Image
In this first in our series of shows on the topic of science and its benefits, or otherwise, to human beings, we subjected modern medicine to an in-depth and experience-based analysis of the root causes of human illness.

In combination with modern technology, modern medicine has undoubtedly brought various benefits for human health and longevity. At the same time however, a startlingly high percentage of people today, particularly those living in Western 'first world' counties, suffer from an increasing number of 'modern diseases' that have proven to be incurable with modern allopathic techniques.

From various forms of cancer to heart disease and diabetes, modern medical treatments can only alleviate the symptoms of these diseases by way of a plethora of pills (like statins) that sufferers often must consume for the rest of their lives. In addition, many of these pills carry significantly deleterious side-effects.

On the 'bright' side, as the sole purveyors of these pills to the doctors that prescribe them, multi-national pharmaceutical companies have grown outrageously wealthy, bringing into question whether or not there may be a conflict of interest and if these companies are truly committed to improving human health in a real way.

Studiously ignored by the medical establishment is the increasing evidence that diet is a major contributor to health and that what we eat may be a significant contributing factor to the rise of these modern diseases that have, in some cases, reached almost pandemic proportions.

Running Time: 02:11:00

Download: MP3



Here's the transcript:

Joe: Hi and welcome to another SOTT Talk Radio. First and foremost, happy Easter to all our listeners, happy genetically modified Easter is probably more appropriate. This week we're going to discuss health issues as you've probably figured from the title of the talk. Modern medicine promises an awful lot yet so many people today are sicker and sicker in larger and larger numbers. Meanwhile pharmaceutical companies have raked in enormous profits at the expense of people's health. Based on our own research it seems plain as day that the quality of one's diet is central to a healthy lifestyle. Did the scientists working for big pharma miss this memo? How is it that they have not made the obvious connections between diet and health? So this is going to be the first in a series of shows on the various aspects of science and this week we're dealing with modern medicine and health. With me in the studio today is Laura. Say hello Laura.

Laura: Oh hi.

Joe: Jason and Chu and Pierre. All of whom have very impressive biographies which I won't bore you with. But it suffice to say that they all have something important to share with us on the matter of health and their experiences with modern medicine. So take it away guys.

Jason: Suddenly I feel the urge to do a monologue from Austin Powers.

Laura: Go ahead.

Jason: My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium. You know that monologue.

Laura: Ah, I see. Well I think that the thing that kind of connects all of us at the table here together is that we've all dealt with some fairly serious health issues.

Jason: I almost died.

Laura: Yeah, there's actually two people sitting here at the table that were really at death's door and got pulled back and have a completely different appreciation of life and what they put in their mouth in terms of diet and how they live their lives. And I think probably the most impressive is Pierre's story. And Pierre is going to share a little bit about it with us. I want to tell you that I met Pierre many years ago, or quite a few years ago. He was some kind of an executive type person down at the big science research center in France, down at Luminy. And my husband, who is a physicist, was invited to a conference or a seminar of some sort down there by one of his colleagues.

And Pierre found out that we were going to be down there and he said well, when we were there, that he would take me and show me around. So while my husband Ark was doing mathy things, Pierre showed up and took me in tow and took me around to some cathedrals, down to look at the boats, to see things, do things, told me all the stories about Marseilles, etc. And we just kind of hit it off and we've been friends more or less ever since. He would visit with us here and we would see him when we went to Marseilles. And then the day came that he was telling me or we were exchanging emails and he was telling me about some health issues he was having. And I think maybe you better tell the folks what started happening Pierre and what you did.

Pierre: Yes, hello everybody. Ironically the place where I was working in was dedicated mostly to science and health industry, pharmaceutical industries and biotech companies and it was a life science research center. So I was on the supply side of the chain, of the market. And later on, as you can guess, I have been on the demand side, on the patient side of the pharmaceutical market. So it started in 2008 actually. In 2008 I started to lose progressively mobility in the hand. And I went to doctors and doctors saw me. "Yeah, there's carpal tunnel syndrome, inflammation". It was the first wrong diagnosis since the paralysis started to spread further up my left arm, then reaching the elbow. I met several specialists. All the time it was the same story. You're in a waiting room a lot. You meet a relatively arrogant specialist. You pay quite a lot. The specialist is sure of his diagnosis. So second wrong diagnosis, it was a cubital [tunnel] syndrome. It was an inflammation of the nerve that's pinching the elbow. I had to go for surgery immediately. Like for the carpal tunnel.

But the problem is that it started to spread further up, so it was not the elbow, it was higher than that. So the third diagnosis, I'll be quick and won't give all the details, but many consultations, a lot of money spent, different creams and anti-inflammatories and painkillers. And for one diagnosis it was a disc between the 5th and the 6th cervical vertebra. It was wrong again. And all along my health kept deteriorating. Here we are at the point of the third wrong diagnosis. I've lost all the motricity in the left hand, in the left arm, in the left leg I'm starting to lose motricity. I've lost digestion, sleep, hunger, and memory is starting to go away. And so we planned an MRI. I had to wait two months for the MRI although my health state was going down the drain, you know? It was pretty serious at this point already.

And this MRI revealed a tumor in the brain, but a minor tumor, non-cancerous. That was the fourth wrong diagnosis as you can guess. It was a meningioma which is very minor and very common. So I went back home after this MRI result and it got very bad. I spent six days not eating, not sleeping, and not drinking. And this night, the sixth night, I could feel I was dying. I was not going to be able to go through the night. So I drove to the hospital, Central Hospital, emergency department. And I spent about two years turning around the hospital. I was not finding the entrance. I couldn't think straight anymore. I was admitted there. I went for surgery and at one point we kind of developed later probably that I think we should not throw the baby with the bath water. There are good things in the current health system, not a lot, there are good things. And I think surgery is one of those things that are fairly good compared to chemotherapy, radiotherapy and pharmaceutical drugs in general.
Anyway, the surgery went well, it was long surgery, about five hours. And during the biopsy, they discovered that it was a very rare tumor called anaplastic ependymoma, the size of a mandarin, so pretty big cancerous tumor. There are five cases in the world that are listed. So doctors have basically no clue about how this kind of tumor can spread, can develop metastasis or not. It's been ranked as a grade 3 cancerous tumor by the WHO (World Health Organization). Anyway, long story short, I started to recover after this surgery that was performed well, that managed a total removal of the cancerous tumor, in that case the visible tissues and cells. I recovered slowly but surely, month after month, with digestion coming back, energy coming back, sleeping and coming back.

And I had a relapse actually. I had a relapse, got a second surgery on the third of January of this year, 2013. The second relapse, I saw it coming quite quickly because I'd see like the first tumor, I saw the seizure was a particular sign that there was a second tumor developing in my brain. I knew about it. And so we went to the emergency again. I told the doctors at the emergency ward about the seizures. I told about my history. And all he could say is finally, although the scan 1 revealed the presence of a tumor, you need an MRI plus dye. But this guy obviously didn't think it was serious enough, he ordered a scan. I went for the scan the very same day. He looked at the scan and he said "Well it's not bleeding, so it's not an emergency. Go back home." I was having seizures like four, five times a day at this point. With a tumor growing in my brain and I knew that every day that passed you lose more motricity. And some you don't recover. It was four years ago, the first tumor. And I didn't fully recover yet. And will probably not recover fully this lost motricity. So time is really important in such matters.

Anyway, I went for a second surgery that was pretty quick and very well performed by a very good surgeon. And the irony of the story, another ironic point, is that while I was recovering from the surgery in my hospital bed, this doctor from the emergency ward, who told me "yes, no bleeding. Your tumor's not bleeding so go back home, there's nothing serious", was there in the hospital and he went in my room. I said "Hello doctor X", we're going to call him this way, "do you remember me?" He said "No." And I said "I remember you. I met you at the emergency ward in the hospital and you say there was no problem and the tumor was not bleeding and was not an emergency. And I got surgery in emergency and they removed the tumor the size of a grape roughly". So he was sorry, at least he recognized he was sorry because usually, at least in France, doctors are pretty arrogant and they're always right and the patient is ignorant and is always wrong. At least he said he was sorry but he could skip my bedroom. He understood I didn't want him to perform any health care for me, knowing the history. He had pretty bad recall, so I preferred to avoid any care from him.

So I try to be quick. Basically that's the story.

Laura: Well that's the main event of what happened to Pierre, but you have to understand there's a couple of other things that went on here because during his recovery, he went on what we call a paleo diet and at a certain point later in the diet, he went totally ketogenic which means to keep your protein levels controlled and no carbs at all. And he did not receive radiation. He did not receive chemotherapy after the first or the second. And the reason was that there is no evidence that - well he wants to say - okay, you tell.

Jason: Yeah, let him tell it.

