where he's getting to the point where he's just about to commit suicide and just trying left after, right? All these different things, uh, go back and listen to that podcast. It was amazing. One, if you have not, and he was able to turn it around, there's that rock bottom time. And from there kind of grows this health conscious and expands from there. And when I say health conscious or health unconscious, right, this seems like a black and white category. But once again, it's more helpful to look at it as on a spectrum, right? So you can become more and more health conscious.

(07:35):
And so what do I mean by that? Consciousness is first and foremost art awareness. So do you have the awareness? Do people around you have the awareness to recognize that health is something they can do? Something. The thing about a, whatever, the beliefs surrounding health and what can be done and beliefs while we often think of these as these one off things, but really it's a system of beliefs that go together and this could build up into something. We might call a paradigm. So right now in the pandemic world, we have conflicting paradigms. And once again, there are shades of gray and all of these, but let's say there's the paradigm of, uh, the Western medicine. You gotta wash your hands, you gotta mask up. Uh, you got to avoid people. That's the only thing we can do about this disease. Then the other paradigm alternative health paradigm, uh, which is looking at well, one, this disease is not nearly as bad as many people say, not to say, it's not a threat at all.

(08:37):
But there's so much that we can do. And we don't even see simple things like, uh, vitamin C, vitamin D. These things are not getting airtime in our media. Simple things such as that take care of your immune system. That is because the Western medical paradigm, how it is constructed actually does not want people to take care of themselves. I'm not saying individual doctors would actually say this to patients, but this is how this system is built up because of how it encourages profits to be made. So we have this paradigm and it is hard to shift from one paradigm to another. It does happen with those rock bottom moments. Uh, and oftentimes it's not like a black and white, like a pull up Saul on the road to Damascus type moment. It is additive. It grows over time. And like I said, that health consciousness can expand.

(09:29):
So when I started, I was really only thinking about physical health and nutrition movement, that sort of thing. And then I got more into the psychological aspects of mental and emotional and in the last few years, much more so on the spiritual side, looking at spiritual health and how that can play a role in this. So if your consciousness, if your beliefs, your awareness is not aware of anything spiritual at all, it doesn't believe that to exist. Then you can't perceive this level and how it may affect your health at all. You don't believe it's there. So therefore there's nothing for you to look at. So if your health consciousness doesn't go there, then you can't get the benefits from working at such a level. Another thing I would say with consciousness is having the awareness is important, but then what is your locus of control? What is within your control that you can do? So there's much that is outside of our control, right? There is toxicity all across the world, environmental pollutants, uh, heavy metal contamination, pesticides, all kinds of different stuff. Plastics with BPA BPS, all that stuff.

(10:40):
Once your consciousness sees something is aware of something, you can then control that you can make decisions, make actions based on that. So when I learned that, uh, the thermal receipts that come just standard receipts at the grocery store, wherever that this stuff is lined with BPA, and it can easily absorb through your skin awareness of that, that my health consciousness expanded with this awareness and I could easily then make choices. Oh, I'm going to handle that paper as little as possible or not at all, uh, is the best thing I could possibly do. So my locus of control expands in that way. And this goes back to my primary, primary principle about health, do more good, do less bad, understand that it is a health journey. It is a long term play. And there are times when you need to take massive action, but you got to start with where you're at, uh, understand that health conscious is an expanding thing, right?

(11:41):
So you're going to, with that expansion, you're going to be able to do more and more, but you really got to build that into your life with small steps here in deer. And don't get crazy about it. You can overstress yourself thinking about all this stuff too, which itself can be a bad thing. So you want to do more good, do less bad. Don't be so Nazi about it. Don't go so hardcore once again, time and a place for that. Absolutely. But just move in the right direction. I think that we have to be gentle with ourselves in doing this because it is not something that most of us grew up with any way. Most of us grew up health unconscious, unless you have parents that really focused on this stuff. Uh, and that's hard to do because of the amount of information in the world and, uh, how things are purposefully done in ways that, uh, do not help support health sovereignty.

(12:34):
It's a very tough thing to do. So this phrase came to me, the deterministic hangover. Uh, what do I mean by that determinism is that, you know, you don't have choice. You don't really can't do much. And really the prime example of this is genetic determinism. So this theory came up, uh, coming out of genetics. And obviously there's some important stuff there, but that everything was controlled by genes. And this played into this medical model. Oh, it's the genes. Uh, it's not, you, you can't do anything about this. Uh, your genes determine what is going to happen. Your genes determine your health. Once again, genes absolutely do play a role. Your DNA is important and you should do things to protect your DNA. But we now know with epigenetics and we've known this since I believe the seventies that, uh, genes can be turned on and off based on environmental factors, your psychology, uh, nutrition, all these different things.

(13:35):
So with genetic determinism, it was this idea that, yeah, it's all about the genes. Nothing else has happened. And they're still looking at this. They're still going for, Oh, we're going to figure out how to rewrite all your genes. So no one has any health problems. This is continually promise. It's that promissory materialism, just down the road, 10 years from now, we got this covered 10 years from now. We got this covered, even though the human genome project had basically didn't help out that much. It was promised to deliver us from disease. It definitely did not achieve that. And so from this idea in surrounding ideas, doctors were telling people, Oh, this has nothing to do about diet. This has nothing to do with your lifestyle. You are not in control of this. I am in control. I'm the authority figure. So do what I say is basically that yet once again, wasn't always elucidated quite like this.

(14:27):
So what I mean by deterministic hangover is no one would really few people would really say, yes, these are my beliefs right now that genes are everything. Or that doctor says, yeah, diet has nothing to do with cancer or whatever. A few people would say these things. However, having been in that thing where that was the dominant paradigm, that was the scientific paradigm. For quite some time, there are still little bits of this, that, uh, for lack of a better word, in fact, people that are still a part of their thinking without them having the clarity about it. So it's, it's, it's built into the paradigm, the model of the world, for many people, there's still bits of it, even though most people would not say it as such. And that's why I'm calling it a hangover had those beliefs before it they're still affecting us today.

(15:16):
But this fit into people. If you are of a victim mindset, and now that's kind of a strong word. Some people certainly are, Oh, what was me? I have all these health problems. Nothing can be done. That is the case in some cases, but even without being that, that victim mentality there, it still is the excuse here. That health is not something that I'm an expert in. So I need to trust the experts. Uh, and as I said, the world is very complex, very busy. There's also this excuse or this permission that you can focus elsewhere because we'll take care of your health when you need it. Uh, if focus elsewhere in your life. But the problem is this trust in authority has really been abused. I wish it weren't this way, but if you've been listening to this podcast, you know, that there's some problems with our authority, uh, institutions and figures going on right now.

(16:14):
And this gets back to this idea of what gets people to become health conscious. Where is that rock? Bottom moment. It is often this trust in authority that then is neglected. It is abused. It fails. So for me, once again, my mother, she did the treatment at first, I thought just, you know, trust the experts. They will cure you, but then it came back. It didn't work that time around and, you know, crushing defeat, losing mother, not a fun thing. And they sent me on this other path because the authority figures did not have all the answers. And I'm not saying anyone else, there's authority figures in alternative health and whatnot, but that is why it's so important to cultivate this self responsibility, this sovereignty for your health. And I'm not saying everyone needs to become an expert. You should certainly find those advisors in your life that are, uh, better than you.

(17:11):
I mean, I know people I would call up for health issues. Should I have them that are outside the scope of what I know there is still something you have to cultivate this yourself. It can't be done for you, especially in the systems we have today. If all of our institutions were ideal, if all the experts could be trusted, wouldn't that be nice, but we do not find ourselves in that way. Thus, it is even more important for health consciousness to be something taken up by each person and you work to expand it and work to support those around you.

(17:51):
In conclusion, health consciousness is about bringing awareness to your health or lack of it, awareness of what can be done, what can not be done? What is outside your locus of control? And the consciousness is largely about awareness. But then if we extend this to sovereignty, the ability to decide and take action on such awareness and be able to expand this in greater ways. Once again, don't think of health consciousness as a black or white thing, but a spectrum and something that can be expanded over time for greater results. And your action taking can be expanded over time for greater results. And outside of yourself, you know, recognizing that we are part of ecology. So expanding in social circles, your family, your friends, people that you know, uh, but also thinking in terms of other species and beans, right? So we have our microbiome or mycobiome, the virome, which no one's talking about these days, but might be really important.

(18:49):
The viruses that are part of us and that are all around in the ecology, but also the greater ecology out there. So understanding that this awareness, this consciousness, this sovereign T can expand further over time as you gain more and more. Once again, not everyone needs to be a health expert, but I would say everyone needs to be at least health proficient. That is a key point. It's your health, it's your body. Other people cannot completely take care of it for you. If you want to neglect it. If you choose to make that recognize you are making a choice at the very least, and then don't blame others for your health problems when you have them. And we all have different things that come up different health journeys, not saying you're to blame for everything. Uh, if this goes indeed to that spiritual level, karmic level, everything involved in there, something I'm just exploring.

(19:44):
I do not have all the answers to that, but recognize if we think of it as a health journey. And oftentimes those worst moments that rock bottom actually becomes the greatest thing for us. My mom, dying of breast cancer. I now see that as a gift she gave me because it set me on this path to where I know I can help others close to me. Those that want to be helped to avoid such pain and devastation. Once again, not perfect. I'm still working on my beliefs and my paradigms and everything, and being open to a lot more possibilities, but it is possible. So this is health consciousness. And let me just say listening to podcasts, this one or other ones like this, certainly can help expand that further. So I hope you've enjoyed this episode. If you like it got questions, comments, head on over to health, sovereign.com. You can leave comments there. That's a great place to talk about this stuff. Thank you for listening. And we'll be back next week.

Medical Monopoly Musings #46
Scientific Racism

With race being in the news, I figured it would be worth looking into conventional medicine’s racist past up to current times. Yep, scientific racism is deeply wrapped in eugenic roots and a part of how modern medicine came to be.

Understand that both science and medicine were some of the strongest tools used to reinforce the belief that white men were superior.

There’s no better well-known example of this than that of Tuskegee. Syphilis was a scourge at the time. Medical treatment for this involved mercury and arsenic which, as you might imagine, had a low cure rate and toxic side effects including death.

The official name of this scientific study was “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” which began in 1932. 600 black men were enrolled in Macon country, Alabama. 399 with syphilis and 201 without. The researchers told the men they were being treated for “bad blood” but no treatment was given beyond placebo, instead just observation of the disease running its course which included blindness, insanity and death.

The study was done without informed consent, meaning the participants were lied to about what was happening. They called it a “study in nature” rather than an experiment because it was believed that black people would not seek out treatment for syphilis.

It was originally designed to last just 6 months. But they decided to continue it for what amounted to 40 years.

In 1945, penicillin became the accepted treatment for syphilis. Not only were the patients in the study not treated, but efforts were made to stop them from getting treatment elsewhere such as from local doctors. The Alabama Health Department was given a list of people in the study to not treat.

Even when the army drafted these men and uncovered syphilis during exams, they were removed from the army, rather than be treated!

In a report on the study, Senior Public Health Service administrator Oliver Wenger wrote, "We know now, where we could only surmise before, that we have contributed to their ailments and shortened their lives. I think the least we can say is that we have a high moral obligation to those that have died to make this the best study possible." Not let’s stop this study, just let’s make good science. To use the words “high moral” in there is cruelly ironic.

If wasn’t just the infected men that suffered. Due to lack of treatment, syphilis spread including to the men’s wives and children (congenital syphilis).

In the 60’s concerns were raised. But in 1969 the Centers for Disease Control and American Medical Association, two of our great noble institutions, both officially supported continuation of the study.

A whistleblower, Peter Buxtun, leaked information to the New York Times, which published a front page article in 1972 condemning the study. An advisory panel was formed to investigate. Their conclusion was the study was “ethically unjustified” and ordered it to stop. Two years later a $10 million out-of-court settlement was reached.

As President in 1997, Bill Clinton offered an official apology. “Medical people are supposed to help when we need care, but even once a cure was discovered, they were denied help, and they were lied to by their government. Our government is supposed to protect the rights of its citizens; their rights were trampled upon…The United States government did something that was wrong, deeply, profoundly, morally wrong... To our African American citizens, I am sorry that your federal government orchestrated a study so clearly racist.”

A one-time mistake, right? Well there’s the U.S. sponsored study from 1946 to 1948, involving at least one of the same scientists from Tuskegee, where Guatemalans were INTENTIONALLY INFECTED with syphilis and other STD’s without consent.

Science being objective and amoral…can easily be used to inject whatever morality those practicing it have, including the inferiority of certain peoples.

No, it wasn’t just Nazi scientists that conducted cruel medical experiments. It’s been far more common than you might think.

References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism
https://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/timeline.htm
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history/40-years-human-experimentation-america-tuskegee-study
https://www.research.usf.edu/dric/hrpp/foundations-course/docs/finalreport-tuskegeestudyadvisorypanel.pdf
https://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/clintonp.htm
https://www.history.com/news/the-infamous-40-year-tuskegee-study
 
*****

Medical Monopoly Musings #47
Wikipedia’s Medical Lockdown

Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit…except that’s not quite the truth. Editors that have been around since the beginning have control over edits almost completely.

Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson discusses this in a 2016 news report. “The promise of accurate, neutral articles and privacy for contributors is often just a mirage, according to two insiders.” Of note here is the problem of special interests controlling information.

You don’t have to look much further than co-founder Larry Sanger, who said “People that I would say are trolls sort of took over. The inmates started running the asylum.” In May of this year he wrote an article titled “Wikipedia is Badly Biased” stating that Wikipedia’s neutral point of view “is dead.”