Pierre: Yeah, about diet. First we can say or so that for 11 years just prior to the first tumor, I'd been a vegetarian, an intense vegetarian like Lierre Keith describes in her book, because it made me feel special is probably the main reason, also because of the animal compassion thing. And I don't think it was the triggering factor for my brain tumor but I think it was definitely an aggravating factor. And after the first tumor, I switched to a paleolithic diet and ketogenic diet. And I think if I'm still here today the one main reason is the change in diet because, well let's face it, this kind of tumor survivor rate at three years is about 40 percent. Sixty percent die within three years, so it's real nasty. Here I'm talking statistics for the kids because it's a tumor that is rare among kids and almost inexistent amongst adults. So we have no statistics for this kind of tumor in adults.

Anyway, there was this change in nutrition that was a main factor for the recovery and I didn't go for radiotherapy and chemotherapy although it was strongly advised by my surgeons. The surgeons said basically "you have to go through radiotherapy otherwise you're going to have a tumor again and you're going to die". But if you look in the scientific papers, we discover there it's not one single study about efficiency of radiotherapy, effectiveness of radiotherapy for anaplastic ependymoma, this very specific kind of tumor.

This kind of tumor is part of a broader family, glioma, and for the glioma you have one scientific paper that measures the effectiveness of radiotherapy after a total excise, total removal of the tumor. And the results are, if you go for radiotherapy after surgery, the relapse rate will drop but, it's major point, the survival rate that is already low drops even more. So it means radiotherapy, yeah, there will be less relapse...

Laura: Because you're dead. (laughter)

Pierre: ...because you will die. And sure when you're dead, the brain tumors stop growing. And another interesting anecdote is that with the second surgeon that operated on the second tumor, he told me "Yes, after the first tumor, since there is absolutely no statistical evidence, it's legitimate that the doctors advised no radiotherapy". That was not the case at all. The doctors advised the radiotherapy after the first tumor although they had absolutely no data. And it seems that although we think neurosurgeons are fundamentally scientific individuals, the way they behave, the way they prescribe treatments, is more based sometimes on habits, routines, beliefs than the hard statistical evidence, hard scientific data. So that was quite puzzling to learn that from the second surgeon.

Jason: I always think about this in terms of there's a group of guys who do a radio show. And this is a call-in radio show where you basically take your telephone and you hold it next to your car and turn it on, if it's turning or, or try to turn it on, and they will tell you everything about your car. And they will tell you what is wrong with it. And they have a surprising accuracy rate. These guys are really good. They're older guys. They've been working on cars for years. They're mechanics, right? And a surgeon is a little bit like a mechanic, okay? When it comes to taking out bolts, unbolting a bolt, changing your oil, things like that, they are really, really good. But you know what? Mechanics, generally speaking, don't necessarily make good car engineers or good car designers. You can't say "Hey, you're a mechanic. Why don't you design a new car that will be really popular?" They don't necessarily know anything beyond working with their hands and screwing in some bolts and cutting you up. I've been with a lot of doctors and I've been with a lot of surgeons and that's kind of the conclusion that I've come to. If he wants to talk to me about exactly how he's going to cut something out, I'll listen to him. But his opinion on anything else is just irrelevant to me because I've been told so many insane things by surgeons and doctors, period, that when it comes to how does something mechanically work, it's okay, but if you ask them why something is, they never have a good answer. They don't know.

Pierre: I agree. And surgeons basically are mechanics and they're not specialists in oncology, in radiotherapy, in chemotherapy, which are very specific fields and that are very different from the surgery. Another factor to take into account probably is the financial factor. When you start talking about radiotherapy and chemotherapy, you are in big pharma business. Big pharma business, the field I was working in before, getting sick, basically developed therapeutic molecules. Therapeutic molecules are 100 to 500 million Euros to develop, to go through FDA to accept the FDA agreement to go through the four phases of clinical trials. It means it's really for big, big players. An independent researcher, an independent discoverer who finds a promising drug, will not be able to go to clinical trials. To fund it, you have to go to venture capitalists and to sell this drug to big pharmas. So here you enter a big financial system where drugs are very expensive to develop and block busters, i.e. the drugs that sell the most, reach between $1 billion and $6 billion net sales a year. The pharmaceutical industry is an industry that for years has displayed, has exhibited a two-figure growth rate and a two-figure profit rate.

Jason: Wonder why.

Pierre: And the driver, when you think about it, it's crazy that the main driver of the people who develop the drugs that are supposed to cure us, the main driver, is profit maximization. Because at the head of those big pharmaceutical companies are speculators, investors, people whose sole objective, main objective, is maximization of their worth, not the maximization of people's health.

Laura: Let me just interject something here. One thing that Pierre hasn't mentioned yet is the fact that the doctor, the initial surgeon predicted that without radio or chemotherapy or both, that his cancer would return and it would go metastatic and he would be dead in a very short period of time. Well that did not happen. What happened was he did indeed have a regrowth of the tumor, which was caught very early on, but he had subsequent complete MRIs of all the related areas of the body, the spinal cord, all of those parts that would be connected to the brain, and there is no presence of cancer anywhere else in his body. The surgeon who did the second surgery, speculated that the second tumor may have re-grown from a filament, a root-like filament that was left from the previous tumor, and it re-grew in the brain. So of course the possibility exists that if there were some cancer-killing agent he could have been taking or getting from his diet, it probably wouldn't cross the blood-brain barrier. But what also is evident is that nothing spread in his body anywhere. It was just totally self-contained.

We hoped of course that this second surgery was the last, because we don't want to have to do this every three or four years. So he undertook a program for about two months following the surgery of taking liposomal vitamin C, which in the denatured form - what's it called again?

Pierre: DHA.

Laura: Yeah. So he was taking this daily in fairly massive doses to - how much were you taking a day?

Pierre: About 30 grams because the interest of liposomal DHA is that a) it crosses the blood-brain barrier and b) the absorption rate is about 95 percent. So it means you can reach very high concentrations of vitamin C in your body, concentrations that are high enough to be toxic to cancerous cells. And that's why for cancers, most vitamin C treatments or all vitamin C are not efficient because you reach your bowel tolerance level before reaching a high enough concentration to destroy cancerous cells.

Laura: And another thing is that sugar, glucose, competes with vitamin C on the binding sites of the cells. So in order for vitamin C therapy to be effective, you have to be completely sugar-free. That is in a ketogenic state where your body is burning ketones and not glucose in order for the most effective activation of the vitamin C treatment against cancer.

Pierre: Yeah. The transporter in the body that carries glucose from one site to another is the transporter that also carries vitamin C. So if you carry glucose, if you eat carbs, the carriers won't be available to deliver vitamin C in various sites in your body.

Juliana: Now, what amazes me and this is that right now you're connecting carbohydrates/sugar with a modern disease. And a lot of doctors, at least from our experience, just refuse to look into that. In fact, when we suggested to one doctor the vitamin C treatment, he said that it wasn't recognized, it hadn't been studied enough. But then they suggest that you do radiotherapy.

Laura: This also hasn't been studied enough.

Pierre: But the studies, you know, it's really biased because a study is clinically an animal model so in humans clinical trials cost millions and millions of Euros. It's only big players who can fund the studies. So basically the ones who will sell the drugs are the ones who fund the studies. So it cannot be objective.

Juliana: Yeah, but it's amazing how doctors buy that and one of the things we noticed, and I hope there's callers who have stories to tell that will be calling and telling us about their doctors, one of the things is the label of not only ignorance when it comes to diet, I think on average, I might be wrong in the hours, but there's something like 12 hours in the whole career for nutritional studies which is insane when you look at the relationship. And they treat you like you're not allowed to know anything. And if you say something they say "Well, you're not a doctor".

Pierre: Yeah, and not only doctors. I think in their courses they 7 to 15 years in France, they have only two days of courses of about nutrition. But in addition, what they learn during those courses is what we hear in the mainstream media. It's about the five fruits and five veggies and ironically when you study cancerous cell development, the main fuel of cancer is sugar. So the oncologist or the neurosurgeon who knows you have a cancer will advise you to eat your five fruits, full of fructose, i.e. sugar, which is the main fuel of cancer.

Laura: In other words, they're telling you to feed your cancer and get your chemo, okay? So now Jason's got a little story to tell here. I think Chu is going to help him out.

Jason: Oh no, I wanted to talk because why we started doing this show I was talking to Laura. I'm going to call you Laura instead of mom. I don't feel comfortable calling you that. (laughs) Let's be honest, we're not going to be able to conceal the fact that you're my mother. We were talking about this show because there was a BBC presentation, a BBC debate not too long ago with Stephen Fry that I watched called The Catholic Church a Force for Good in the World and it was basically a debate between Stephen Fry and some famous hoodoo in the neo-Darwinian kind of science (Archbishop John Onaiyekan) What? No, it wasn't Dawkins. It was like his lieutenant. It was the sub-pope and some Catholics. And basically of course the Catholics were saying "Hey we do all this charity" and the scientists were saying "Hey you molest all these little boys". So it was kind of like a set up for the Catholic Church, because that's what science has reduced itself to. It's just a parade of horrible, shock kind of debates.