Few places is this more true than Wikipedia’s medical articles. Yet, these get even more traffic than WebMD. “Nearly 75% of US physicians going online for professional purposes are visiting Wikipedia for medical information according to Manhattan Research,” says Eileen O’Brien, Director, Search & Innovation at Siren Interactive. “And 36% of US consumers searched for health info on Wikipedia according to Rodale’s DTC Study.”

Why so popular? A big reason is Google holds Wikipedia in high esteem, a top ten result for almost any search will yield a Wikipedia article. Often times, they embed excerpts into the search page itself. Just recently, Facebook has been testing adding Wikipedia to its search results.

Despite its popularity a study found that 9 out of 10 medical entries contained inaccuracies and antiquated data. Only one out of ten was correct and up-to-date with medical research!

How does Wikipedia look at health? They are strongly in the conventional medicine is the only medicine camp.

Look at how they display it. Alternative and pseudo are falsely equated. Right next to alternative medicine we have quackery, pseudoscience and antiscience. In fact, they define alternative medicine as describing “any practice that aims to achieve the healing effects of medicine, but which lacks biological plausibility and is untested, untestable or proven ineffective.” Does that sound fair and neutral?

Something as simple as breathwork is somehow fringe medicine and science (and right next to camel urine).

“Non-pharmaceutical treatments for diseases from arthritis to asthma, treatments and practitioners alike condemned out of hand as “lunatic charlatans” by Wikipedia’s co-founder and spiritual father Jimmy Wales along with his Skeptic palace guard,” says Progressive Radio Network.

So let’s see how that is done…

Greg Kohls, a man blocked from editing on Wikipedia, says, “Wikipedia is often edited by people who have an agenda…You'll have different people with a particular scientific point of view and they'll edit and modify Wikipedia so that its articles kind of reflect that point of view.”

To show an example, after making an edit to Morgellons disease, it was removed 38 minutes later by an administrator. Kohs says, “It seems to me that this is someone who is either involved with the medical profession or the pharmaceutical profession. They probably have an agenda to discredit or to suppress alternative medicines, things of that nature.”

Scandals have erupted before over editors being paid by businesses for positive edits. Pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca’s employees got caught for positively editing its drug entries, including removing the side effect for those under 18 of increased suicidality for the drug Seroquel.

Medtronic had an employee editing pages for surgeries, such as kyphoplasties, that used their medical devices to show the surgery in a more positive light.

These incidents may be fairly easy to catch. But is there a roundabout way of doing it? From past issues (#28 and 29) we know that the NIH is riddled with conflicts of interest from Big Pharma thanks to Harold Varmus ever since the 90’s. And the NIH encourages Wikipedia editing, having guidelines that “will help you to become part of a unique opportunity in keeping with the NIH’s history of making credible, vetted, authoritative information available to the public. The time spent can be minimal, but the impact could be great.”

That’s all well and good if accurate. That’s quite horrible if used for narrative control. The conflict of interests won’t be disclosed because these are “publicly paid” scientists. Just a few key people doing this well will have large impacts on the public.

References:
http://fullmeasure.news/news/cover-story/the-dark-side-of-wikipedia
https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/
https://www.jmir.org/2015/3/e62/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_medicine
https://www.ibtimes.com/wikipedia-dangerous-your-health-study-finds-9-out-10-health-entries-contain-many-errors-1591527
https://prn.fm/wikipedia-big-pharmas-propaganda-machine/
https://www.cnet.com/news/corruption-in-wikiland-paid-pr-scandal-erupts-at-wikipedia/
http://www.healthcarevox.com/2007/08/astrazeneca_employee_edits_wik.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/08/wikipedia-editors-for-pay/393926/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8415091/Facebook-tests-features-add-Wikipedia-results-search-queries.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20150219012129/http://www.nih.gov/icd/od/ocpl/resources/wikipedia/
https://www.jmir.org/2011/1/e14/

Speaker 2 (00:00:17):
Logan, Christopher. Hello, and welcome. Doing something slightly different for this interview. My friend, Josh Mason of the detox dudes is here with me today. But first Josh has an amazing story, a health transformation, a night and day difference, health transformation, very powerful story. And he's created a amazing video that shares this story in this podcast here, I'm going to pull the audio from this video, but I do recommend you go actually watch the video itself. You can go to health sovereign.com/forty that's four as the Euro, in order to find the video embedded there, or you can also find it at Josh's site, the detox dudes.com. We're going to start with this story. You're going to hear what Josh went through, how he got to where he is today, and then we'll be diving into the interview portion. As you might get from the name, the detox dudes, we're talking about detox, and that's what this story is largely about. We touch on some other subjects, but the more I've gotten into health, where I'm at right now is a strong, strong recognition. That detox is so important and it's under understood. It's under utilized in our society today, and there's so many great things we can do to really support this. The truth is you can not have health sovereignty. If you don't understand detox, if your body is not detoxing well, it's that important. So let's dive in here's Joshua's story.

Speaker 1 (00:01:56):
Imagine that you're a child and it's a cold, wet, rainy day in an empty theme park, completely empty. And your parents and your family abandoned you. And there's no way out of the theme park. You're locked in that theme park. That's literally what I felt like every single day. I was a pretty normal kid, normal normal dude. You know, I was living in the lower East side of Manhattan. I was 23 years old when it all started. And I was pretty successful in the conventional reality and what people consider a success. I was a jujitsu world champion. I had a cool girlfriend. I was living in a expensive apartment in New York city and working cool corporate jobs. And basically I got completely, completely devastatingly ill. You're just living your normally. And then one day what? I'll never forget. I was in my dad's office.

Speaker 1 (00:03:04):
He owns a window in glass company and I was like, I was putting butyl in an insulated unit. Beautiful is like this liquid rubber, basically that you put in between a unit and I was shooting the butyl and all of a sudden it was like, I was like disassociated from my body and like all, all that I once knew or all that I thought I knew disappeared in those moments, it was like, it was like a drug. Like I was on drugs. You know, the only way I could describe it as like a bad weed trip that I had once had times 10 without take without smoking weed. So the fact that I didn't ingest any chemicals was like, wow, I'm going fucking thick. I'm going crazy. And that led into, and, and that led into that led into these hand. What happened next was just, I was just getting tormenting thoughts.

Speaker 1 (00:03:52):
Like I remember the first time I've ever thought of that thought in my life was like, I was like, go kill yourself. And that thought arose in my head. Like, you know, a couple of minutes after feeling weird. And I was just after I thought that I was just like, Oh my God, I just had a suicidal thought and I free it, just spiraled out of control into a panic attack. And from that moment on for three and a half years, I never regained my center. I never regained my center from that moment on when I was shooting that beautiful for three and a half years, I completely lost my sense of self.

Speaker 1 (00:04:30):
There's no way of understanding what that's like, but imagine I couldn't leave my bedroom, leaving my bedroom and felt like I was going to climb Mount Everest. It was like, I was so scared of talking to another human being. I was, I thought that if I revealed my sickness to anyone truthfully, that I would be institutionalized, it was like, I not only did I, was I dealing with my sickness, but I had to deal with the fact that I knew what everyone else was thinking about me, which led me to hide a lot. Because if people truly knew what I was going through, I felt that I would be put in an institution. And, and, and I was always afraid that I would be put in outside of my will. You know, my first step was a psychiatrist. You know, I went to the psychiatrist, told him a little small window of what I was experiencing.

Speaker 1 (00:05:25):
Cause again, I felt if I told him everything, he would just like, be like, all right, dude, you know, we're sorry, we gotta, we gotta lock you up. You know, I told him a small window and they put me on a bunch of different medications, Zoloft, Latuda, Trazadone three or four others too. And I started taking these pills and I felt something turn off in my brain. I literally felt like, like I felt this numbness creep in like this, just this weird creepy numbness felt like I was a body of floating around. There were no emotions, no love, no care, no tenderness, no compassion, no empathy. Just, I was literally just a body floating around like existing. So there was no desire. Nothing, no sex drive, no nothing, no desire for anything greasy foods and television. That's what I was drawn to. Was there anything in you enjoying that as well?

Speaker 1 (00:06:24):
There was a little bit of comfort in being a victim to the illness. There was a little bit of, Oh, I have bipolar and, and severe depressive disorder. I could just take these pills and, and, and nobody could blame me for the rest of my life and I can just eat this food and I can get fat and I can do whatever the fuck I want and just be lazy as hell. And there was a little bit of like there was a little bit of a release there, like, like, Oh, life could just be this, you know, like there was a little bit, I'm not going to lie. You know, there was a little bit there. What, what part of you was like, no, fuck that Me, every other part of me, the real me was was, was like, fuck, no, it wouldn't have been possible for me to do that. I was, I was a victorious kind of guy, you know, like I won a lot of tournament. I was a world-class Warcraft player before I was a world class jujitsu practitioner and competition and winning was this like, it was like in my blood, you know? So you felt it's felt that I was losing. I felt I was losing. So what did you

Speaker 3 (00:07:48):
[Inaudible]

Speaker 1 (00:07:48):
Try ketamine injections, obviously all the psychiatric drugs mushrooms, a lot of mushroom ceremonies. Iowasca colonics, enemas, coffee, enemas, parasite protocols, meditations with positive meditation, guided meditations, yoga, breath, work, fasting, juice, fasting, water, fasting, float tanks. Did the work nothing did. What do you mean? Nothing worked. It didn't help at all. It was like, all of those things I was doing was allowing me to not kill myself. There was no joy. There was no, there was no peace. There was panic, anxiety, depression, and it was just swimming, just swimming enough so that I didn't kill myself through all of those modalities. Some of them would give me 10 minutes of relief. You know, like a float tank. I would generally feel like, okay, for about 10 minutes, you know, before I would spiral out of control again, it's super frustrating after trying all of that, there's this way where like I hated, I hated God.

Speaker 1 (00:09:00):
I straight up hated. I hated God. I couldn't, I didn't believe it was possible to that there was a God or that there was spirituality or that there was, I felt in those days, honestly, that it was my role on this planet to suffer eternally, like as if like Gollum from Lord of the rings, how he's possessed by the ring. I felt that I had a curse on me that I couldn't clear that I was meant to suffer, that I was meant to be tortured. And somehow that was my role. That was who I was. That's Josh Mason. And he just he's here to suffer. And somehow it's bettering the planet with him suffering like this. There were so many times during my journey when I would literally be on the floor, begging, begging for peace, like not the kind of like, victimy like, please help me, God, please.

Speaker 1 (00:10:07):
It was like a full body. Like you mother fucker. I fucking gave you every last drop of fucking energy. Do you see what I'm doing? I spent my whole fucking bank account. I fucking do everything with integrity. I do everything full force. Every meditation, every yoga I bring my whole fucking essence to it. I'm not fucking around. I'm not going through the motions with these practices. I'm fucking doing everything, concentrating on my breath every minute, every second, concentrating on my breath. And I would look up and at the sky and just say, fuck you like, fuck you seriously. [inaudible]

Speaker 1 (00:10:58):
At the end of my story. When I was really close to killing myself, I would swim out in Miami, in Miami. I would swim out to sea when there was no lifeguards as far out as I possibly could until I started really getting exhausted. And my goal was that I would hope a shark would eat me. See, I thought I broke. I thought I broke a lot of times. Like I thought I broke when I would swim out in the ocean. I thought I broke when I would stand up towards the moon. I would always look at the moon. You know, that was like something I can connect to in the sky and just say, what the fuck? You know, I thought I was broken during those events. There was one time when it was actually true. One time when I broke so hard that I couldn't, I didn't even scream. I didn't even, I didn't even, I just said, I literally just said, you won. It's over, you won. I'm going to my I'm going to Africa for Ebola. This is my last chance after this goodbye, I gave it my, I gave it my everything. I didn't even shed a tear because I was done. I was done. There was no more space for tears. I was done.

Speaker 1 (00:12:38):
I somehow I somehow reengaged my my will. I don't know how I did it. I, I I broke down to my family and I told them that they needed to believe in me and I needed help. I needed unconditional help. I had no money left. I had no will left. I was broken. It was like, okay. I accepted that. It was my last chance on earth. And in accepting that it was my last chance on earth. Money became a joke. Money became pixels on a screen. And because of that, I looked at my body and said, what is possibly wrong with my body? Because if, if I can change it for less than $25,000, I'll change it. I looked at every body part, every surgery I ever had, I had stitches here. I had surgery on my hernia and I would look at everything and say, what, what is possibly wrong right now? What, what is infected? What is wrong? And then I looked at my teeth and I would just dream about it. Think about it all day, all day, touch them, look at them in the mirror. Just like, fuck, man, maybe I should get rid of these things before I go to Africa. You know, I really think I should get rid of these things.

Speaker 1 (00:14:18):
Nah, it's expensive. It's a waste of money. Nah, I don't know. I really think I should get rid of these things. Booked an appointment right then and there, you know, without reading anything on the internet, because I had already heard of it before. Somehow somewhere I read mercury is not good. We read them and we ignore them. Totally. It's not affecting me. How much did you see a world champion? Fuck that that's not affecting me. You know, then I got them, take them out, taking them out. It wasn't until I got them taken out. And I remember then I Googled mercury poisoning stories. It was like the first thing that came up, it was the first time I'd ever read any other account to this level of torture and suffering word for word pulled out of my mouth

Speaker 4 (00:15:32):
Recently completed experiments. Now reveal how mercury causes brain neuron degeneration with direct visual evidence from brain neuron tissue cultures. How mercury ions actually alter the cell membrane structure of developing neurons. The neurite membrane underwent rapid degeneration leaving behind the denuded neurofibromas seen here. It interferes with the way the brain works. It interferes with the way motor works. So you end up with some neurological or motor or thought process that gets fried because that's what mercury does. It destroys nerves. What you're seeing is mercury vapor coming off at 25 year old silver amalgam filling in an extracted to the background is a phosphorescent screen. The mercury vapor absorbs the fluorescent light and you can see it as a shadow on the screen. What we've discovered is that every time you do anything to the filling with you, chew on it or brush it or chew gum, or have a hot toddy or whatever, something that he'd set filling up through friction or temperature makes it spew mercury vapor, add levels that, you know, if it was a city, they would evacuated. These are not small amounts of mercury. If you can see it, it's more than 1000 times higher than the environmental protection agency will allow for the air that we breathe. Okay.

Speaker 1 (00:16:57):
I was both sad that I had to give life another chance because I had already checked out and happy that I would maybe maybe found my answer to my life. I read tons of information on the internet and I realized it wasn't just my mercury fillings. It was everywhere, seafood backs and nations and even fluorescent light bulbs. And it wasn't just mercury. I learned that there are heavy metals and chemicals everywhere. Even in the tap water. At this point, I had read enough. I needed to learn how to clean this stuff out of my body. And I wanted to do it fast. I began taking seven, eight, maybe 10 things from my gut, aloe Vera butyric acid, glutamine, tons of bone broth and many other things I felt like for the first time I was feeding myself and not feeding this disease, feeding this curse.

Speaker 1 (00:17:48):
Fuck you mercury. You have no chance. Then I started taking gut binders, things like charcoal, clay zeolite, that became part of my morning concoction. And these acts like a giant vacuum grabbing onto toxicity in the body. They truly are lifesavers. Eventually a couple of months in the life began flowing through me again. I was having a resurrection and I was watching it live in action. I was watching TV and in my normal cycle, this torturous cycle and anxiety and feeling like I was like all in my head and just like, just like static energy all around me.

Speaker 1 (00:18:30):
And all of a sudden I would look, I looked at my hands. I looked at my arms, I felt my heart beating. It was like, I had seen my hands for the first time in four years. Cause when you're in, when you're in a panic, you can't actually see what's right there. There's no presence. There's nothing. It's just, you're invisible. You're, you're lost in the thought. Everything else is invisible. To see my hand again, to feel my heart, my hands, I was just, I was like, Oh my God. I remember literally I remember sitting up like putting the TV on mute and just being like, what happened to me? He's best where you like, where did I fucking go? I would say after like nine months is when I felt like it was like, like I was here again, living on this earth already for a year. I've been better than I've ever been. I believe that my suffering has led to who I am now, which I would never want to give up for a million years. I would, I would do it. I don't know if I would do it all over again, but I'm happy that it happened already. It's done.

Speaker 2 (00:20:26):
Welcome Josh. Good to have you here. Thank you, Logan. Pleasure to be here. So that is quite a story in it. To me, it's a extremely inspiring story. The worst off, I mean, look at our movies, right? You have that dark night of the soul and in, in a movie, you know, it's shortened down to hours, but for you, it was years. Right. And this amazing journey. And I really liked how you said at the end. Like

Speaker 5 (00:20:54):
I wouldn't, I love

Speaker 2 (00:20:57):
The transformation that's occurred, but I wouldn't want to go through it again.

Speaker 5 (00:21:03):
So

Speaker 2 (00:21:03):
A couple of questions on that. Why do you think that happened then? You mentioned like you were laying down rubber or something. Why was that the trigger that suddenly sent you into that?

Speaker 5 (00:21:17):
So, yeah, I was using this beautiful machine at my dad's office in New York where I was basically like gluing together with this rubber substance, two pieces of glass. And I don't know if that had anything to do with it. I think that why did it happen then? That's like one of the best questions I've ever been asked. I have, I have no clue.

Speaker 2 (00:21:43):
There's going to be some toxic chemicals. Is that just like the straw that broke the camels?

Speaker 5 (00:21:47):
Exactly. Yeah. If that was contributing factor, it was, it was the straw that broke the camel's back after years of seafood and other toxins and other things. And also on a spiritual level. Like I believe that our breakdowns happen at, at a particular time where we have all of the resources we need to handle it. We have every, you know, the universe, God gives us these, these breakdowns, the beginning of our metamorphosis at a time where it knows that, that we can handle it. Like I remember five years, six years prior to that moment, I was at university of Maryland and I started experiencing depression. When I first, when I was a freshman at university of Maryland, it was like this huge, scary world. And I remember that the same portals that opened in full when I was 23, they began to open when I was 18. Like the little parts of those dark portals opened up and, you know, I was able to close them, you know? And had they opened up in that w in full at 18, I never would have had the resources or the, the, the inner knowing or anything to, to be able to get through it. Right. So I feel like it happened spiritually at a time and a place in the age where you can handle it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was an esoteric answer though. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:23:16):
But it's good. Like just the other week I hurt my back working out, which is an extremely rare thing for me to hurt myself. Just kind of a freak thing, but it was, and it was my low rack and everyone's had low back pain at some point. Right. It's pretty crippling and this wasn't super bad or anything like that, but it was interesting cause it was coming up at this point where like I needed to ease back off work and give myself a break and do a transition thing. So it's like immediately because I've practiced this stuff, right. Gone, went into the reframe, you know, what's this about emotionally, mentally, even

Speaker 5 (00:23:46):
Not just thinking like, Oh crap, you know, I hurt my back and that sort of stance. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:23:54):
So another question of that, it's really interesting. The point you got to where you're like, what's wrong with my body, you were looking around and you end up staring at your teeth and seeing the mercury fillings.

Speaker 5 (00:24:07):
Yeah. could you

Speaker 2 (00:24:09):
Sound on that really? Cause you had done so much, so many things through how I guess looking back, how did that never occur to you before or

Speaker 5 (00:24:17):
Yeah. W why did it occur to you then? You know, it did occur to me in the past. Like I had actually read articles of people being poisoned by mercury of fillings, being bad for you. And the thing is in the, in that moment, the, for this couple year, period of time, when I was drinking Iowasca and working with plant medicines and you know, herbs and deeds and cleaning my colon, doing enemas fasting, I had developed this attitude of like, I like spirit conquers. All right. Like if I, if I developed this attitude of essentially, like, if I say this mercury is not toxic, it's not toxic. Like there's no way that this thing in my teeth could be poisoning me to that degree. Like, this is surely a shamonic initiation. This is surely a bigger than any chemical or substance that's. Cause the level of torture was so intense.

Speaker 5 (00:25:13):
Right. So I had, I had given it some energy and I was like, nah, no way, no way. It's not possible. And furthermore, I had read that removing them is like three, four, five, sometimes six, $7,000. And I was like, well, I don't have that money. Why even go down this path? Why even I there's no way I could possibly get rid of them, even if they were crippling. And that's the interesting thing, right? Because when push came to shove, I found that money, right. Like I just, I put it on a credit card. Right. Once I realized that it was a matter of life or death at the end, and that's the thing about money, right? Like everyone says, I can't afford it. No, actually it's just not a priority. Right. As soon as something becomes a priority where your life is in jeopardy, like nothing matters.

Speaker 5 (00:25:59):
Right. So, so the short answer to that question is, is I had given it a little bit of energy. I had heard about it and read about it. It wasn't until I was at my wit's end, where I was like, this is, this is all that's left that I haven't explored yet. There has to be something here to this mercury substance. And I had heard another woman's story about it. And when I read her story and saw the level of suffering that mercury can can cause I was like, Oh my God, this is, this is what I'm going through. This is what it is. You know, this is one of the answers. Right. Cause it wasn't like I found mercury and then everything changed. There's a lot of other substances to have detox out of my body. And there's a lot of spiritual work and you know, and deep, emotional work that has gone into my becoming whole again. Right. Removing mercury is of like a pivot point. Right? Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:26:58):
So that that's like you were to that point, you hit rock bottom. I'm going to kill myself. If this doesn't work, literally like can't be much of a rock bottom going to give this a shot. It worked. And that's where things started to turn around for you. But yeah, I think it's important people. There's still this idea of like one, cause for one disease or there there's always one thing, but it's really just layers and layers and different stuff. And you touched on it there that, that idea, spirit conquers all and think like maybe possibly, if you can be, you know, super duper, hyper spiritual, maybe that that is possible. But you know, we live in a physical reality. So I like to look at health on those, those different aspects. I used to call them levels, but that does connote a, like a hierarchy when really it's just, you know, different perspectives. So like the physical, the mental, the emotional, the energetic, the spiritual. And really, if we're looking at things for here, like that pivot point, there was the mercury that was some physically had to take care of, but there really was all this other stuff too. And it was all layered together.

Speaker 5 (00:28:03):
Oh exactly. Totally. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:28:06):
I'm curious for the people that come to you and work with you, how many of them, how many times have you heard I've tried everything.

Speaker 5 (00:28:14):
I have heard that. So in Logan probably, and those are all of those are always my best clients. Those are my favorite clients to take on the clients who write me a four page email who say, this is all that I've done. You know, transcranial magnetic stimulation, every diet, this diet, this supplement that supplement hyperbaric oxygen STEM cells, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I'm like great. You know? So, so I would say about, you know, 33% of people that maybe 40% of people that contact me are just serious, serious health warriors. Like people who really have gone down the rabbit hole who have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and still haven't been able to, to move the needle for themselves, you know? Wow. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:29:02):
Yeah. That's cause I, I to hear that a lot and it's interesting, like what, no one has tried everything right there, there are so many modalities out there, a lot of stuff. And I can understand getting to that frustration point where nothing seems to work. But I think that is part of the journey, right? Is that no matter what, you keep trying things until you get there.

Speaker 5 (00:29:24):
It's so true. Like you keep on knocking on the doors. You just, you have to have this relentless tenacity inside. If you think, like I remember at several points of my journey where I was like, I've done it all. There's nothing else out there. I've, I've drank the Iowasca. I was about to go do Boga. I did a lot of San Pedro and mushrooms and fasting and water, fasting, juice, fasting, colonics, enemas, like there's no other way to clean this body. There's nothing else to explore. I figured out everything that could possibly be wrong with the human body and the fact that I believed that to be true when I was two or three years into this journey and seeing how far I've come in the past four years, three years since then, I've done hundreds of thousands of new dollars that I've spent on my health to continue and explored.

Speaker 5 (00:30:17):
And now I'm doing around a 40 hyperbaric oxygen treatments in Marine. And it's like, like just, and I've done STEM cells. I've done exosomes. I, I have all of these contractions and electron machine and a juve red light. And it's like, Oh, I really thought that I was at the end. Like I figured it all out. Like I'm broken and unrepairable. Like that's, that's a joke. And if anyone's in that frame, even if you've gone for 20 years, searching, just know that like the, the way out is to keep knocking on doors, you know, to keep like there's other things. What about structural issues, postural issues. And, and there's so many amazing healers on the planet, Logan, and you're one of them, right? There's there's people who, who have mastered little niches and little categories and people who have mastered the whole body and master there's so many geniuses in the world. Right. And for you to like get stuck in that thought pattern cause of your suffering and be like, it's over, I can't find anything else. Like you're closing yourself off to the hundreds of thousands of geniuses out there who have figured something out. Right. Right. So yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:31:28):
Yeah. And another thing that's helpful on that because like you were, you were locked into, Oh, this is a spiritual battle. This is a spiritual thing. Right? So you were looking, Oh, the plant medicines are the fucking eye medicines, whatever this is, that's, what's going to fix it. Right. I think for people that are on this journey, you want to not only keep knocking on doors, but try to strive for very different doors so that you were saying like the structural thing. Okay, let me go to an energy healer, let me go see a psychic, let me talk to a showman. Oh, let's yeah. All these different things. Let me try different diets. The, because our problems, we might be locked into thinking of just one way of thinking and trying a bunch of things there that is far from trying everything. Right. That's just trying the same thing over and over again. And one example would be, you know, conventional medicine that works great for some things. And it really sucks for a lot of other things. Right. So just going to doctor after doctor won't necessarily help many of the issues that doctors aren't great at.

Speaker 5 (00:32:28):
Yes. I'm going to give you an exact example of that Logan I, for years focused on detox, spirituality, meditation, and that, and that was the, the bulk of it. Right. I learned about upper cervical chiropractic where they actually check your Atlas and your access and make sure that it's not out of alignment because when the Atlas or the axis is out of alignment, it compresses the brain STEM and the brain STEM is of course is connected to your whole body. And it's, it's like it's like a circuit breaker when the Atlas is out of alignment. And I was a fighter for, I was a wrestler for five years. And as you just be a fighter for five years, I had been grappling using my neck for 10 years. Right. And I had gotten a lot in a lot of fights on the streets. I had a lot of head injuries.

Speaker 5 (00:33:16):
So I learned about this upper cervical chiropractic and had my upper cervical adjusted many, many times. And it was like, it was like, Oh, like, this is the way the circuitry is supposed to be like, it wasn't all of this spiritual thing of me needing to witness my thoughts more or me needing to detox more mercury, actually just my Atlas needed to be put in back in place. Right. And it's this, this biochemical magnetic system, all of a sudden worked better. Right. So, so yeah. Yeah. That's an example, right. Of just see, seeing finding a magic key that changes everything. Right? Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:33:57):
So a question, this is leading there, right? You've, you've detoxed, right? You've cleaned up the crap. You've been doing this for years. And of course there are more layers always to be done, but I feel most people only get into health after they've hit some sort of rock bottom may not be rock bottom, but after, you know, the doctor says you have some problem and people start going up against this. Usually it happens when they're older. Most people don't pay attention to health before then. But to me, well, one thing is most people have a health is ill-defined health is to most people being free of, or absence of disease. But really health to me is more about adaptability being able to handle more and more stressors and thriving from that. So, so much of this health, a continual experiment patient of different modalities is to continue to thrive, right? It's not just healing problems that exist. Right. Is that your experience that you're just continuing along this path because I guess there's like enjoyment and you continue to get more out of it.