Because I started, after watching this, I kind of realized that modern medicine is very much like what the Catholic Church was back during the enlightenment in a certain sense. Basically before Martin Luther came out with printing this whole bible thing, it was this whole "The priests have the books. We read the books. You can't interpret the bible. You can't have access to it. You're just a sheep in our flock. And you have to go to this special school, become a priest. You have to wear a special uniform. Then you're allowed to read the books in a special obscure kind of language. And then you're allowed to pronounce stuff on religion as long as you do the doctrinal thing." And then the scientists came along, the naturalist philosophers at the time, and they said "Hey, this is real BS". And Martin Luther was like "No, everyone should be able to read it." And that kind of led to the scientific revolution in a certain sense.

And now we have the exact same situation today that we had then with the inverse, which is basically that in order to be able to talk about anything scientific you have to wear a special uniform, a white coat, a thing around your neck. You have to go to a special school for many, many years, you have a special title. You're not called father, you're called doctor and all these different things. And so basically science has replaced religion and takes over the exact same job.

Pierre: And the jargon.

Jason: The jargon.

Pierre: The jargon. If you don't have the jargon, the specific words, you're unable to read, communicate, to learn.

Jason: Right!

Pierre: About the specific field.

Jason: Right. And there are reasons for it, just like there were reasons why they wrote everything in Latin. When you read stuff about what was going on with them collecting up the documents and coming up with the scriptures, there was a reason why they chose Latin and they unified everything at that time, were for very reasonable reasons. It wasn't to obscure things.

Pierre: And still today you have a lot of anatomy, words for anatomy, words for diseases are in Latin.

Juliana: Well some of that's like they want to save you, not help you, you know?

Jason: Yeah it's that sort of thing where doctors today, they don't want to help you. Seriously, because I've been in pain and I've been at hospitals and I've been seriously, like "I need some help". They don't want to help you. They want to save you. And there was one time I went to the hospital and, well okay so quite a long time ago, I'm going to tell the one about the colon thing. I had a colon problem for actually a couple of years. Every six months I would have some very strong intestinal pain and I would just stop eating anything for several days and then it would go away. And each time it would come back it would get worse. So I went to Los Angeles and I worked for this game company. And of course I ate a bad diet there with all the great food in Los Angeles, didn't do so well. I came back and right after coming back I got sick again with this thing that I always had. But it didn't go away. It started getting worse and worse and worse and worse and worse.

Laura: About what age did this start?

Jason: What age did the colon thing?

Laura: The colon problems, yeah.

Jason: Oh I don't know. Probably like, that particular problem, the colon problems themselves that was about 7 or 8. I don't know. That's when the colon problems started.

Laura: Now keep in mind, I was feeding this child what was considered to be an absolutely healthy diet. He had multiple vegetables. He had whole grain breads.

Jason: No basketballs.

Laura: And that was the funny thing was because from the time he was an infant, if I tried to feed him vegetables, he would turn his face. He would cry and hold his hands up and he'd say "No basketballs. No basketballs."

Jason: Because that's what I called vegetables.

Laura: That's what he called vegetables because he couldn't say the word vegetable, so he called them basketballs. And essentially I was getting him to eat his vegetables and his whole grains and his cheese and drink his milk and all the things that I had been told were the things that a good mother fed their child. I felt pretty righteous because I didn't feed my children fast food. They weren't allowed to have cokes or soft drinks or excessive candies or anything like that. If they had a dessert, it was something that I baked at home. I made our own bread. I would sometimes make 25 loaves at a time. Put them in the freezer so that I knew absolutely everything that was in that bread. It was perfect. It was healthy, it was whole grains. It had molasses, it had wheat germ, it had oatmeal, etc. etc. I mean really great bread. I made really fabulous bread.

Jason: It was pretty good actually.

Laura: And so we had all this great bread. We had...

Jason: Corn bread.

Laura: Yeah and we had corn bread. We had collard greens. We had lots of fresh tomatoes, green beans, and the whole nine yards. But he hated his basketballs. But he had this problem going on. And he wasn't really talking about it to me, his mother, because I think there must be something embarrassing about having a colon problem and you don't want to talk about it. So he was having these problems and he wasn't talking about it. And every once in a while he would say "My stomach really hurts". But he wasn't making it clear because I guess he thought it was normal. Carry on.

Jason: I had it for a while. Anyway, so it didn't really get really bad until I was maybe 24, 25 maybe. That's when it started to really kind of get worse. We moved to France and that kind of added a lot of stress and stuff like that so I suppose that kind of made things worse. Anyway, so I got back and I had the problem again and it didn't go away like it normally did. And it kept getting worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. And so I went to the local little hospital and went there and he said "You have this kind of infection and you're going to have to take some antibiotics." And he said "You're going to have to stay in the hospital." And I said I didn't want to stay in the hospital because who wants to stay in the hospital. "Actually, can you just give me some antibiotics and I'll go home and take them." So I went home and I took them and the antibiotics were oral antibiotics and they made the problem worse. So much worse that, my mom can tell you, I have actually given a death bed confession.

Laura: Yeah, he made his death bed confession, he apologized for everything. He was in so much pain. And I really seriously thought he was going to die.

Jason: I thought I was going to die.

Laura: It was so bad. And after they had done these scans, these x-rays, all of these things, and they said that his whole intestines and all of the tissues around were all infected, it was just such a horrible condition. There were mumblings about removing his colon at the age of 25 or something. I was just in a shocked state. And I also knew that if you have an infection in your colon and something goes wrong, it can perforate, it can spill into your peritoneal cavity. You can get peritonitis and you can die. So when he was making his death bed confession I was taking it seriously. Okay, we're going to take you to the hospital.

Jason: So we go back to the hospital. This is like the next day-and-a-half. Because I took the oral antibiotics and they just totally ripped me up. And I go back to the hospital and we finally get in after all of this effort to get in. When we get in it's really late at night, actually, it was like 10:30, 11:00 at night. We go back to the hospital and get into the bed.

Juliana: And it was Christmas day.

Jason: Yeah, this was Christmas day actually. No Christmas day was the next day. It was Christmas Eve, Christmas Eve night. So she calls the doctor and the doctor, the doctor that I was seeing I'm not going to say his name, he wasn't there but this other doctor, and I will say his name because I hate this guy.

Laura: Better not.

Jason: Oh no can't say his name.

Laura: This is France. We can't say his name.

Jason: I can't say his name. Anyway, so then a little bit of a history with this other doctor who is evil, and he was the only one who was available. So she called him. So he came and basically blamed me and said "Well we told you so." And then I was like "Can you give me something for the pain?" And you've got to understand intestinal pain is really kind of bad, you know? It's not a fun kind of pain to have. And I had very severe intestinal pain at this point. And so he said "No, no, I can't give you any. I'll just give you some a paracetamol." And it was kind of like at that point, well actually it wasn't at that point because I was very incoherent at this point, I was doing anything to escape the pain. But finally it did calm down after a while. I got some intravenous antibiotics. But it was after that point that I realized that he didn't want to help people. If he had wanted to help people he would have helped me, in that sense. Here I am in pain. He kind of actually thought I deserved it. It was like I had sinned. It was kind of like the same philosophy that a Christian has when he sees someone suffering from their sins and they say "Well, you shouldn't have sinned." And a Christian doesn't want to help you. He wants to save you, right? He wants to save you. There's a very different idea here than helping people. And that's what doctors are like. Doctors want to save you. They don't want to help you.

Pierre: Yeah. I think you're onto something when you compare the behavior of doctors and the behavior of Christians who believe that pain is somehow part of the expiation process, as if a disease is something that you deserve, you receive from some god. And that the suffering, this pain, you deserve it and you have to go through it, a kind of purgatory. And in France, at least since the beginning of the '80s, for dental treatment there was no anesthetics used. I remember when I was a kid, about 7 years old, I had chronic otitis. And it was too bad. So I had to go to a doctor who pierced my eardrums. And he didn't use any anesthetics. So basically he put a needle in my eardrum and he pierced the left one. And then he pierced the right one. And it was very painful, actually.

And France as a catholic country, the granddaughter of Rome, fundamentally catholic, has been notorious for lagging behind other countries as far as pain treatment is concerned. And also on the political level, on the hierarchical level, keeping the patient in a pain state, making him more dependent on the health system. When you have the more pains, you don't need a doctor so much. You might think about, you might discuss his opinion, you might go to another doctor because this one is too expensive and to incompetent. When you're in pain, you're desperate, you accept anything. You're vulnerable.

Jason: Yup. You're vulnerable. So yeah, my experience with doctors, because of I've met and talked with a lot of them, I've been operated on more times than I actually can count.

Juliana: Five.

Jason: Five times? Are you considering the first one there?

Juliana: Mm-hm.

Jason: And then that one.

Juliana: That was six.

Jason: That's six. There you go. Okay, so six times. I had six general anesthesias. I've actually had eight general anesthesias. And I've seen lots of different doctors, mostly gastroenterologists. And my opinion is that you talk to them and you find out what they've got to cut out, you know? I'll give you a great example of this; I went to a specialist and I love this specialists. And I don't want to say anything bad about him because he really is a truly great guy. He's probably one of the best doctors I've ever met. And I was very lucky to find him. But I go to this guy and sit down and he gives me this speech because it turns out that I have a disease called Verneuil's, which is a genetic disorder which is kind of incurable. And whenever I had this problem I just have to go get surgeries.

I didn't know this at the time, but I sit down and he gives me this speech. And the speech is "There's no cure". That's the first thing he says. "There's no cure. You're going to have to learn to accept this and realize that whenever you have this problem, you're just going to have to get it operated on and you have to come to terms with that. And a lot of people have problems, but there's no cure." So I said okay. So he said "But there are a couple of things that you can do to ameliorate the problem. The first one" he says "is we don't know, but we've seen that there might be a connection between being overweight and having the problem". And said "Okay, cool I lost 60 kilos". And then I had the problem, so obviously, there's no way. So he said "Okay, okay, I'm just telling you". And he said "The next thing is, maybe if you stopped smoking it will help." And I said "Well hold on a second. How exactly is smoking connected to it?" And he says "Well we've noticed that 80 percent of people who have your disease are smokers." And I said okay. And he said "And if they quit maybe it could help. We don't know. We just notice that there's a high number."

The next thing he says is "You have to maintain your stress." And I said "What do you mean?" And he said "Well one thing we do know about the disease is that when you get really stressed out, it causes a hormone imbalance which causes the disease to activate." And I said "Okay, so can you connect point 3 to point 2?" "What do you mean?" "Well, if people are susceptible to stress and they get stressed out a lot, they might be more likely to smoke because smoking helps you with stress." (laughter) It was like he couldn't make the connection with this idea that he didn't realize there was a correlation, alright? It was the fact that they smoked was actually a symptom of the fact that they had this stressful problem and smoking helped them to manage their stress. People who have stress management strategies, one of them being smoking, and then if I stopped smoking, I'm losing a stress management strategy so that should make it worse.

Laura: Tell them about the vegetables.

Juliana: Yeah, well the thing is during one of those surgeries or after or in between the colon thing, we met another doctor and he said "We're going to do a colonoscopy. We have to." "Okay, so how do we prepare for it?" "Well you have to eat a non-residue diet." And we're like "Well, what is a non-residue diet?"

Laura: Wait a minute. One of the things he said is "We have to calm things down."

Juliana: Yes. "Why do you have to do the diet to calm things down? Okay so what does it consist of?" "Just some mashed potatoes and nothing with fiber and dairy which Jason can't have we know, we've discovered through diet that dairy and gluten are a no-no for his colon and for many people as we just covered. But anyway, when you went through the list, the only thing that was left was fat and meat. And Laura and I looked at each other and we were like "Wait a minute! Is that's what's healthy for the colon? Aren't we supposed to have fiber all the time?"

Laura: Yeah, the thing was, was he was saying you have to get the colon calmed down and you have to get it clean so we can do a colonoscopy. How do you do that? And basically it amounted to eating meat and fat and no vegetables and no fruits. In other words, this was a gastroenterologist who was going to go and look inside somebody's colon and he wanted it to be clean and not messy. And he was telling us the way to get it clean and not messy is to not eat any vegetables. They don't like to do colonoscopies on people who have been eating vegetables because it's messy. It's full of nasty stuff.

Juliana: But they're so brainwashed that even that doctor, when we asked him "Well is that a good diet for him? It might be." He's like "Oh, no, no, you can't go too long without your fiber. You have to."

Laura: As he was just saying to me what irritates the colon is fiber. That's what keeps it irritated and agitated. And I just sat there and I thought "This guy cannot make the connection between what he's saying to me and the fact that he is addressing a patient who has what can only be described as an IBS, irritable bowel syndrome, and a real problem with an irritable colon and one that definitely does not need to be irritated or agitated in any way, and he's saying "Oh no, you've got to have your vegetables" even though that is the thing that is the irritant.

Jason: Well I hate the term IBS. There's two terms that I think should just be erased and they're unfair. IBS kind of sounds like maybe you're just not happy about the food you're eating (laughter) something like that. And leaky gut, I mean, it just sounds like a leaky drain pipe. People don't really understand the pain, the embarrassment, and the discomfort. It's really bad because when you have IBS, you start measuring distances in public restrooms. How many public restrooms are going to be on the way to this particular location and will there be a bathroom at this location in case I have an attack. And you become kind of agoraphobic. You don't want to go outside. It's not that you're terrified of going outside. It's that you're terrified of being somewhere where you don't have access to proper bathroom facilities. And so IBS is really a mental disorder and it's a physical disorder all at the same time. It's basically like having a phobia that isn't actually a phobia because it's not unreasonable for you to be afraid of the situations that you've experienced before. And I've had some horrible situations.

Juliana: And no doctor, we met about four specialists, no doctor had showed any empathy whatsoever for it. All they could suggest was kind of like for Pierre, oh, we're going to do some super-duper technology. We're going to sew your stomach. We're going to divide it into three chambers.

Jason: Oh yeah.

Juliana: Basically they're turning you into a cow so that you eat less because "You're problem is that you eat too much probably". And we know he doesn't eat too much.

Jason: The thing that strikes me so much is that there are actually scientific studies that basically have shown that the calorie-in, fat-in, fat on your hips is completely and totally fallacious. That how much you eat has nothing to do with how fat you are. That people who don't eat very much get very fat and people who eat lots and lots and lots don't get fat. We all have anecdotal evidence of this. Every person in the world right now has anecdotal evidence of this. Everybody knows a super skinny person who eats constantly, who has McDonald's every day and who eats fattening, huge quantities of food and never gains any weight. And most of the fat people out there have tried diets where they restrict how much they eat and realize that it doesn't help anything, right? There's anecdotal evidence. Turns out there are scientific evidence against it. There is actually no scientific evidence for it. Okay? And doctors, they don't know about it and it's gotten to the point now where I, as a lay person, know about it then I have to consider them not knowing about it as willful ignorance.

Juliana: Oh, let me tell the one about the protein. That's the example of their ignorance.

Jason: Beautiful.

Juliana: I mean you can't get worse than that. We went to another specialist.

Jason: A gastroenterologist specialist, right?

Juliana: Specialist. What does he specialize in, digestion.

Jason: Yeah, digestion.

Juliana: So Jason tells him "Well for one year I've been doing this paleo diet and I barely only eat meat and fat and it has really, really helped me. I'm not coming to see you." This was at the point where we were still trying to find a diagnosis for Hidradenitis Suppurativa or Verneuil's. He wasn't going there for the colon, and so he was telling the story, he was happy about it and he told the doctor "I only eat meat and it cured all my IBS problems. And the doctor stopped him right there and he said "Well what do you mean? You only eat meat?" "Well yeah, meat and fat." "Well you can't do that! You're going to lack protein!" (laughter) This is a specialist in digestion people.

Jason: Just to be fair he said "You're going to lack protein" in French so it wasn't like he misunderstood the English word. It wasn't like that. He was speaking in French at the time. So he doesn't get off on the whole idea that he doesn't know the word in English.

Joe: Marcel has asked a question which is: "Is there a difference between IBS and leaky gut syndrome or are those interchangeable?"

Jason: So when you're talking about IBS/leaky gut, basically everybody has their own opinion of them.

Laura: They're different.

Jason: They're different. It's like IBS is kind of like the same concept of AIDS in a certain sense. AIDS basically is not really a disease, right? It's a spectrum of disorders that you can have. So when you have AIDS or when you die of AIDS, it basically means that you died of some disease which they can't really account for. Basically if you died of a colon cancer or you died of this or you died of some other type of...

Laura: Pneumonia.

Jason: Pneumonia. People who die of AIDS actually die of other things but they kind of lump them all together into that category based on a couple of rules like whether or not you have a marker for another disease called HIV, which is a passenger retrovirus type of thing. If you have the marker for the white cells, then you die of some disease like pneumonia or there are a couple of different colon cancers that you get and things like that. Then they say that you have AIDS. That's kind of how that works. IBS is kind of in a certain sense the same thing. You have a bunch of different problems and nobody's really sure what it is. You could have inflamed guts and you could have chronic diarrhea, or you could have sort of like chronic constipation, which is kind of funny that the same disease can be either constipated or diarrhetic. So basically when you have all of these different problems and they don't know what the cause is - well actually they should know what the cause is, but they don't.

Laura: Vegetables.

Jason: And then they call it IBS. And it's basically when your intestines aren't functioning like somebody else's, like the normal, the golden mean, which is basically food comes in and then food comes out at a regular interval and you don't have any problems holding it and it's not too liquidy or too hard or too painful or any of these things. And when that's not the case and they don't know why, then they call it IBS.

Laura: And leaky gut is usually something that occurs in the small intestine and not the large intestine. It's when there are damaged areas in the walls of the intestine and partially or not completely digested food can pass directly into the blood stream through the walls of the intestine. And it usually comes from damage to the cells lining the intestine. And that damage is usually caused by gluten and casein which are proteins of grains and dairy respectively.