Speaker 5 (00:34:59):
Absolutely, absolutely. You, this is like a machine that requires constant maintenance. Right. I though the way I've experienced healing and my life is that as I continue to advance, as I continue to ascend in my consciousness gets higher and my physical body feels better and everything gets more solid and grounded. What I've experienced is that, you know, there's this immense I think the right word is dichotomy where it's like the more clear and vibrant you get, the more sensitive you get as well. Right. So there's so much work to do in maintaining the vehicle. When, when, when you put so much energy into your, your vehicle, it becomes like a porch. Right? Right. It becomes like a portion instead of a Honda. And it requires the expensive gasoline and it's so much upkeep and so much energy and time. And like the parts are really expensive when they break.

Speaker 5 (00:35:55):
Right. So, so there's this thing of like being, I, I I've actually become more sensitive. And and so, so again, there's that, there's that challenge there of how do I navigate in a world that's so toxic while my whole life is around detox and clarity and purity. Right. And cleaning. So and now that's exactly where I'm at, where I, I, I love figuring out how to become better, how to, how to reduce inflammation, systemically, how to be feeling good in my body on a regular basis, how to be mentally clear and connected. Right. So yeah, at this point it's become more, a game of upkeep and thriving and ascending as opposed to like I'm broken, fix me. And, and it's just, it's actually more fun. See, once I got out of survival, then it actually became like a game and I became a tinkerer. Like you just like you and alchemists, right. This urban, that urban let's figure out all the different combinations and concoctions are. Right. And that, and that that's fun. That's fun for me. At least,

Speaker 2 (00:37:08):
Especially when, like getting one of those breakthroughs, like at this stage, right. Like a, a 1% improvement, those little fine things. Mostly that's what you get, but there's still those occasional, like, like you had with the structural manipulation they're game changers. Right. If, and if you can hit one, one of those, like every five years, that's amazing.

Speaker 5 (00:37:27):
Yes. Yes.

Speaker 2 (00:37:29):
So I, I do want to dive deeper into the topic of detox because it's, it's so important as I've understood health more, over the many years I've been involved in this, I feel this is such a neglected spot. For instance, I, on my coaching program, I have an application there. And one of the things I do is ask people to rate a certain health area on a scale of one to 10, like their movement, their diet supplementation, and I have a detox eliminations and what I've found people answering this as they don't even know what I'm talking about there, but for the most part, they think it's just about poop, which is fine. That's an important aspect, but there there's really so much more in there. And so people don't even have like a frame to really think about detoxing. So can you describe like why detox is so important and in working with your clients, like I know some of the people come to you and the detox isn't as important of an element perhaps where something that may be more of a spiritual journey, whatever else. So, but what do you see

Speaker 5 (00:38:36):
As far? Like how many people does everyone need to support their detox systems? Yeah. Great question. So I've,

Speaker 5 (00:38:49):
I've learned about detox in my personal experience, started with pure and simple colon detox, right? This is where most people start to hear detox and it's like, Oh, like you clean your, you clean your colon, right. Or, or maybe that's might even be a little more advanced. Most people may be like, all right, I'll eat salad for a week. And then that's a detox. Right. And like, that's the extent. And maybe they would put it together that that equals more poop, right. Like to clean the poop in the colon. So that's probably where most people start. Right. Or they go to the store and they buy a detox, supplement that in essence makes you poop. Right. So, so that's again where most people begin. Right. And, and that's where I began. And I learned that, wait a minute, I can drink juice for 12 days and go to the bathroom and have a bowel movement every day, potentially twice a day.

Speaker 5 (00:39:46):
Where's it coming from? That doesn't make any sense. Where is this coming from? And that's when I explore Daniel, read the Tao of health, sex, and longevity, and other colon books, Richard Anderson, dr. Richard Anderson about cleaning the colon cleanse and purify myself. And I learned that most people's colon has five to 10 to even 12 pounds. In some overweight people weigh more of old rotting fecal matter that undigested fecal matter, that is a result of sitting in chairs all day, as a result of overeating, a result of incorrect food, combining a result of not chewing our food thoroughly of stress of even simply sitting on a toilet. You know, we do that wrong. We, the way like this, this is audio only, you won't be able to see me, but you can imagine yourself on a toilet. It actually doesn't align your rectum with your large intestine with your right.

Speaker 5 (00:40:47):
So lifting your feet up or squatting is, is a much better way to, to go to the bathroom. So there's all of these things that we're doing incorrectly that basically lead to clogging of the pipes, right. To put it simply. And I had spent years working on my clog pipes and worked on it very, very diligently. And it, it moved the needle a little bit. I felt more connected to the divine. I was able to access higher spiritual places. I had more energy, but there was another layer, right? So the new layers that I learned about from that point forward, which people rarely explore is things like cleansing and purging the liver and gallbladder of, of stones, of things like removing heavy metals and plastics and chemicals and fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides from the organs and tissues of the body from the blood, like most most substances that we most toxic substances, they actually settle into safe zones like the kidneys and the liver and the brain, and people would say, how is it, why would it go?

Speaker 5 (00:42:05):
Why would your body put mercury in the brain? Because it's way more toxic when it's in the blood, right? It's, it's way more detrimental when it's floating around in the blood. Right? So, so the next tier of detox that I learned about was, again, this, this refined removal of substances from the organs and the tissues and the muscles and the fat, and of course, sweating, right? Sweating is an Avenue of detox that you look at cultures, you know, Finnish Norwegian cultures that use saunas on a regular basis in Iceland. And they have way lower cases of heart disease of cancers, because regular sweating is incredibly effective at boosting the immune system, removing toxicity and keeping up with the flow of, of toxins, into toxins out. So my answer to to, does everybody need detox? I believe that everyone at, I believe that there are some people that can totally handle what's going down on the planet. They're just resilient. I'm the opposite. I'm a Canary in the coal mine. They would be whatever the opposite of the common area in the coal mine is a robust coal miner.

Speaker 5 (00:43:32):
And and, and, and they, you know, I know a friend who is 40 years old and he'd been drinking beer every day of his life every day for the past 20 years. And he does jujitsu every day and he smokes weed and he eats whatever he wants. And he's probably healthier than me never had an issue in his life. Right. And, and how am I going to tell that dude to like, get healthier, right? And even my ex girlfriend who is super, super healthy, you know, she was able to eat whatever she wanted. Right. So I would say the majority of the population, if you are, if you are not thriving, detox is important. Even if you are thriving, what happens is that one hits their body burden point? What this, this bizarre time. Exactly. Yeah. It's a bizarre thing that happens where all of a sudden, in a couple of week, period of time, things just change. You just go from being super, super healthy to like, Whoa, what just happened? Right. It's like, oftentimes I've observed this body burden shift where again, they just, someone shifts into like illness rather quickly. Right. And that's because they've been ignoring all of the micro symptoms right. Up until that point. So as a long answer to your question.

Speaker 2 (00:44:51):
Yeah, no, it's good. I got the kind of the image of, I'd like to try to think in terms of fractals, cause that's how nature works. So there's like the whole organism detox. And we see that simply as like urinating deprecating, right? That's the main things, but sweating in there as well would be a main source. I mean, a important thing about sweating for me is that that's a way that your body removes not just water soluble toxins, but fat soluble toxins, which is really important because otherwise the colon is the other way that that happens. And if stuff is backed up, it's probably not removing much there, but then we can go down zoom in, into the different organ levels. Right. And see that each one of these, there may be some like the kidneys, the liver are more directly involved in the detox, but really literally every organ within the body. And then we can zoom in even further down to the cellular level. You know, what's the ability of the cell, the membrane to be able to absorb the right kind of nutrients, get rid of waste, that sort of material. So I think that's a useful way to think about it. You can start big, but then begin to narrow it down over time.

Speaker 5 (00:45:58):
Yes. Beautiful. And down to the cellular level, what many people in the detox world don't don't realize is that the reason we accumulate toxicity is because is because we're mineral deficient, oftentimes when there's mineral deficiencies, the body will pull in a metal or a toxic substance because it's hungry for something, right. When we're selenium deficient and you consume mercury, the cell will actually pull in mercury instead of selenium, when someone has ample reserves of selenium, they're going to retain less mercury. Right. So

Speaker 2 (00:46:37):
And chlorine, if you don't have the eye that in there

Speaker 5 (00:46:39):
Exactly. Right. Exactly. All of the halogens. Right. so, so on a cellular level, when we detox, we also have to replenish minerals. When I use this word detox in my businesses is called the detox dudes. Right. But the truth is that there's so much more to the game. You have to replenish minerals. You have to constantly be bringing in the good things into your system, as you remove the bad stuff, right. Otherwise it doesn't work. You become stripped and you become devoid of, of, of everything.

Speaker 2 (00:47:12):
I think the, the cycles there's like detoxing then rebuilding or supporting, right. And those, those go together. And again, that's kind of fractal. We can think of just the food and water we consume and that goes out or down to the cellular level, the, the minerals and the toxins that are involved in another important point is the human body produces its own toxins. Right? Like we are detoxing, whether we're supporting it or not, that's something that's necessary for life to function. So it's not a matter of like, is it happening or not, but are we supporting those processes? And it's all about intake and outtake, but it really, to me, like if you narrowed health down, it's about intake and outtake, and this happens on all levels, food coming in, food, going out, minerals, coming in, minerals, going out, you know, spiritual lessons coming in, it's all across the different aspects of it. It's all about that.

Speaker 5 (00:48:08):
Like a function in mathematics, right? Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:48:10):
Yeah, absolutely. So I guess let's, let's narrow it down a little further into detox. What are some of the like most use? I know there's a wide variety of things. Cause we're talking about one chemical, there's going to be something that's best for helping to detox that. But what are some of maybe your top tips or tricks or supplements that work for a lot of people that maybe people aren't aware of? Yeah.

Speaker 5 (00:48:38):
One of my, I would say if we just started with the core, core, core things that everybody should do, number one, changing one's water, right? The water we drink is becomes our blood. It becomes our blood. It's so powerful to change and transform your water. People spend $10,000 to go to a Tony Robbins seminar before they change their water. What, like, I love Tony Robbins, but change your water before you spend 10 grand on Tony Robbins. You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 (00:49:11):
More foundational than what I've been thinking about that like the basics of the basics of water and breadth. If you, if you don't get those right. Those are really easy to get, right? Yes. But without the right knowledge, it's very hard to get. Right? Yes.

Speaker 5 (00:49:26):
And breadth is not that easy

Speaker 2 (00:49:27):
These days with COVID.

Speaker 5 (00:49:33):
Yeah. So, so so water you know, me and Logan used to live 10 minutes away from each other in Bonny Doon.

Speaker 2 (00:49:44):
Sorry, I don't know if you want, you can edit that out.

Speaker 5 (00:49:50):
But we used to live 10 minutes away from each other and there's a spring there. Okay. The best water on earth to drink. And that's the water I drank every day. All day when I lived there is spring water. What are that comes from an aquifer deep within the earth that can take hundreds of years to come back up to the surface. Sometimes thousands of years to come back up to the surface and it gets filtered through the earth. You're you have minerals, you have life force cheat. And and this water is pure and clean, clear high energy water. That's my favorite water to drink. Right? Distilled water. I also love one can purchase a distiller for like 500 bucks and never have to get water again and never have to pay for water again. You can distill tap water. Well, water is also good in Bonny Doon.

Speaker 5 (00:50:38):
There's a lot of Wells. I lived on a well when I was in Bonny Doon. And so our water is also pretty good. Reverse osmosis, high level filters are good, but the worst water to be drinking is municipal tap water. Right? So most people in the plant on the planet, especially in the United States, which is one of the worst countries in the world for, for, for toxins in water. Why? Well, because we deliberately put it in there, right? So, so we put halogens, we put chlorine in our water to filter it right. And there's pharmaceutical drugs in our water. So we're one of the highest users of pharmaceutical drugs in the world. Pharmaceutical drugs get metabolized when we pee it out, it's very, very, very small particles. And the municipal filters cannot filter this out. Right. So we're left with pharmaceutical drugs. You've done a writeup on this. I believe pharmaceutical drugs in urine. Right. Have what

Speaker 2 (00:51:37):
Gone into it. Yeah. And what an interesting thing, like the in order to have the effects on the body, these drugs are designed to be bio-persistent to be not broken down easily. Right. So they pass through the body and they're going to exist in the environment. Some of them for very, very, very long.

Speaker 5 (00:51:53):
Yes. Yes. And, and so of course, you know, we're, we're, we're left with this, these pharmaceutical drugs in our water. So you're getting a dose of Xanax, a dose of Klonopin, a dose pathic dose homeopathic doses, right. Of these pharmaceutical drugs. So there's also viruses and bacteria and all kinds of stuff in the tap water. So we removed the tap water. We bring in the best two waters, in my opinion, distilled water and the natural spring water. And that is a game changer. Okay. The next step is for someone to drink 16 to 32 ounces of juice every day you buy a $200 juicer and the Omega J eight zero zero six, and you start getting celery and lemon and cucumber and ginger and green, Apple and parsley and making a green juice. Every single day takes seven minutes to make five minutes to clean up.

Speaker 5 (00:52:49):
And I drink 32 ounces of juice every single day. This is going to bring minerals in raw life force in it's going to help with evacuation. It's going to help with cleaning. It's going to help with detoxifying, the liver and the water and the juice you can. If someone has never done these two things, they'll observe massive, massive changes in their life. Right. So those are the two core basic things, right. And of course, breath, right. Breath is instrumental. I mean, it's, we, can't 60, if you know, 120 seconds without breath, we can live many days without water days without food, but all right. So I'm sure you'd have a lot to say about breath and breathing techniques and clean air and all of that. But after that the basic, the next basic level is to do colon detox and colon detox.