Juliana: GMOs.

Jason: And you'd think that something called gluten, i.e. glue, would not cause the walls to open up. And the problem of what happens with that is that when the stuff escapes from your colon in the wrong form, like when the food hasn't been properly digested...

Laura: In the small intestine.

Jason: In the small intestine, when it leaks through the sides of the walls, your body's autoimmune system notices that it's a foreign body. It hasn't been broken down properly into a consumable form. It sees it as a foreign body and then it starts to attack it. And so it causes an immune reaction. But it causes a secondary immune reaction which is why you don't have an immediate response which is why it's so difficult for you to realize that when you're eating wheat it's causing a problem because you eat the wheat. And, of course, it's opioids so you feel immediately good. In fact you feel good for probably about 24 hours afterward of eating some wheat. And then you start feeling like crap.

Laura: Then your autoimmune reaction starts kicking in.

Jason: But that's at the point when it starts leaking through the gut and your autoimmune reaction kicks in and then you start swelling up and you get the inflammation.

Laura: And you eat some more bread to get some more opioids, so you can feel better, but meanwhile, that autoimmune reaction has kicked in in such a way that it starts attacking your own tissues. You can have your joints attacked. You can get arthritis. You can get lupus. You can get things like multiple sclerosis. You can get heart disease.

Juliana: Even mental problems, schizophrenia.

Laura: You could have mental problems. Yeah, schizophrenia is linked to gluten intolerance. And you can be gluten intolerant without having celiac disease. In fact most people on the planet are probably gluten intolerant or gluten sensitive.

Jason: The problem is celiac is extreme. That's when you start actually having physical damage to the villi in the gut.

Laura: That's irreparable.

Jason: It's irreparable. That's another one of those things. When we went to the doctor - can I tell this one about the liver?

Laura: Yeah.

Jason: So we went to the doctor with Ariel.

Laura: No name, little sister.

Jason: Oh, little sister. Sorry. Went to the doctor with my little sister, can't use names. So anyway, so we go to the doctor and she's sitting there talking to him and she wants to get a test. We've been trying to find out what's wrong with her. The doctor doesn't know what's wrong with her. She's hasn't been feeling so well. We, of course, do our own research and we ask "Well can she have this test? Maybe this test would help." And of course the doctor takes great offence to having any kind of suggestion. And he says "No, no, no, we can't do that because she doesn't have organ damage so we can't do the test."

Juliana: Well it's exactly the same thing that happened to Pierre. In fact before we managed to get the MRI, we had to call five hospitals. And he had to drive five hours to have his MRI done because the scan wasn't showing any bleeding. Now they wait until your organs are destroyed or your brain is bleeding to do something about it!

Laura: I wanted to ask this guy "Do you only diagnose in the dissecting room?"

Jason: Yeah, exactly. Do you only diagnose when you do the autopsy. Jesus Christ guy!" I mean the thing is, with me, whenever I went to the hospital or the doctor or something like that they always kind of treated me like there was something wrong with the way I was living that was causing these problems. And then finally after years, I go to a doctor and he explains to me "No, as it turns out, it's just you lost the genetic lottery when it comes to this. And actually, you didn't lose the genetic lottery." Basically, my health problem, which is very terrible, comes basically from having kind of like an old left-over gene that would work really, really well if I lived in a wet, cold environment and I would have no problems whatsoever. But because I don't live in a wet, cold environment, and I'm not swimming around all the time, my skin produces a little bit too much oil and a little bit too much carotene and then I have this problem. So it's irritating because they treat you like there's something wrong, not so much that there's something wrong with you, as that you're doing wrong things. You're not doing the right thing. You're sinning.

Laura: Tell about the woman and the milk.

Jason: Oh Jesus Christ!

Juliana: Oh well then that was another one. After four surgeries within one year, Jason had a blood test and I think you were low on vitamin D or something?

Jason: Oh this is the great thing. Okay, so hold on a sec. So I had to travel all the way to Lyon to have the surgery. So I had - should I give a little bit of details so people will understand what was going on?

Laura: Yeah.

Jason: So I had this whole intestinal problem and I cured the intestinal problem which was great. But because it had weakened the walls of my colon, I ended up with a fistula, which is terrible. And then I was in Austria and developed this fistula. It was horrible. I ended up in the hospital in Austria which is a whole other story that's absolutely fantastic. I come home and I'm looking for some help with this problem. I go to this French doctor at this clinic who is the place where the mean doctor was, and I didn't want to see the mean doctor, so I saw his partner. And his partner was such a retard that I told him I was going to get a second opinion. And he got mad at me and basically banned me from the clinic, saying "Well you want a second opinion, you don't appreciate me, blah, blah, blah."

So we find this specialist, go to the specialist. I give the diagnosis for Verneuil's because he was actually kind of a clever guy, even though he didn't know about the protein issue, and he fixes the fistula problem. So I had that surgery. But when he goes down to fix the fistula problem, he notices that I have Verneuil's, right? And he's a surgeon, and surgeons kind of like, they can't not cut on you if there's a reason. Like, they're just obsessed with excising tissues. So he wasn't satisfied with just putting in a seton for my fistula, he decided to cut out around my anus basically. So I had a big giant gaping wound right under my anus, which is very, very stressful.

And so I came back. I come out of the surgery and he says "Oh, and by the way, I cut out a little bit of this problem that you have." A little bit (laughing). He said "Oh no, it's not any bigger than my thumb" (cracking up laughing). And I'm on so many painkillers, and nothing's wrong and go home. They take off the bandage. It's like the size of a small teacup right under my bootie. I'm like "Oh Jesus Christ!" So that heals up, right. And then I go back to him (laughing). I go back to him to get the seton taken out and the bastard cuts it open again. He says it healed too quickly (laughter). I said "What do you mean 'it healed too quickly'? When is that a criterion?" Oh my god!

So this is like I had these three surgeries there. Get put in, get the thing cut out, then I had to have another surgery to get it replaced and then another surgery to get it cut out and then I had to go up to this specialist in Lyon. I get eight wounds; the largest one is nine centimeters long by 4 centimeters in the deepest place, right? All in my junk, basically, this is all junk wounds. This is totally like the worst possible place you could ever have holes this big (laughing). And so I come down from having these and this is my fourth surgery. I have holes in my body, nine centimeters by four centimeters deep. I go to a hyperbaric chamber because obviously this is problem where you don't want to be healing for a long time. And there was a doctor at the hyperbaric chamber. And the hyperbaric chamber says "Well I control everything" because she's also doing experiments. "So you're going to have to see our nutritionist".

Laura: (laughing).

Jason: And I'm just like "Okay." So the nutritionist wants me to have a blood sample. So after all of these surgeries, all of this stress, all these prescription medications, everything, this whole time I'm eating just the paleo diet, she gets the partial test results back. And I was completely normal on everything. I was perfect on everything except one thing. What was it?

Juliana: Vitamin B I think.

Jason: Vitamin B? Yeah. I was a little bit low on vitamin B, right? And the nutritionist totally freaks out because she predicts that I'm going to be low on everything else. They only got partial results back. And so they only got this vitamin B and a couple of other things and she's like "Oh my god! You're going to die! You have to take special health stuff."

Juliana: Yeah, it was like a baby formula, milk with extra vitamins and stuff.

Jason: Yeah, it was milk and vitamins. And we tried explaining to her that I don't drink milk, I'm lactose intolerant. But the doctor refused to accept my word for it. She said "Well you're going to have to get tested for it".

Juliana: And when you did get tested the only thing they could say is "Well you're not celiac. You're making it up."

Jason: Yeah, they said I'm not celiac. I said "Well that doesn't mean that I'm not sensitive."

Juliana: And that can happen to you people. You go there and you know you have some symptoms, but because you're not celiac, they don't test you properly and then they look at you like you're mad or you're some kind of orthorexic, now the new term for people obsessed with healthy eating, and you're actually left with either agreeing and not doing what they say, or just leaving.

Jason: That's what we had to do basically because she wouldn't leave it alone, right? She cornered me one day after I had just gotten out of my hyperbaric session early on. I get out of my hyperbaric session and I'm sitting there. Because it's hyper-oxygenation too so basically you are kind of high after all of this oxygen. So you've been stuck in this tank for two hours being injected full of oxygen so you're really kind of like not in the right state of mind.

She corners me and she starts asking me about what I eat. And so I had to lie because I couldn't say "I eat pork chops." What else do you eat? I mean, people always ask me what else and I'm like "pork chops". Now I eat a little bit more variety, but at the time, when this was going on, I was just eating the pork chops. And then she kept asking me and she said "Well what about cheese?" And I said "No, I don't eat cheese. I don't like milk products." And she's like "Well what about brie?" And I said "Well that's a cheese" (laughter). She was like "Well do you like provolone?" And I said "These are still cheeses" (laughter). And she was like "Roquefort?" (laughter) I said "No, I don't eat cheese!" "Ovaltine?" But she looked exactly like Frau Farbissina from that movie. She did, she looked like a midget version. And this woman basically she looked like Willow Walk. She was three feet tall, I swear to Christ, really, really thin with this turkey neck situation going on. She had like the really pronounced turkey neck. And she was hyper, hyper thin. And I was like "You're going to advise me on health?" Seriously (laughing). I mean the woman weighed 90 pounds. She looked like a cancer survivor. Pierre over here doesn't look like that.

Laura: Pierre doesn't look like that.

Pierre: Just going back I noticed as well that the doctors often bring you this guilt trip which is a way to control you. So you feel guilty and then you are much more submissive to their power. And one of the main culprits is their reasoning basically is that if you're sick it's because you're doing something wrong, which may be partly true. But usually the solution they give to the problem is counterproductive. It's following the five foods, five veggies, and no smoking dogma.

Juliana: Radiotherapy.

Pierre: Yeah, I'm going there. Step by step. So yeah, one of the main culprits is smoking. Smoking is really bad and in mainstream media and all doctors will tell you there's a strong correlation between smoking and cancer, in particular lung cancer. And there is an anecdote, it's not an anecdote, it's the results of some scientific studies. In the'50s before this war against smokers, in the 1950s there was this group of researchers who were conducting research about cancer, smoking and radiations. And they were working on mice, basically. They had a population, a group of mice that was exposed to radiation, ionizing radiation and another group of mice that was exposed to smoking. By the way, they never managed to have a higher rate of cancer in the mice exposed to smoking compared to the mice exposed to nothing. However, when they exposed mice to ionizing rays, the radiation, the cancer rate was going through the roof of course. That's one of the main causes of cancer. And that's why radiotherapy, gamma rays, which is the most dangerous type of radiation, is difficult to understand. Basically radiotherapy, gamma rays, which induce cancer, is supposed to cure your cancer. I didn't understand yet how it works, if it ever works. Anyway, one day one of the researchers made a mistake. And instead of testing normal mice exposing them to radiation, he exposed mice that were exposed to smoking, to smoke and then exposed them to radiation. And what he noticed is that the cancer rate in smokers, in smoking mice, was lower than the normal mice.

Laura: Smoking protects you from radiation.

Pierre: Because smoking stimulates secretion of mucous that acts as a kind of protective layer against radiation, particularly in the lungs, particles that might be inhaled.

Jason: Right, the protective smoker's cough.

Pierre: Yeah, absolutely. And protection to any kind of detrimental dust and any kind of detrimental thing you can find in what you breathe.

Jason: Well yeah, you know you watch The Hunt for Red October and when there's a radiation leak they all pull out the radiation cigarettes.

Juliana: Well it seems to me we're describing two problems here. Apart from the whole religious tone to medicine, one of them is the lack of holistic approach they have. Everybody - you go to a doctor and they say "Sorry, this is not my domain. I only studied the gut. By the way, you're going to die of protein if you eat too much meat." Don't ask me how much they studied that. But none of them, or at least from our experience, have the holistic approach. They don't know how the body really functions. And a lay person can know more about it sometimes. So that's one of the problems that the whole education system concerning medicine and how they're really, really put into little boxes and if you have a heart problem you go to one. If your toe is hurting you can go to another one. But never, ever ask for any advice that doesn't concern their specialty. And that's dangerous because a lot of things are connected.

And the other thing seems to me the problem of authoritarian followers. They seem to be really high in the medical profession. Authoritarian followers, I don't know if we have defined them yet in any show. Yes, we have.

Jason: Yeah.

Juliana: So I mean you have the - can you tell the story about the nurses from Cialdini?

Jason: Oh yeah, in Cialdini there was a nurse study actually done a while ago and basically what these sociologists did is they picked a hospital and they had pre-arranged everything so there was no danger because what they did was very dangerous. Basically what they did is they would call up the nurse at the nurses' station and they would identify themselves as Dr. So-and-So. And they would know the name of a particular patient and what room they were in and say "I want you to go and I want you to give this dose of this medication to that patient immediately". And the dose of the medication they gave was obviously fatal, they picked the medication, I can't remember the name of it so don't ask me for the name of it, I think the medication that the nurse had to know, absolutely, that it was a completely grotesquely fatal dose, and I think it was something like 80 to 90 percent of the nurses had to be stopped by the researchers before administering the dose because they were really going to go through with it.

Juliana: Well the funniest one about, actually not for the people who were going to have it but about the nurses, a guy pretended to be a doctor on the phone and then he showed up and he wrote in the prescription, it was an ear antibiotic, and he wrote in the prescription "Apply on R. ear", right ear he meant. They misread the prescription. Now read R-E-A-R altogether.

Laura: And they were putting it on the rear.

Juliana: Yup. That's how much they don't think when they get orders.

Joe: Okay, we have a caller back here. Hi caller, what's your name and where are you calling from?

Caller: Hi. I'm Robert from New York.

Joe: Hi Robert.

Jason: Hey Robert. What's going on?
Robert: Hey, I noticed these doctors, they're very subjective. I go for a physical every year because I have a commercial driver's license. And the first year I went I had borderline blood pressure. And I told them I smoked and he said "Oh yeah, you're in bad health. You're in bad health". Next year I had a different doctor. Same readings, told him I don't smoke and he said "Oh yeah, you're in really good health. Your cholesterol's great and blah-blah-blah." Nothing changed. Just by saying I smoked.

Jason: Exactly. I've done an experiment with this, right? Because I've seen 10 different doctors and I've gone for several surgeries. So I've tested it. I basically don't tell doctors that I smoke anymore because when you tell them that you smoke, they act differently to you and they have different restrictions on you, like pre-surgery.
Robert: Yeah.

Jason: And they act like you can't smoke or anything like that and if you tell them, no, no, I don't smoke, then you're totally fine. But if you tell them that you smoke, they suddenly find all kinds of things wrong with you and have different recommendations. So it's absolutely hilarious.

Laura: I have a good one on that. I had surgery in 2008 and part of the pre-surgery preparations and check-ups, I got sent around to different doctors who were checking all my systems because when you get to be an old lady, they don't want you to die on the operating table, so they want to check everything out. So I go to the pneumologist, I guess the one that checks your lungs to make sure that you're going to be able to breathe during the surgery, so she asked me if I smoked. And I said oh maybe one or two a day. And so she noted that down and that was a really low number so she didn't figure I was really a smoker. She said "You're not really a smoker." I say "one or two a day". So I get the lung test and I have to breathe into things and check how powerful my in-breath is and my out-breath and listen to my lungs and all this kind of stuff. And she says "You've got the lungs of a baby!" I swear that's what she said. I never bothered to explain to her that when I said one or two a day I meant one or two packs!

Robert: Yeah, we had the breathing test for the respirator and the first time I did it I got 105%, whatever the normal. And then he's like "Well you smoke. You're going to lose it." So anyway the next year I had the different guy and they came up the same thing, 105. Maybe actually more, 107, because the EE, the EE breathing, and he's like "Wow your numbers from last year, you've improved." And afterwards I wanted to say "smoke" but I just kind of like shut up.

Jason: You can't. I did the same thing. To go to the hyperbaric chamber I had to get a lung thing. I had to get a lung scan and everything, get the doctor to do it. And he didn't notice anything. There were zero problems with my lungs and I've been smoking for a very long time, longer than I should have been. So yeah, they can't tell.

Robert: No.

Jason: They ask you don't tell them. They actually can't tell. They don't know. If you don't tell them that you smoke, they have no way to actually diagnose it. Because there's no real marker going on there except that they see the stain on your finger from smoking natural tobacco. Other than that or smell it. Those are the only ways that they can tell that you smoke. It's not like it actually causes health problems. And they say "Don't smoke before surgery" and yet I smoke like right before any general anesthesia I've had and not a single problem.

Laura: I'm telling you, when I came out of my surgery, they had me hooked up to a morphine pump, which meant that I could push the button any time I wanted morphine. But I said "What I really want is a cigarette". I said "Will you unplug me from this damn machine so I can smoke?"
Robert: Yeah, it just irks me that it's not really a science. A lot of it is guessing. It's like going to the mechanic and he doesn't know what it is. He just keeps swapping parts.

Jason: When I first was having this problem with Verneuil's, right, I used to get them on my neck. And I would go to see this doctor in the town across the way, sort of like a normal general practitioner. And he would note down my symptoms and then he would start typing on his keyboard and one time I went and I looked around to see what it was and it was software where they input your symptoms and goes out and tallies all the possible diseases you could have.

Laura: (laughing)

Jason: They basically don't know.

Robert: You can do that for free on WebMD.

Jason: And that's what your doctor uses. You think that they are vetted. You think that a doctor has credentials, but he really doesn't.

Laura: You have to keep in mind that 50 percent of doctors graduated in the bottom half of their graduating class.

Jason: Yeah.

Laura: Figure that one out.

Joe: Alright Robert. Thanks for your call.

Robert: You're welcome. Bye.