Speaker 5 (00:53:45):
I like triphala at night, you're taking these three erratic herbs that help gently detoxify the colon. I like magnesium glycinate and I like Boldo tea and those three are my, the typical things that I use at night to, to gently flush the bowels. Magnesium oxide is another thing to gently flush the bowels the following day. And and then some cool supplements that are really important in my opinion, for most people on the planet are things like iodine. Okay. So global healing center makes an amazing iodine. You can put it directly on the thyroid. You can take it internally. It's very strong stuff. Liposomal, glutathione, glutathione being the master antioxidant. I like sulfur MSM. I really think sulfur is important for the, for the system and also moves the needle for, for many, many people. And I would say that would be a starting point, the water, the juice, the three supplements I recommended and of course, biohacking one sleep.

Speaker 5 (00:55:04):
Right. And I actually don't even like the term biohacking, but just improving one sleep, unplugging the router not sleeping with your cell phone next to your head. You can go as far as me and get one of those canopies that, Oh, you can't see it on the call, but that's a silver canopy that I sleep that blocks out all EMS. Right. and and really just like beginning to get rid of screens using blue light blocking glasses, all of these, these basic things to, to start improving one sleep, because sleep is the magical zone where all the everything happens, right.

Speaker 2 (00:55:43):
Your sleep, your improve, everything.

Speaker 5 (00:55:45):
Here's what I've learned through this process of four years of torture. If you're not sleeping or pooping,

Speaker 2 (00:55:50):
You're screwed. So I wanted to ask about Clay's cause this is one thing I haven't gotten a super clear answer on. So most clays, like zeolite, for instance, have these great reputations for pulling toxins out of the body yet they're made up of aluminum, which is a light metal, and there's definitely problems with aluminum. Yeah. Can you explain this? What's your experience knowledge around this topic? Nope.

Speaker 5 (00:56:19):
So thank you. Cause that would be the very next step after those five things that I about the very next step would essentially be to introduce binders. Binders are negatively charged substances that are sometimes manmade and there's sometimes found in nature. Sometimes they're a combination and what they are is they're like vacuums. They go into the body and they're like a negatively charged vacuums that grab onto positively charged pollutants and allow for evacuation. Right? So you don't digest these substances. They typically just run through you like a vacuum. And there's some life changing binders out there. Clay being one of them, some other binders are like activated charcoal, bamboo, coconut charcoal, bamboo charcoal, citrus pectin from the crustacean the shellfish you can get kudos on, right? Which is another binder. Some silicone products are other binders, zeolites, zeolites, and clays are very similar.

Speaker 5 (00:57:25):
And there are such thing as toxic zeolites and toxic clays where these clays are actually high in lead and aluminum. And and they can be detrimental over the long haul what I've learned. And so I've, I've read some papers and I read some studies and I read some research, but I've also taken clays for literally six years. Right. And, and my levels of aluminum and letter very, very low. So what I've basically gathered through my own experience and through some reading is that of course, one wants to buy the best products. And I I've done my research and found the, you know low led, low aluminum, clays, and zeolites. Biopure being an incredible company by the way. For both of those is that most of the led and aluminum in a binder actually doesn't get absorbed into the body because it's connected to the binder, right?

Speaker 5 (00:58:28):
It's in the binder and your body is not going to take it out of the binder and not going to digest it and metabolize it. So again, it, I always view binders as these, this vacuum that grabs other particles, not quite, not quite getting digested. So if it has tons of led and tons of aluminum, I think it would be a problem over the long haul. But you know, BioPure even puts horsetail in there, zeolites, silica binding to aluminum, right? So that's one way around the problem. Overall, I've experienced binders to be life changing for an and here. So here's another example of, of experience being more valuable than, than research. Right? Right. I've had clients come to me with five, 10 years of full blown, panic attacks, heart palpitations, feeling like they, their, their nerves are like being fried and feeling like their nerves are on fire. They take binders for two weeks and literally symptoms can, can vanish. That's how powerful binders are. That's how powerful metals are when metals are in the gut, breaking through the leaky gut, crossing the blood brain barrier and just causing systemic hell for people. That's how powerful and detrimental mat metals can be for people. Right. does that answer your question, answering mirrors some of my own thoughts, but a little more developed. Thank you for that. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:00:06):
I got notes all over here. Yeah. how does fasting fit in? So yeah, I've done a fair amount of fasting. For me it seems like different. So everything you just talked about right. Different components are going to help detox certain things, certain stuff. I have affinity for one metal versus other things may have affinity for chemicals. And then with fasting, we have juice fast. We have dry fast, we have water fast, all these different types. And I think this goes back to our starting discussion, like all these different modalities, right? So there's all these different detox options. Yeah. I guess my question is where does fascinating fit into this? And any more detail on how one should approach this large topic of detox we gave some of the foundational or early easy steps, but how should have been one expand this over time?

Speaker 5 (01:01:01):
Sure. Fasting is a, is a technology. It's a beautiful, beautiful technology that I used a lot in my years. Water fasting, juice, fasting. I never have done dry fasting though. I've heard amazing things about it. In my opinion, fasting is a bit of an obsolete technology. So I do think that that intermittent fasting is great. I think that fasting a day, a week to give the digestive system a break is great, but this concept of doing 10, 20, 30, 40 day fast to to heal the body, in my opinion, is obsolete technology. And, and I'll share with you the pros and cons of it. Alright, so let's take an extreme of like 20, 30 day fasts. This is extremely depleting for the body. What the teachings of health and detox 30, 40 years ago, for instance, Daniel read an excellent resource.

Speaker 5 (01:02:04):
We were way less toxic as a collective back then. If you look at rates of autism, if you look at the nutrients in soil, right? The soil degradation from never allowing land to rest from monocrop farms, where we have one crop across an entire farm stripping minerals, the same minerals come out, the same minerals come out. There's no ecosystem, there's no permaculture. It's all you just devoid it's devoid of life force. It's there was a study, or I don't know if it was a study or some paper I read, I don't know exactly what it was, but basically a carrot today is like one 20th of a carrot 30 years ago in terms of its nutrient content. Right? So, so fasting water fasting is depleting. The body of more electrolytes have more minerals. And it, yes, it causes autolysis autophagy, which is basically where the body cannibalizes, anything that doesn't serve it, but it's dripping the body of minerals of nutrients. I've seen people get worse on fasts though. Of course they really can spiritually connect. Right. through this fasting process connect to,

Speaker 2 (01:03:17):
I was thinking there like a longer fast is probably most more, a spiritual thing than it helps.

Speaker 5 (01:03:23):
It is. It's an incredible spiritual experience. And I do think that, you know, everyone should, should give it a shot three, four or five day fast to recognize how much they rely on food and how dumbed down their system is from, you know, from food. But all in all, I've observed that it's obsolete technology because we have so many incredible supplements and so many machines and modalities that can kick toxins out while replenishing the body at the same time and can can just, it fasting is like a pendulum, right? We're, we're living this way of life. And then we fast everything, all of our food is gone. And then when we're done with the fast I've observed this pendulum effect where we like, like a Slingshot where we like come back to like overeating and like, give me more, give me more.

Speaker 5 (01:04:17):
Right. And so overall fasting does serve a purpose, but in my years of doing this, I've, I've learned that it's, it can cause more harm than good. And it's depleting to an already depleted body. We are as a collective depleted of minerals of electrolytes of life force. And I don't think we need more depletion. I think we need building, we need like juices and minerals and, and it's a big, big subject, but the short answer there it was a long answer, but the, the, just try to keep it concise is that it it's good. It has incredible benefits. I've observed other things to be more powerful and complete technologies. And so yeah. As far as the grand picture of detox, this becomes a way of life, right? So taking herbs, sweating, doing the detox, it becomes a way of life instead of just a quick fix or a one week trial. Right. Right. And it becomes a multiyear journey, but it doesn't have to be so much work or so much money. It's, it's just, when you start feeling the results from cleaning this vessel, you'll never want to go back to, to not detoxing again.

Speaker 5 (01:06:02):
And you can ask me more specific question if you'd like on that subject.

Speaker 2 (01:06:05):
Yeah. No, that's useful. And that's how I think of it too. Thank you for that perspective on fasting. That's fascinating. I'm going to have to reflect on that some more, but yeah, it's the, the building in the, the habits, the routines that help support the detox on just a daily basis where it's not a hassle where you're doing just certain things that, cause as you were saying, things can both be like supporting and building and detoxing at the same time. And ultimately I think that's most of what we need because of the environment we find ourselves in. And then there's a time and a place for a more extreme, if you will detox a longer time period, throwing the bigger guns into the mess. But the more you can style your life to have the gently supporting detox, the less you have a need for that.

Speaker 5 (01:06:53):
Exactly. Exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:06:54):
But then hopefully also you cultivate awareness along the way so that then you can bring out those bigger guns as needed. I wanted to ask about the testing for, let's say heavy metals. I know there's different forms of testing your hair analysis. I've gotten my hair tested two times. This was a few years ago. And then quite a few years ago, both times I had really high arsenic. Okay. And I never really figured out what that was from. I didn't seem to have any of the symptoms of arsenic poisoning. So yeah, your, your thoughts as to what works and what should I do for my arsenic levels, assuming they actually are sky,

Speaker 5 (01:07:32):
Do you eat rice?

Speaker 2 (01:07:34):
I do eat rice. Most of it's or Ganek and like comes from the USA versus I know that's a bigger problem with Chinese rice. So I, I don't, I don't eat so much of it that I think that's the issue. But I, I could be wrong. That was one thing that, that maybe that's that, but

Speaker 5 (01:07:51):
Yeah. Yeah. So as far as tests there's a lot of different tests. Here's the, what, what I'll first say? Well first say is that I believe a detox should be done no matter what test results come back because of how inaccurate these tests can sometimes be. And it can sometimes test can change from week to week. I've done a lot of different tests and I've observed that, you know, Hey, I don't know how, how perfect this test is right.

Speaker 2 (01:08:24):
Better to do the detox of some form. See if you get better than realize

Speaker 5 (01:08:28):
Exactly before the experiment, even if it's a few hundred dollars, like I'm not just saying this to conveniently get more clients right. And conveniently like make my business more in demand. Right? The truth of the matter is that I've seen people with no levels of mercury on their tests get and know levels of Luna, other tests get calculation. And I've seen people with mega levels of metals on their, on their tests who are perfectly healthy. So, so, you know, again, the experience,

Speaker 2 (01:08:58):
It comes down to that storage in the body versus it being circulating, right? Because everything stays in your brain. Nothing's coming out in the urine or the hair, then it's, it's in the brain and maybe causing the problem there versus maybe you have none in the brain, but it's

Speaker 5 (01:09:12):
Just circulating precisely. So the tests are urine tests. You're in there's urine test where you just straight up urinate. And those are very, very low level. The best tests are when you take a urine challenge test. So you take a key later, you take this oral key later, which provokes culation, and then you, you Jurnee there's hair tests, which are pretty good. There's also old LIGO scans where they actually check your finger and there's a in inside of your blood and your finger. They can check your levels of minerals and metals. Those are pretty good too. They all have their pros and cons. They, you know, so I encourage everybody to check it out. It's rare to get false highs. It's more way more common to get false lows. Right. and

Speaker 2 (01:09:57):
Hey, so you're saying testing, isn't accurate. I wonder if that has any applications to do

Speaker 5 (01:10:01):
Well? It does. Yeah. That's the part two we'll do COVID PCR tests. D does he hear about the president who tested like a jackfruit and a papaya, which came back positive for you? I grew up and then I heard it. He was, he died later, got killed notion. And again, this is all straight forward. So some amazing things to get rid of that arsenic you could take cilantro juice with cilantro juice with wheat grass, you can take EDTA powder and you can even take EDTA in suppository form, which is more effective. My friend Spencer makes EDTA suppositories. His company's called remedy link. I can send you a link if you'd like for that. And those are good. It's very effective for other heavy metals as well. And that would pretty much, if you did that consistently, that would dramatically lower your arsenic levels. And I don't know where else you'd be getting that from. It could be in the, it could have been, it can be in well water. Right.

Speaker 2 (01:11:22):
We've been here for a while. I did see a connection that crystal Geyser spring, which my family used to buy that arsenic. It was high in arsenic. So I think possibly that, that was it. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:11:34):
Yeah. And they're in Bonnie Doon, aren't they?

Speaker 2 (01:11:38):
Did they collect from different Springs in California?

Speaker 5 (01:11:42):
Yeah. They, and they, they got in trouble for dumping their arsenic. Did you know about that?

Speaker 2 (01:11:46):
Yeah, that may have been what I was doing is something related to the arsenic. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:11:52):
Mmm.

Speaker 2 (01:11:53):
Let me ask. Is there, does it really depend on like the person and what they made doing, which test they should be getting, or like their most recommended tests that should be applicable to most

Speaker 5 (01:12:04):
People, if you're not seriously ill, I recommend the urine challenge test. Okay. That will be the most accurate. Okay. if, if one has serious symptoms, the urine challenge test is very dangerous because they are taking a strong key later for 24 hours. And well sometimes you to take one dose, sometimes you take those spread out through 24 hours and key lading metals will dramatically exacerbate symptoms for a wide range of people. So if you're okay and you're just like experiencing brain fog and this and fatigue and some slight depression, go ahead and do that urine challenge test. If you're in the world, like I was in panic, heart palpitations, serious anxiety, stay away from the urine challenge. Test, do a hair test, do an old LIGO scan. And and check that and check those out first. Yeah. Nice. Quick. Silver makes them a try test for mercury quick silver mercury try test is, would also be good. That's specifically for mercury, which in my opinion, mercury and aluminum are the most sinister metals.

Speaker 2 (01:13:20):
Right. If you can take care of it with the most exposure of what's that, that we have the most exposure of, right?

Speaker 5 (01:13:26):
Yeah. But how intensely they affect us. Yeah. So if you want to focus on the most important things, it would be mercury and aluminum. No.

Speaker 2 (01:13:39):
Oh, Joshua. I feel like we could keep going for hours. We could. Yeah. Maybe we'll definitely do this again, but tell people a little bit about your site and your work and people want to follow up with you and get more info.