Joe: We've got another call here. We'll go ahead and take it. Hi caller, what's your name and where are you calling from?

Caller: My name is Joe.

Joe: Hi Joe.

Caller Joe: The title of your show is Is Science a Force for Good in the World. To me that has a connotation attached to it, which I don't particularly care for. That's like saying "Is eating a necessary force in today's society?" Well of course eating is necessary but people then hear that and say "Well what about global warming?" So science of course is good. It's the abuse of it which is bad. And today's topic, medicine, you're actually making doctors look like idiots which...

Jason: Chill, Joe. Back off. Now the title was taken from the opposite side, right? Sort of the Stephen Fry, the BBC thing, right? They did that about the Catholic Church saying "Is the Catholic Church a Force for Good" and they were saying "no" and their argument was that because some priests have molested children. That was their basic argument. If you watch the BBC thing, that was it. So it's not an unfair title. It's not like we're trying to be all weird with this. We just sort of said well okay let's have a little bit of a response.

Caller Joe: Okay, fine. I'm just saying how the person who listens to this sees that, their initial reaction is going to be the way that I described it, whether or not you put it up that way. That's okay with me. I'm just telling you what I feel about it.

Joe: Hang on Joe. Basically, it's just an open question. It's just wondering whether or not science is a force for good in the world, and like you just said, it's the misuse of science that can be a force for bad. So the point being that science can be a force for good but it can also be a force for bad or for evil, or whatever, if it's misused.

Laura: Just keep in mind Joe also I am married to a 40-year career scientist. We live in the scientific, academic world. He writes books. He writes papers. He's on editorial boards. He does seminars. He taught for many years. He does research. So it's not like we're a bunch of hooligans.

Caller Joe: Alright, don't get all defensive. I'm with you guys. You guys are talking, like I just said before you interrupted me, that you're making doctors look like idiots, which they are.

Laura: They are?!?

Caller Joe: Yeah. A lot of doctors are. Well take a look at the profession itself. There isn't any "better" killing profession than the doctors, other than the government. Two hundred fifty thousand people die per year from preventable actions which the doctors themselves could have taken. So if you can go to a doctor and you can perform these experiments that you've done and the doctors can't tell whether or not you're smoking. And they prescribe pills which don't work, and they've been doing this for decades. You have to ask yourself is it the doctors or is it the science or what is it? Me? I love science because science, if you perform it properly, will give you the answers even if the answers are "I don't know".

Laura: But science has lost its way.

Caller Joe: Because of the abuse of it. Science in and of itself is a procedure.

Laura: Exactly.

Jason: The same kind of thing is that there's nothing fundamentally wrong with religion with a small "r". But with a capital "R" there kind of is. You have to admit that when you add a capital "R" to religion, it really kind of can become a bit of a problem. Like modern world religions, like Christianity or Islam, these kinds of like religions they do actually lead to a lot of negative consequences. They don't necessarily all have bad stuff. Some of them have good stuff. There's good stuff in the bible. There's good stuff in the Koran. There's good stuff in everything.

Caller Joe: Yeah.

Jason: But add the capital letter, it becomes a problem. The same thing happens with science. The scientific method is great. The scientific philosophy is also great. And if people adhered to it and actually follow it, it is a good thing. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with science.

Laura: So many scientists today are not really doing science. They're doing religion with a capital "R".

Jason: It's science with a capital "S". It's the scientific establishment. It's the money and it's the job of being a scientist. It's the job of being a doctor and it leads to a lot of unethical behavior in the same way that there are a lot of priests out there who are molesting little boys and doing all this other stuff. There's no place in the Christian bible where it says "Thou shalt be a pederast." It doesn't happen, right? But people go around and they blame the Catholic Church as an institution for that kind of behavior and for letting it slide. For pushing it under the rug and for tolerating it, right? And we're saying that sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. When you have science, what is science sweeping under the rug? What are they lying about? What kind of problems are they causing? And just because they're not touching little boys most of the time, they're just actually going around killing people or being incompetent or prescribing evil medications or...

Laura: I think the problem comes in when politics and science mix, when big money and big politics has the say-so over what is or is not considered to be suitable research topics.

Caller Joe: That's why doctors get influenced by the pharmaceutical - by the salesmen.

Jason: Exactly.

Laura: Yeah, and the medical schools are funded and supported by pharmaceutical companies.

Jason: But I just want to point out before we get too far away, that many, many years ago, before we came to this problem, the version of what you just said "When politics and science get together it leads to bad things" used to be "when politics and religion get together" when politics and religion ride in the same cart, used to be the old saying hundreds of years ago. And now we've come full circle and now we're saying "When politics and science", so maybe what the problem is, is politics (laughter).

Caller Joe: Yeah, the problem is politics. Science in and of itself, as you've said and I've said, is a neutral activity. It's the abuse of it which creates all the problems that we have.

Pierre: Another thing that religion, spirituality and science or scientific method went through the same process, a ponerization process where they lost their goal along the way. The goals are maybe the most important for humanity, getting closer to objective truth, getting closer to our spirituality and because of ponerization, psychopaths, greed, money, politics came into the game and right now science is not pursuing its fundamental goal. It's going the opposite way.

Laura: That is understanding the order of the universe and our place within it and helping us to live.

Caller Joe: You can't have objective truth otherwise politics would die.

Pierre: Or it would change fundamentally that's true (laughter).

Jason: I wonder when people are going to start asking the question exactly how many politicians do we really need because there seem to be a lot of them. But the thing is we've come to actually accept politics in all kinds of situations where we shouldn't have it. Like when people talk about their work. Let's say for instance they work in the transit authority, right? And they talk about office politics in there. It's ridiculous that you should have politics in these types of situations. Politics is the cancer that permeates every level of life. Even garbage men have politics between the garbage men. Its mindboggling how infested we are with political...

Laura: And politics is about power and control over others, domination.

Joe: Hey Joe, just on the health and medical topic, do you have any personal experience of bad medicine, bad treatment, that kind of thing?

Caller Joe: I try to avoid those leeches as much as possible.

Joe: Oh yeah?

Caller Joe: Yeah.

Jason: Oh my god, please. I've got to tell this story. Every time somebody mentions the leeches. A lot of times when you hear doctors talking about modern medicine they always refer back to two things; bleeding and leeches, right, those two basic things. They basically say "Well modern medicine is better today because remember back in the old days they used to bleed people and leeches." And so one day I'm watching, I think it was the Discovery channel and they were talking about...

Caller Joe: Gangrene.

Jason: What? Yeah, they were talking about labs and they produce an anticoagulant for post-op, right? And what they were talking about is all this stuff. And they say "And then we grind up leeches." (laughter) I said "Wait a minute. You use leeches for anti-coagulant?" It was like "oh my god!" And so then, right, so then I'm reading about some procedures and there's a disease called hemochromatosis, we've been talking about it on our forum, and basically the prescribed solution for this is bleeding. I just said "Jesus Christ!"

Laura: Yeah, you just go out and unload about 500 milliliters of blood every two weeks.

Jason: So basically it blows my mind. Sorry. So whenever anybody says the leeches thing, I'm always reminded of the fact that modern medicine still uses leeches. So go ahead man. Sorry. I interrupted you.

Caller Joe: Well aren't they using leeches because leeches eat around live tissue and they only eat the dead tissue? Because I think a few years ago I came across something that even as an experiment or even as a regular procedure, some institution was doing that.

Jason: Yeah, they use maggots. Maggots are excellent for that.

Caller Joe: Maggots maybe. Yeah.

Jason: Maggot will eat necrotic tissue and not eat the living tissue. So if you put them in a wound, they will actually clean it out.

Joe: Yeah, the leeches thing because in their saliva they have an anti-coagulant so they can stay on you and keep the blood flowing, to stop it coagulating.

Laura: I think they'd have to put me under general anesthesia to put any maggots on any wound of mine.

Joe: But I was wondering in that whole thing, how do you train a leech how to spit, you know? (laughter)

Jason: I think they were forcibly extracting the spit.

Joe: Anyway Joe, you got any more questions?

Caller Joe: No, that's it.

Joe: Alright. Thanks for your call.

Jason: Thanks for calling. Sorry I got a bit defensive there.

Pierre: Those two examples, leeches and bleeding, make me think that maybe the program is more global than that and it's symptomatic, no pun intended, of the loss of a lot of knowledge and ancient wisdom about effective treatments. And if you look at big pharma, a lot of the molecules actually come from natural medicine, ancestral, known for centuries in tribes in the Amazon or other places. Big pharma gets the natural molecule produced by nature. They have to treat it so they can patent it. So they treat it. Usually there are a lot of chemicals that are not necessarily good for health. They patent it and make millions with it.

Jason: Then they fill - they do this one thing. One of the reasons why I can't have oral antibiotics is because they put two products in them that really give me problems. They put gluten and lactose. And I have a little bit of trouble understanding why exactly they do this, into a pill. Because for a while I was getting antibiotics, they didn't have any gluten and lactose in them and suddenly they started adding it in. And I'm like why exactly?