Speaker 5 (01:13:52):
Sure. My website is the detox dudes.com and has everything on there. My YouTube channels, the detox dudes, Instagram is at detox dudes. And I offer tons of free information. I have so much stuff on my website. If you are a beginner, you're this part, sparks your interest. Your soul is like listening right now. And you're like, yeah, there's something here. There's something here. Go to my site. I teach you every step of the way for free. And if you want more support, I sell a course a masterclass that I sell a 40 video series. And I also do one on one coaching. I do retreats retreats all over the world. My last retreat was in Hawaii, but I've been all over the world with retreats. And yeah, I'm very, very passionate about this world and of detox and health and biohacking and, and would love to support you in any way I can. Yeah. All right.

Speaker 2 (01:14:48):
Well, thank you so much. I think people will find this useful. There'll be a whole bunch of show notes, the link to the video, because you got to watch Josh's story links to the website, everything over at healthsovereign.com /40. Thanks everyone.

Medical Monopoly Musings #44
Remdesivir – Poor Science and Conflicts of Interest

Remdesivir is an intravenous anti-viral drug being used for the novel coronavirus. It is produced by Gilead Sciences.

Pharmaceutical companies tend to have very high profit margins. When more than 10% profit is considered good…Gilead had over 50% profits in 2015 on $32.6 billion dollars!

With the novel coronavirus, the drugs companies have been rushing to cash in (*ahem* save lives).

The NIAID study showed that those patients with COVID19 taking remdesivir improved in recovery time and discharge from the hospital, down from 15 days to 11 days. However, the survival difference between remdesivir patients and placebo control was not statistically significant (8% vs. 11.6%).

(Meanwhile, a Chinese study published earlier at the end of April did not find any statistically significant clinical improvement. Here 14% of remdesivir patients died while 13% on placebo did, though again, not statistically significant.)

Christopher Roland of the Washington Post wrote, “Fauci said the results were modest. But, lacking any other treatments, he proclaimed the drug the "standard of care" for hospitalized coronavirus patients. Full results of the trial have not been released, and many questions about the drug's effectiveness remain unanswered.”

The standard of care based on a press release and an interview. On May 1st the FDA issued emergency use authorization for remdesivir for treating COVID-19.

Over three weeks later, on May 22nd, the full study and data was finally released. Turns out the results for faster recovery time were only for a sub-group, those also receiving supplementary oxygen. Furthermore, they also changed the primary outcome during the trial from number of deaths to recovery time while the trials were ongoing (though those who changed it said they didn’t have access to the data).

The study concludes, “These preliminary findings support the use of remdesivir for patients who are hospitalized with Covid-19 and require supplemental oxygen therapy. However, given high mortality despite the use of remdesivir, it is clear that treatment with an antiviral drug alone is not likely to be sufficient.”

At the time of writing there are numerous other clinical trials with remdesivir in progress.

Early on, Gilead pledged to donate 1.5 million doses of the drug. Beyond that, an independent organization estimated that Gilead could be charging up $4500 per patient for the drug…on something that is estimated to cost $1 per dose. What is $4500 more when that average coronavirus hospital bill is $30,000, especially since few patients are paying out of pocket?

So at best the drug has a modest effect. At worst, it has some negative side effects that was dropping people out of the trials. But wait, there’s more…

As I’ve established over the course of this series, conflicts of interest are often at the root of controversies of the medical monopoly. Here is no different.

Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson said, “When it comes to money, we checked financial ties among experts on the government panel devising coronavirus treatment guidelines— which had the effect of dialing back hydroxychloroquine use and giving an edge to remdesivir. We found that of 11 members reporting links to a drug company, nine of them named relationships to remdesivir’s maker Gilead. Seven more, including two of the committee’s leaders, have ties to Gilead beyond the 11 months they had to disclose. Two were on Gilead’s advisory board. Others were paid consultants or received research support and honoraria.”

There are other conflicts, but Gilead is by far the leader. Isn’t it interesting that the only approved drug happens to come from this company? Just a coincidence, right?

To give perspective on how conflicts of interest work on government panels we can look at the criminal case of Vioxx and similar drugs. The FDA’s 2005 advisory board had 32 advisors, ten of which had conflicts of interest with the drugs’ maker Merck. The board voted to keep these dangerous drugs on the market, but had these conflicted members not been involved, the vote would have gone the other way. Eight of these ten said that their ties did not alter their votes. (At least two were honest about it!)

Next time, we’ll turn to the even more controversial hydroxychloroquine, which is off patent and very cheap in comparison. Never has science become so politicized with a media barrage involved…

References:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GILD/gilead-sciences/profit-margins
https://www.niaid.nih.gov/news-events/nih-clinical-trial-shows-remdesivir-accelerates-recovery-advanced-covid-19
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/coronavirus-covid-19-update-fda-issues-emergency-use-authorization-potential-covid-19-treatment
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31022-9/fulltext
https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-treatment-icer-pricing-analysis-on-gileads-remdesivir-2020-5
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?cond=COVID-19&term=remdesivir&cntry=&state=&city=&dist=&Search=Search
https://www.chron.com/business/article/Taxpayers-paid-to-develop-remdesivir-but-will-15296173.php
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/09/heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-coronavirus-treatment-costs.html
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2007764
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/remdesivir-study-finally-out-drug-only-helped-those-oxygen-finds-mortality-too-high
http://fullmeasure.news/news/cover-story/hydroxychloroquine
https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/panel-financial-disclosure/
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/25/politics/10-voters-on-panel-backing-pain-pills-had-industry-ties.html

*****

Medical Monopoly Musings #45
Hydroxychloroquine – Poor Science and Conflicts of Interest

Last time we covered the drug Remdesivir for COVID-19 and how this was bound to conflicts of interest with the drug’s maker Gilead in the approving committee, as well as some questionable science on whether it worked. Now we turn to hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), which was notably promoted by President Trump.

In this case, we’ll cover the drug in the same way as the previous one, looking at science and conflicts of interest.

The crazy thing is it is not possible to have this conversation in a balanced way anymore as politics is more polarized than ever. Personally, I am critical of lots of Trump’s actions and words, but unlike many, I am not blinded by 100% hatred for the man. There are some things he does and says that I do agree with.

Trump was not the first one to talk about HCQ. This was recommended by scientists across the world first and foremost by French Dr. Didier Raoult who said, “We know how to cure the disease.”

One study touted by the media in the USA was done at the VA showed that more people died when taking HCQ. But there were flaws in this study. As a retrospective study, it wasn’t randomized. More importantly sicker patients were put into the treatment group, which would then make sense as to why they died more.

An influential study was published in the Lancet showing HCQ increased mortality which seemed to be the death-knell for this drug, so much so that the WHO paused its other ongoing trials of the drug (which were later resumed). This led many to claim that Trump’s disinformation was killing people!

Yet, this study was later retracted when the company behind the data, Surgisphere, wouldn’t share said data. They were behind another NEJ M paper that got retracted for the same reason, though this one looked at ACE inhibitors, not HCQ.

Looking deeper, these are the only studies this company’s data has been used for. According to LinkedIn they only had five employees. Checking at the time of writing this, the number has gone down to two. Prior to February of this year the company only had one employee, the founder Dr. Desai, who has had malpractice suits against him.

(Part 2) The URL for the company has been excluded from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. This is highly unusual, in fact, I have never seen any site disappear from it before!

There is much more controversy behind this company and its founder which you can find in the references. In other words, Surgisphere appears to be a shell company whose sole aims appeared to be to make HCQ look bad. So who was behind it?

One thing we find is that the Lancet paper’s lead author, Dr. Mandeep Mehra has a long list of drug and medical company conflicts. He has “personal fees from Abbott, Medtronic, Janssen, Mesoblast, Portola, Bayer, Baim Institute for Clinical Research, NupulseCV, FineHeart, Leviticus, Roivant, and Triple Gene.” This study was “supported” by Brigham and Women’s Hospital where they’re also doing Remdesivir studies with over 1,000 patients, for which they’re receiving funding from Gilead.

Yes, there are still more studies that show no benefit. Many of these don’t use zinc which is said to open the cellular pathway to allow HCQ into the cells to work. Dr. Anthony Cardillo said “[HCQ] really only works in conjunction with zinc. Every patient I have prescribed it to has been very, very ill and within eight to twelve hours they were basically symptom-free and so clinically I am seeing a resolution.”

Importantly, there are many studies that DO show benefit with little to no risk. A public Google document titled, “Sequential CQ / HCQ Research Papers and Reports January to April 20, 2020: Executive Summary Interpretation of the Data In This Report” shows more than 20 trials from across the world. They state, “The HCQ-AZ combination [an antibiotic also used in combination], when started immediately after diagnosis, appears to be a safe and efficient treatment for COVID-19, with a mortality rate of 0.5%, in elderly patients. It avoids worsening and clears virus persistence and contagious infectivity in most cases.” Doctors across the world are saying it does work.

(Part 3) What about Trump’s conflict of interest for HCQ? A big hubbub was made of this. New York Times reported, “Mr. Trump himself has a small personal financial interest in Sanofi, the French drugmaker that makes Plaquenil, the brand-name version of hydroxychloroquine…As of last year, Mr. Trump reported that his three family trusts each had investments in a Dodge & Cox mutual fund, whose largest holding was in Sanofi.”

Mutual funds own lots of stocks. For this reason mutual funds are exempt from conflict of interest laws (not that that makes it impossible for them to be a problem). Yet his stake in Sanofi is no more than $1,500. More importantly, HCQ is off-patent. While Sanofi makes it, so do many other companies. And its dirt cheap, especially compared to the new patented Remdesivir.

Meanwhile all of the New York Times articles I’ve seen have been silent regarding the conflicts of interest behind the approval of Remdesivir.

This is how “science” is done in our modern world. While most of the time bad science hides in the shadows, this is one of the most blatant examples I’ve seen! Too bad our news cycle has moved on, so the people aren’t thinking about this anymore. Few and far between will hear this story. Remdesivir is still the standard of care being promoted.

Yet, some are fighting back. The Association of American Physicians & Surgeons has sued the FDA, Health & Human Services and BARDA over this to “to end the irrational interference.”

One more personal thought…it’s all misdirection!

(Part 4) What is the drug that will save us? Notice how the entire scientific, political, and medical conversation is on this drug, that drug, or the vaccines. Notice how nothing is mentioned about ANY of the important aspects of health. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be doing drug trials and find those that can help. That’s all well and good, but if it really were about health and saving people we’d be talking about much else.

There are plenty of trials showing common nutrients are working for this disease; zinc, vitamin C, vitamin D, phytonutrients, etc. Even Google is censoring those topics as the CEO of YouTube said they will “remove information that is problematic, including anything that is medically unsubstantiated, such as take vitamin C, take turmeric. Anything that would go against WHO guidelines, we will be taking those down.”

References:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/21/health/hydroxychloroquine-veterans-study/index.html
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666634020300064
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31180-6/fulltext
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2021225
https://www.medicineuncensored.com/a-study-out-of-thin-air
https://www.linkedin.com/company/surgisphere/people/
https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://surgisphere.com/
https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/03/who-resuming-hydroxychloroquine-study-for-covid-19/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/03/covid-19-surgisphere-who-world-health-organization-hydroxychloroquine
https://www.brighamhealthonamission.org/2020/03/26/two-remdesivir-clinical-trials-underway-at-brigham-and-womens-hospital/
https://uncoverdc.com/2020/06/06/politicized-science-lancet-nejm-retract/
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04292899?id=NCT04292899&draw=2&rank=1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jfkz5kIH7Jg
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/09/facebook-posts/trump-has-tiny-financial-stake-company-manufacture/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/29/health/gilead-remdesivir-coronavirus.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/health/coronavirus-remdesivir.html
https://aapsonline.org/judicial/aaps-v-fda-hcq-6-2-2020.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsLKs8kye7k

*****

As science goes more research is being done. There is good, legitimate research. And then there is agenda-driven research. Here’s some new data I didn’t cover before on the latter.

On June 15th, the FDA revoked emergency use authorization of HCQ and CQ. “FDA has concluded that, based on this new information and other information discussed in the attached memorandum, it is no longer reasonable to believe that oral formulations of HCQ and CQ may be effective in treating COVID-19, nor is it reasonable to believe that the known and potential benefits of these products outweigh their known and potential risks.”

So let’s look at some of the agenda driven science.

To of the main ones are the WHO’s Solidarity trials and the UK’s Recovery trial.

The problem is that these trials are using excessive, deadly doses. The WHO’s own information shows this. A 1979 paper by consultant H. Weniger mentions that 1.5 to 2 grams of HCQ may be fatal. Around this amount is what is being used, the Recovery trial specifically 2.4 grams in the first day.

Meanwhile, French doctor Raoult was using 600mg daily for up to ten days with his patients. Of 1061 Covid19 patients all over 74 years old, only 8 died, a mortality rate of 0.75%.

Meryl Nass, MD says “Excessive, dangerous HCQ dosing continues to be used in WHO’s Solidarity trials. These trials are not, in fact, testing the benefits of HCQ on Covid-19, but rather are testing whether patients survive toxic, non-therapeutic doses.” If you want more detail see this article here.

Only when this information was repeatedly pointed out was the HCQ arm of the trial stopped. They did it without announcing this information.

So let’s think about this for a second. Do you think these were honest mistakes? It was just an accident to use massive doses of a drug that has been widely used for decades safely at lower doses out of the blue?

Or do you think that they set out to prove the HCQ did not work, so that Gilead could make money off of Remdesivir now, and that a vaccine later on becomes the savior?

As you might expect by this point, the Gates Foundation is implicated in this research, along with the Wellcome Trust for funding the Recovery trial. As for the WHO trial, well Gates is now the #1 financial backer of the WHO.

Understand what this means:

They were not only ALLOWING people to die from COVID19 due to poorly treated them.

But they were in fact KILLING people by purposefully overdosing them on drugs all to prove this drug doesn’t work so that their agendas move forward.

References:
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/coronavirus-covid-19-update-fda-revokes-emergency-use-authorization-chloroquine-and
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/global-research-on-novel-coronavirus-2019-ncov/solidarity-clinical-trial-for-covid-19-treatments
https://www.recoverytrial.net/files/recovery-protocol-v6-0-2020-05-14.pdf
https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/65773/WHO_MAL_79.906.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1477893920302179?via%3Dihub
https://www.ageofautism.com/2020/06/who-solidarity-and-uk-recovery-clinical-trials-of-hydroxychloroquine-using-potentially-fatal-doses.html 
https://www.recoverytrial.net/files/recovery-protocol-v7-0-2020-06-18.pdf

The great mask debate, who would have thought back when 2020 started that this is what everybody would be talking about. Have you seen the social media is have you yelled at someone for wearing a mask for not wearing a mask stuff is crazy right now. And I wanted to take the opportunity to dive into this in striving for a balanced way. And I don't really care about masks that much. That will explain a bit more on that when I'm trying to do more. So is understand how people come to believe something become convinced of something oftentimes off of so little evidence, one way or the other way, what allows a person to be absolutely certain about? So I am going to do my best to present both sides in this. I do have my leanings. I do think the evidence points one direction, more so than the other.

However, I am open to more information and it's interesting as I've dug into this topic, as I began writing on weirder more arcane subjects it's interesting because it's forced me one to recognize like where there actually is some sort of evidence, whether it's circumstantial or otherwise versus where it's just something that is people are saying, and it's not being spread in addition that have to work with my own biases how I may quickly launch into a position and not necessarily recognize the other side. So I'm working with these things in order to better understand, because at the foundation of our health or health sovereignty, we have to be able to make good sense of what is going on in order to be able to make good decisions. And as we've talked about in past episodes, there is this dominant worldview that has many, many things wrong too often.

People just default into trusting the experts, right? And because it's a system that can be gained experts will use that to people's detriment. I think we can all agree that that happens. So let's talk about masks at its very base. This should be a scientific, there should be an answer to it based in science, but like all subjects, there is actually science on both sides. It's, it's really funny. One of the things people jump to right away is saying the science is settled or it's it is science or just thinking the other side has no rationale for their opinion, for their decision. And this happens because of, I guess, polarization and echo chamber only seen one side of the argument. And if you only understand one side of the argument, you actually don't really understand even that side because it's only when we make it two dimensional or three dimensional.

So many things are polarizing to just one side or the other. When oftentimes there is third, fourth, fifth positions we can take. If you don't have these other perspectives, then you really don't truly even know that one. And I know we're all busy. If we can't dive into all the science around every single subject that comes up to us and most people never read a single scientific paper. So they must rely on these other things. But as in all things in the masturbate, there is science on both sides. So one of the things that I've noticed is that our CDC here in the U S a the world health organization, they did not recommend masks up until a certain point past the beginning of the pandemic. Why is it? They did not recommend mass when they do now. I believe the CDC, the CDC was either April or may, then the who wasn't till I think early June when they officially switched their position.
If these are scientific organizations, why did they have this opinion to begin with? Was it based on science? And the only valid reason why they started shift is because there is new emerging, scientific evidence, right? That's only valid reason. It shouldn't be done for politics. It shouldn't be done for any other reason, besides new science coming to light. But the previous position of these organizations is that mass do not work there's papers on both of their websites that say clearly masks, according to random controlled trials, do not work. In addition, they do say there is a plausible mechanism by which masks could work. So it's, it's interesting that the data does not back up them working yet. There's this way by which, I mean, logically it does make sense. Some sort of mask will block stuff from coming out of your nose, your mouth, whether you're coughing, sneezing, just talking, breathing, it's going to block some stuff.

We'll get into the deeper details of that in here. It's going to block some stuff. And if there's less of that stuff, getting out then less spread of the virus. So it's definitely logically plausible that this works, but once again, random control trials, these tend to be kind of the gold standard of scientific evidence. Can't really do a placebo controlled style with a mask. I don't know how you would do that. Maybe you have some sort of holes in masks and not other ones. I'm not sure. So these aren't placebo controlled, but they were randomized controlled trials and part number of them, the papers I read, I didn't actually go into the detail of the science because I'm also busy and I don't want care to go that deep at this point anyway, but one of them, the, in the hu paper looked at 10 randomized controlled trials, and then the CDC paper had a total of 14.

So it was a bit of a meta analysis looking at the existence of data from these other sources. And I'm sure there's overlap between those two in which trials they were looking at. So we do have randomized controlled trials. Then we do have a plausible mechanism. Now, most of the data that people is looking at, if they actually point to some science, it's funny. I asked for on Facebook people to show me the science that shows that it works, and there was not a single link to a scientific paper in there. I thought that was pretty interesting because I requested that specifically, there was rationalizations and thoughts in some people to follow in different things like this, but no one actually pointed to a scientific paper. Very interesting, but there is science saying this works, and this is mostly epidemiological. This is looking at population studies.
This is looking at Hey, certain countries have far less cases, and these may be masked wearing countries such as Korea, Japan, so that in comparison to non mass Marion countries, such as the U S where people think it is a, it is against the right to be forced to wear a mask. And it's not part of our culture. We of course have the most cases here now. So this is interesting, and this is good data. But once again, this is not. If we look at a hierarchy of scientific data, a randomized controlled trial is going to tell you more than the epidemiological evidence. That's my understanding of it because that's going to show correlation, not causation, but a randomized controlled trial should show causation. Now, another question is this, those randomized controlled trials, we're looking mostly at the influenza virus, maybe some other viruses as well.

Is there some sort of difference between the coronavirus Corona viruses? Because it's not just this new one, but the new one versus old ones, influenza and whatnot, from what I could gather, say, micron size. So same size particles, so that shouldn't have a difference in the mass. There there's talk of these viruses, staying airborne and getting on surfaces, but no way it's not surfaces. So there's a lot of confusion about those topics, but there shouldn't be any real reason that these are working differently in the actual mechanisms of them. Because if virus particles are virus protocols, now, of course there's asymptomatic carriers and transmitters we'll touch on that a little bit more and then long incubation time. So that is a factor that could be looked at in here.

So a couple, it's interesting because people are convinced because it is hard to read a scientific study. I, I get it. Most people do not do that. Even looking at an abstract abstracts can be misleading or headlines of scientific papers. Sometimes. Oftentimes, unless you are a scientist work at a school, you don't have access to papers though, here in the Corona virus, anything on that topic tends to be open and available. So memes are being spread and I've seen some interesting ones as ones that look convincing on both sides of the argument. One of the ones showing the, the mechanism by which it worked. I thought it was good. It is in analogy, pissing your pants. If you have a person that is not wearing pants and you're not wearing pants, they can piss on you quite easily, even accidentally, right? If they're wearing, if you're wearing pants, then you're not likely to get the urine on you.

Less likely. If they're wearing pants, then it's not going to get past them. We have to be careful when looking at analogies on whether they are actually appropriate or not. So it's a good concept, easy to grasp logical, but does it actually fit for masks? We'll get into more of that. Another one I saw was a Petri dish, a person coughed into a Petri dish without a mask that coughed into a Petri dish with a mask, the mask one had nothing growing there. The unmasked one had Duff growing there. However, this is bacteria. This is not viruses. Is there a difference in those a particle size, perhaps it's interesting to look at does that actually matter? Then I asked the person, what kind of masks were using this? Because not all masses are equal, something else we'll be talking about, but I thought that was an interesting one, going back to the CDC and the who they flip flop on this and Dr. Fauci, this is something I do have a problem with. He in the beginning said, mass, aren't going to do anything mass. Aren't going to do anything. This was the official statement from a person. Many people believe then he switches to everyone should be wearing masks. And he specifically said he was lying to people. He didn't use those words, but that is what he was saying. He was saying he lied to people because he wanted to preserve the masks for the healthcare workers. Now, a big part of the problems we're having in society is because people lack trust in their government. So if a government official is lying to people and that may be for a noble reason, but understand that erodes trust. So should we believe him now? Should we have believed him back then? Should we believe anything else he's saying? What about other officials who have similarly flip-flopped on this and other issues? It's not just about the mass because the masks, the way I see it, there's layers of what should be scientific questions. So we have the deadliness of this disease, which is less than 1% significantly less, depending on what you look at, how many people are possibly asymptomatic with this, a lot of shenanigans with the testing. So we don't really have a clear answer on that, but we do know it is less than 1%.

So if this thing is not major and sure it's worse than a flu but is it that much worse? Are we going to forever more wear masks in order to prevent flu? Cause well, we have a vaccine for the flu and yet it still claims tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of lives per year. So somewhere on the order of what is going on with this, despite that thing. So do we always wear mask forevermore? If what we're trying to do is prevent death and spreading of disease. And once again, we have incubation asymptomatic people and whatnot. So that might be a call against that. But if we are really trying to do it, then, is there any reason to only mandate masks for this one thing versus everything else? And as I said, a bunch of testing shenanigans going on, which further complicate this issue and make it is, is this even worth doing, it's not just mass for no mass, but looking at this other stuff and that this mass discussion is built on these previous discussions.

And I think that's one of the reason people are very polarized on this topic because you, the two main paradigm seem to be, you believe this thing is deadly. And we got to watch out, we all got to do our part to spread it, or that this thing is mostly overblown. You've in a hoax different layers or degrees of that stuff. And these two sides from that position, then that makes sense to take the appropriate masker nomax position compared to that. Now I've also seen people talk about that. If you wear a mask, there could be negatives and positives as this one negative, but many people just mistakenly believe a mask is going to protect them completely. Then they may not engage in other appropriate behaviors, such as washing their hands, or let's say supporting their immune system. Okay.

Then also people with their master fiddling with it, they're touching their face. They can be spreading germs viruses that they pick up in touching surfaces and whatnot. In addition to that, but on the flip side of that, people may have the mask on and that keeps them more conscious, more aware of what is going on. So we can see points on both sides of that.

Now, overall, I would say that masks are very low intervention thing. You know, it's not taking a pharmaceutical drug whether prophylactically or as treatment. So it's low risk in that way, but there are people talking about harms of this. I saw some people talking about and show a pulse oximeter. I've now seen that both ways. People saying like, Hey, here's my pulse oximeter. It drops my oxygen saturation. I can't breathe in this thing. And I've seen another person saying like, Oh, Nope, that doesn't happen to me. Is this happening to some people? I personally, I got a postdoc seminar. I figured I could use it for some other things, working with breathing exercises. So it wasn't just to run this experiment, but I got a postdoc seminar and I wore a mask in my house for half an hour, which was not fun, but I did it in order to conduct this little experiment for myself and my oxygen saturation was exactly the same.

Now that is true. But when I wear a mask, it does feel stuffy to me. I did notice a slightly lightheaded. I'm pretty sensitive to different things. So I didn't know this, these physically now could I do a whole bunch of stuff and just power through it? Absolutely. But I am noticing these feelings going on in my body. And here's another place where we see memes. One meme. I don't recall the person, but a runner that set some sort of record wearing a mask. That's impressive. If this person can do this, then you can wear a mask when you're outside or shopping or whatnot. Makes sense. I've also seen people talk about, some people have doing exercise or whatever else dropped dead, wearing a mask or fainted or various things like this. Could they both be true? People want to attach so quickly to one side or the other.

Is it possible that some people have difficulties breathing with a mask on mean people have asthma or all kinds of other things. So some people may be, this does change their oxygen saturation. So just because something is true for you or true for another person, we shouldn't automatically rush to judge that this is true for everyone. I've also seen people say, Hey, Oh, if you can't breathe in mass, well, you know, doctors are fainting and dropping dead in the operating rooms when they're doing lung surgeries. No, they're not for the most part, but I also saw some reports of some have fainted from doing exactly that. Is it possible that this is both ways can depend on a whole bunch of different factors? There is logic on both sides. There is science on both sides. There is a rational reason to believe either side. I think if people got this and this is true, not just a mass, but just about anything, then we might be able to have better discussions, which is important. One of the logical things against mass was, well, look at hospitals. Have we done? Who where's the mass do the S infectious patients to wear a mask? Or is it the doctors and the nurses, the hospital staff that wears masks makes sense to me. So much of this is that, Oh, mass aren't for me, it's for stopping, it's spread out to other people, but we have that hospital example, which is interesting to think about.

And once again, masks are not all mass. This is a generalization. Does a bandana equal a properly fitted in 95 mask? No, not even close. Now may have been Dan at do something. Yeah. Let's say you cough mucus out. Yeah. That's going to catch it obviously, but the, some of the viruses getting through it may block some, even the worst mass may block some of the virus, But yeah, it's not going to stop it all. That's for sure. We know that much. And some of the models that are made. So another layer of the science is that models are made based on whatever assumptions we've seen. Models be very wrong with the coronavirus. Thus far, I personally am looking at any model and distrusting it in the beginning just because this is an easy way from what I've seen that some sort of agenda can be pushed. I'm reminded of John Perkins, the economic Hitman. He made economic models in order to deliver in an agenda in order to get loans from the IMF for certain countries that would then bankrupt the countries, be able to control them in different ways. That was through the use of models. We've seen models of this virus, millions of people should be dead right now, according to the models. And we are not there. Not yet. At least Another logical thing is you have a bandana usher. It covers your thing, but if you cough or sneeze or breath, it just sprays out the sides because it's not properly fitted. So again, we can't make it.

Okay. All the assumptions based on every small thing. So now let me get into the most worrisome part of this masturbate. If it were just mass, I would not be covering it. I would not be concerned about it so much because as I said, low intervention, low risk. If we're just that, not a problem. However, I've seen this messaging before, this is very much the same sort of messaging that is used for vaccines. It's not about your protection. It's about other people's protection.

That is a large part of the vaccine debate right now. Oh no, there's, there's no debate. They're just crazy loony. Anti-Vaxxers polarizing the topic so that we can't actually have a adult discussion about this. It's a similar sort of messaging and Oh, the vaccine's not here yet. But if we get this messaging out, you got to do this for everyone. And we can put mandates, California has now mandated them all through the state. Cuomo and Biden are talking about if they were president or the president should be mandating it all across the nation. We may see that whether or not that actually happens in areas who's to say, but once again, mandates look at where this messaging is leading. And I'm really worried about that because ultimately health sovereignty, if you want to choose to get a vaccine, that's fine. I support your decision to do that.

I do not think you should be forced to take a vaccine. I do not think they should be slipping vaccines into people that have not do not have informed consent that do not know the risks and rewards of vaccines. This amounts to you, medical experimentation, this violates the first principle of the Nuremberg code. And we see examples of other countries, especially where informed consent was not a thing. And they talk about wanting to do away with informed consent. One good way to do that is just through social pressure, which we see playing out with the masks because here's some facts we don't yet have a COVID vaccine. Coronavirus vaccines have been torturously difficult. They've never cured the common cold because of this. And in fact, they cause a immune activation so that when you have exposure to a Corona virus after getting the vaccine, it makes you worse.

This has been the experience with the vaccines thus far, and yet they're moving forward on this. We are an operation warp speed for this working on getting the vaccine far, far faster by magnitudes than has ever occurred with the vaccine in existence. So even though they may go through these trials, we'll see if there's shenanigans involved in the the data with those trials as often happens in science, then it's still going to be an experiment on people because what's a phase three trial going to have a thousand people. Well, what if there's a one in 10,000 risk with this vaccine, once it's pushed out to these wide populations, generally with these trials, they get healthier volunteers. What if you have existing? Cormobidities what if you have existing problems that it's not being tested in this vaccine and now they're mandating it. That is why I am extremely worried about masks.

That is why I don't like what I'm seeing with the mask here. And personally, yes. If a store wants to ask me to wear a mask and I need to go in that store, that's fine. That is their location. They should be allowed to do that. Just like they have no shirt, no shoes, no surface. Right? am I gonna try to not wear shoes in there? No. And I'm in California. So things have been strong here. Like every store, every restaurant, every place I've been to is requiring these sorts of things, but requiring me to wear a mask outside. That's where I draw the line personally. I don't think it's good because fresh air is good for you. If the mask is blocking things from coming out, how much is it blocking things from coming in? I haven't actually looked at what is the micron size of say the essential oils put off in the forest or just the trees around that is that mass now blocking these from getting in.
And thus that is impacting my immune system. Similar sort of things we say, like we know vitamin D is very good for this thing, as it is good for health in general immunity in general hormone system, in general, bone health, all these different things. So it's closing the beaches. I can understand that prevent the spread, prevent people getting around, but are we actually doing more harm than good with many of our interventions? Is it possible that mass do have this very subtle thing? Once again, overall, I think it is an extremely low intervention thing and sick people should be doing it. I think that is definitely warranted, but healthy people. I've probably been under the influence of this virus. My wife had COVID toes, the only one and only symptom that she had a, it doesn't seem to be a bad otherwise. So she had it. I'm guessing I had exposure to it whether I develop antibodies and not haven't done the testing don't know. And of course, there's that whole debate where whether you can get infected or not, I've seen a little bit of science on both sides of that. There's science on both sides of asymptomatic
Carriers. Okay.

Although I think that leads one way that when the, who officials said that it was very rare, then walked back that statement. But if you actually look at what she was saying, so the data we have, these studies published and unpublished that really are looking at this doing contact tracing following people around found that asymptomatic transmission was quote unquote, very rare. However, there are models and I guess more epidemiological studies that are saying this, which aren't actually really looking at the minute details of the cases. So once again, which science do we believe? Well, I have my opinion that one too.

So this is the mask debate. If you want to jump in on this, got comments over at the blog. healthsovereign.com, find this episode put in your points there one side or the other, that's heavy civil debate about it. The, I do have a little bit of an issue just talking about these subjects. I want to be as much as possible accurate in my statements. And I don't think an audio podcast is the best way to cover science because it's tricky subject. And then to have to reference every single thing I said in the show notes for this show, I will have some of the studies I've come across regarding that, but I think this is a tougher way to do it. And written form does seem to be a better way to do. And that's why I liked doing a lot of writing as well, really easy to reference things to back up what you're saying, and I've done some of that around mass.

I just thought it'd be worth going into more detail here, but yeah, I'd love to hear your thoughts, whether you think that mass should be mandated or not, whether you are personally format or not, what are your favorite memes or favorite pieces of science that back up one way or another? I think this is an interesting thing to look at. What we see with the coronavirus is it's an acceleration of so many things. Mostly things that are going wrong in our society. It's just a match. That's lighting gasoline and all of that. This is just one of the many, many things going on. So if you want to join me in the comment section [email protected], let's keep this debate going or let's end it. Let's hopefully get to a clear resolution at the end. I'd love to do that with you.

Medical Monopoly Musings #40
Evil Lilly

“One of the most evil pharma corporations in the world, Eli Lilly & Company. You may have heard of them. They’re evil. And I can say that because I was part of the evil.”
- Dr. John Rengen Virapen who worked 35 years for Eli Lilly in many positions including as an executive.

Should we believe a man who perpetrated such evil and later grew a conscious? Well, we don’t have to rely just on his words…

Lilly has come under fire for their blockbuster drug, Prozac (fluoxetine). Ironically, or devilishly, depending on how you look at it, a drug made for depression leads to increases in suicide. (Not to mention homicide as covered previously in #10.)

In Lilly’s internal records, suicides were changed to overdoses (despite prescribed doses leading to suicides) and suicidal ideation to depression to hide the side effects.

Lilly covered these up in seeking approval for the drug. Yet Virapen discussed how he bribed Swedish and German officials to approve the drug. In 1997 it was the fifth most prescribed drug, a blockbuster making over $1 billion per year!

Within the US, they worked hand in hand with FDA officials. Lilly was able to cover-up it’s tracks for some time including settling court cases in ways that their deeds didn’t become public knowledge. Still, eventually the FDA issued a black box warning on antidepressants stating these risks.

There’s someone close to me that as a teenager tried to take their own life while on Prozac. Fortunately, they were unsuccessful in doing so, but others weren’t so lucky.

Imagine you’re feeling down so your doctor prescribes you a medication. It then causes akathisia, which people describe as a feeling of wanting…needing…to jump out of their own skin leading some to try to accomplish that.

Peter C. Gøtzsche sums it up well. “Lilly’s internal papers disclose a long and successful battle against the idea that Prozac could induce violence or suicide, and they suggest that Lilly had an explicit strategy to blame the disease and not the drug, which some of Lilly’s own scientists had reservations about.”

That’s one case of Evil Lilly’s deeds.

The biggest case in which they got caught was in marketing another psychiatric drug Zyprexa for off label and unapproved uses. For this they were fined $1.4 billion, which included a $515 million criminal fine, the largest ever at that time in 2009.

This antipsychotic drug was given to elderly people for dementia, Alzheimer’s, sleep disorders and more. “Eli Lilly’s management created marketing materials promoting Zyprexa for off-label uses, trained its sales force to disregard the law and directed its sales personnel to promote Zyprexa for off-label uses…Eli Lilly expended significant resources to promote Zyprexa in nursing homes and assisted-living facilities.”

They also promoted this to people of all ages, including children for anxiety, depression and other mood disorders.

This drug too led to deaths. Former Eli Lilly sales representative Robert Rudolph said, "You have to remember, with Zyprexa, people lost their lives."

No one went to jail. Zyprexa was another blockbuster, raking in at least $39 billion since 1996 so the $1.4 billion fine and their being forced to sign a corporate integrity agreement surely mended their ways, right?

This literally only scratches the surface of Evil Lilly’s practices. They’ve shown a pattern of going after the vulnerable, children and elderly, with drugs that increase death significantly. I don’t know about you, but that qualifies as evil in my book.

References:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMh1UlpALS8
https://www.corp-research.org/eli-lilly
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2301661/
http://psychrights.org/Research/Digest/AntiDepressants/BMJ-SecretReportSurfaces.pdf
https://ahrp.org/eli-lilly-prozac-documents-what-do-they-reveal/
https://wayback.archive-it.org/7993/20170112130326/http://www.fda.gov/downloads/Drugs/DrugSafety/InformationbyDrugClass/UCM173233.pdf
GOTZSCHE, P. C. (2017). DEADLY MEDICINES AND ORGANISED CRIME: How big pharma has corrupted healthcare (pp. 202-206). CRC Press. https://amzn.to/368GIQG
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/eli-lilly-and-company-agrees-pay-1415-billion-resolve-allegations-label-promotion-zyprexa
https://www.alternet.org/2009/03/the_case_for_giving_eli_lilly_the_corporate_death_penalty/

*****

Medical Monopoly Musings #41
Meet the Man Responsible for Trillion Dollar Transfer from Public Coffers to Big Pharma (and Tens of Millions into His Own Pockets)

This makes me despise politicians more…and at the same time feel bad for the ones that are honest as this is what they have to deal with.

Billy Tauzin was a longtime Democrat in Congress representing Louisiana starting in 1980, nicknamed the “Cagey Cajun” for his methods. But he switched to Republican in 1994 as that party took power in the House. (Clearly, a man of principle!) His salary as congressman was $162,000.

He helped to craft and pass the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003. One of the provisions of this bill was that the government was not able to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies, nor import cheaper drugs from overseas. Taxpayers paid the full rate despite being the biggest customer by far.

“The pharmaceutical lobbyists wrote the bill,” said Republican Representative Walter Jones. More importantly, see how it was passed!

Wendell Potter and Nick Penniman cover this in their book Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts Our Democracy. “Early in the morning of Friday, November 21, 2003, just before the Thanksgiving break …[the] thousand-page bill finally landed on House members’ desks. To their astonishment, they were told they would have only a few hours to review it before having to vote on it.”

“The timing of the vote was in itself unusual. What came next, however, was something that had never happened before in the history of the country. Jones said it was the “ugliest night” he had ever witnessed in more than two decades as a member of Congress. Tauzin, Hastert and DeLay, who had received hundreds of thousands of dollars from drug companies during their political careers, knew it wouldn’t be easy to pass the legislation without a plan to pay for the costly new entitlement other than through permanent deficit spending. But they believed they had the support they needed when they called for a vote at 3:00 a.m. on Saturday.”

“Among the shenanigans, reportedly sanctioned by House leaders: freezing C-SPAN cameras and allowing lobbyists on the House floor as the vote was being taken.”

“Despite the arm twisting, the bill was still short of the 218 votes needed for passage after the standard 15-minute voting period. Rather than accept defeat, however, Hastert added two minutes to the voting clock. When that wasn’t enough, Hastert decided to keep the vote open indefinitely to give the pharmaceutical lobbyists more time to change minds.”

(This is an aside but shows more of the morality of these men. Dennis Hastert would go on to be convicted of molesting several underage boys!)

They threatened to fire Richard Foster, chief actuary of the Medicare system, and thus blocked information about how much this bill would cost taxpayers from reaching anyone in Congress. Had this information been available there is no way the bill would have passed.

This full court press led to eventually enough yes votes being counted. The billed passed at 5:53 am.

Tauzin’s reward? He retired from Congress and within the next few days became CEO of PhRMA with a $2 million per year salary. PhRMA is the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the industry trade group.

He wasn’t the only one. Fifteen lawmakers, staff and officials took healthcare industry jobs within a year of that bill being passed. Craig Holman of Public Citizen said, "The pharmaceutical industry got rich, Congress got rich, the executive branch that worked on the bill got rich. Everyone got rich on this except the American people.”

A New York Times article reports, “In 2007, the Democrats added a new provision to the House ethics code known as the “Tauzin rule,” which specifically bars a lawmaker from negotiating deals for future employment while still on the job.”

It’s always great to have an ethics rule named after you because of what you did!

In his new role, over the next few years Tauzin was able to kill legislation that would repeal the most egregious parts of that act. He had his hand in the Affordable Care Act making sure it benefited his paymasters.

Potter & Penniman write, “We can also thank Tauzin and many of his friends in Washington for increases in both our taxes and the national debt. In fact, by 2023, the US government’s debt will likely be more than a trillion dollars higher than it otherwise would be.”

Tauzin’s cut of the action grew. In 2010 PhRMA paid him $11.6 million.

What do you do with all that money? Wikipedia says that “Tauzin endorsed Jerome Schneider's book The Complete Guide to Offshore Money Havens, dubbing the book "A serious contender for the best book on offshore banking I've ever seen."” So he’s read multiple of them! Well, I guess we shouldn’t expect someone that would fleece the taxpayers to want to pay his own taxes either.

Welcome to how politics are played. The criminal medical cartel breaks the laws, they skirt the laws, but most of all they make the laws because they buy the lawmakers.

References:
https://billmoyers.com/story/the-man-who-made-you-pay-more-at-the-drugstore/
https://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/health-reform-in-limbo-top-drug-lobbyist-quits/?partner=rss&emc=rss
https://sunlightfoundation.com/2010/02/12/the-legacy-of-billy-tauzin-the-white-house-phrma-deal/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/18/us/dennis-hastert-released.html
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-11-29/tauzin-s-11-6-million-made-him-highest-paid-health-law-lobbyist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Tauzin
https://web.archive.org/web/20190825120042/http://www.nbcnews.com/id/11714763/t/tauzin-aided-drug-firms-then-they-hired-him/#.XWJ4gmimOUk
http://www.ssqq.com/stories/cancerfight08.htm