Pierre: They do the same for cigarettes, actually. Most of the detrimental effects induced by cigarettes come, not from tobacco, it comes from the texture and flavor agents, chemicals that are added to a natural substance that has been considered as beneficial and used for centuries, if not millennium.

Jason: When I was coming of age, probably 19, 20, there was this big thing called the truth movement. I don't know if you guys ever saw it. The truth movement was basically they got a whole bunch of Abercrombie and Fitch kind of jock-looking kids, supposed to be cool and they would go around and tell you interesting facts about cigarettes, right? And one of the things they'd do is they were putting up billboards. This was like a commercial on TV. They were putting up billboards with a list of all the chemicals inside of cigarettes. There were things like formaldehyde and arsenic and all these different things in different quantities. And I said "But that doesn't come in the plant. That's added in by the tobacco company. Why? Why do they need to?" And then there's this American Spirit came out and they were like "We don't have any additives." But the surgeon general made them put on the front of their packs "The lack of additive chemicals does not mean a safer cigarette."

And I said "Well hold on a second. If I have a glass full of water and it has a drop of arsenic in it and then I have another glassful of water and it has two drops of arsenic in it, which glass is worse?" The one with two drops of arsenic is worse than the one with one drop. The one with one drop is safer. If I have to drink one of the glasses, I'm going to pick the one with less poison than the one with more poison and therefore, logically speaking it must be safer to have less poison than it is to have more poison. So I said that's illogical to say that it doesn't make for a safer cigarette because when you take out the arsenic from the cigarette, suddenly it's not as poisonous. But they're not legally allowed to say that. And I said "Well hold on a sec because that's not the truth."

Pierre: Talking about that, when you talk about arsenic, I thought about micro doses in homeopathy. And it reminds me of two other weaknesses of the modern health system today. The first one is I live in France and there's a total denial of any other kind of therapy, except allopathy. It can be massage or tai chi or meditation or acupuncture all that is considered as charlatanism. Another weakness as well is the causes. I think doctors are very good in some fields. In their own fields, but there is a holistic problem, that's a weakness. They're very good at defining a diagnosis, like a mechanic, you know? You have this kind of failure. This part is not working and they're good at mechanical intervention, hiding the problem. But the one thing that is missing is the identification of the fundamental root of the disease, whether it is nutritional, environmental or emotional. There's no connection and no focus, no treatment of the fundamental cause of the disease so you only hide, you patch, but it will come back because the root is still there.

Jason: I have another story that that inspired right? So I'm going to this hyperbaric chamber and the doctor tells me "You have to do four two-hour sessions a week or else it won't work." And so I said okay. One week I couldn't so I went double sessions actually for one and then the next week I did my four sessions. And I had two centimeters of growth. It's quite impressive actually, two centimeters of growth on the wound. I thought wow, that's really good. And then the next week I could only come to two sessions because of some various different circumstances which we won't go into. So I go in and at the end of each week they measure the wounds. And so I go in and I get the wounds measured and I only went for two sessions but I had 1.5 centimeters of growth. I only went for two sessions. She said "Oh yes but you only went to two sessions, it's a placebo effect." And I said "Well the placebo effect has the word "effect" in it." If it works, I'm not really going to complain here.

Laura: There was 1.5 centimeters of placebo.

Jason: And then afterward I said to the nurse "Numbers don't lie. 1.5 centimeters is 1.5 centimeters, you know." And the week when I didn't go at all, I actually had missed one entire week, it only grew 0.5 centimeters for the entire week.

Pierre: The placebo effect is a reality.

Jason: It is.

Pierre: Actually when you look at some studies made by pharmaceutical companies, you're surprised at the difference between a placebo group and the group that took the new molecule, and you're wondering about the effectiveness of the drug. Sometimes the difference is not so high.

Jason: Negligible.

Pierre: But it also shows that the emotional dimension, the mind plays a fundamental role in the body.

Jason: But doctors say placebo effect as a disqualifier for something.

Pierre: Yeah.

Jason: But the placebo effect is actually a real effect and is quite good, you know?

Laura: Well not only that, but when they see that there is a placebo effect, why aren't they focusing on that as a modality of healing. Looking at what the mind can do.

Jason: Some do. The Harvard Medical School has a website now, I can't remember the name of it, but they do, they have a research center that is researching the placebo effect.

Pierre: There was this example in the book written by this neurosurgeon who describes cancer survivors and cancer survival. And he described the case of this guy who was terminal cancer. And they gave him a drug and finally they gave him, I don't remember exactly the story and all the details, but basically they ended up giving him a placebo because the drug is not available anymore. Or it was a brand new drug still going through clinical trials. It was not available but the doctor promised to the patient, they couldn't deliver. So he gave a fake one. And the guy was in terminal stage, was about to die, has maybe two weeks left. He was getting better and better and better. And then they stopped the placebo and he gets worse. And they restart the placebo, he gets better. And yeah, I think it's totally under-explored, not explored enough, the influence of the mind, influence of the emotions like with AIDS, as this book has been describing, inquiring a bit, is a fundamental factor too. I think if someone has a healthy emotional mind, life, and a healthy nutritional life, he would be safe and healthy.

Jason: Yeah.

Laura: Well, I'm going to tell my little story now because everybody's gotten to tell their story, so I want to tell my story. It's basically about my experience with the medical profession in its various forms. Let me start by saying when I was in college I studied biology and anatomy and physiology and I was going to go into the sciences but then I ended up dropping out after three years. But I wasn't exactly stupid and I did get some fundamental basics of the biological sciences and the health sciences under my belt. And then I went to nursing school. And I worked for a doctor for a while and learned quite a bit there. So it's not like I'm a complete newbie when you start talking about medical topics. I knew a lot of things. I experienced a lot of things. I was there with the doctor I worked for when he performed surgeries. I took medical histories, administered treatment with him. So I wasn't completely blind or ignorant about things.

But the first thing is that I grew up two houses away from a little boy whose mother took thalidomide while she was pregnant for morning sickness. And anybody who doesn't know about thalidomide, look it up on the internet because it was a drug that was approved and prescribed to pregnant women. Pregnant women and of course it was being prescribed for morning sickness which occurs in the early stages of pregnancy which is when certain structures in the forming fetal body begin to differentiate.

And it was only after multiple, many, many, many, I mean really just horribly, horribly high numbers of infants of mothers who were taking this drug were born without arms and with flipper feet and other horrible abnormalities that they realized that they were basically performing experiments on live people. So it was stopped immediately and it was a big scandal. You can look it up on the internet and find out about it.
But anyway, I grew up two doors away from this little boy. He was three years younger than I was and his mother came over and asked my grandmother if I could come down and play with him because he didn't have anybody to play with. And we kind of grew up together and he was my best friend. And I never forgot that this happened to him because a doctor prescribed a drug for his mother because of course I'd learned that during the course of the years.

Then later on my grandfather had some basically getting older problems, atherosclerosis and so forth and they put him on a course of treatment. This was the veterans' administration. And he ended up dying within about four years after they began the treatment. About 10 years later I was watching television. I watched a special on 20/20 where they were exposing the fact that this particular course of treatment that my grandfather had been on had been discovered to have killed many, many people because it was exactly the wrong thing to do for the condition. And they had had so many deaths from giving this course of treatment to people who were suffering from high blood pressure and just basically minor problems, they were killing them.

So that was kind of like strike number two. It was very upsetting, to say the least, to realize that the pills that I had shaken out into my hand and put on a saucer beside his plate, you know "Take your medicine grandpa", that I'd helped to kill my grandfather.
When I was pregnant with my first child, I went in for a prenatal check and the doctor said "Well something doesn't feel right". So he sent me down, this was back in the early days of doing different kinds of scans so you didn't have them easily available everywhere, so he sent me 20 miles down the road to a hospital that had a scanning machine. And they did a scan and I brought it back. He looked at it and he says "Oh you have cancer. We have to do a hysterectomy. You have to pay the money in advance. Show up in the morning with a check and we'll put you in the hospital and get this taken care of right away." And I was very upset to say the least because you go from thinking you're going to have a baby to being told that you're going to have a hysterectomy. So it's a little bit disconcerting, to say the very least, especially when you're 25 years old.

I called a friend of mine to tell her what was going on because I was very upset. You call a friend to just talk to them. Well it just so happened that this friend of mine was the personal secretary for the head of the nuclear medicine department at the University of South Florida teaching hospital. And she says "Wait a minute!" She says "That doesn't sound right. Why don't you let me talk to", her boss's name was Larry at the time, and she says "Why don't you let me talk to Larry and I'll get back to you." A little while later she calls me back and she says "He agrees that it doesn't sound right either, he would like to look at you." So I drove all the way over there and he took his lunch hour to do the scans himself and he said "I don't think its cancer, but the history is a little strange. I'd like you to go down to Tampa General and see" one of his colleagues who was doing rounds there at the time.

So I get in the car and I drive down to Tampa General. The guy apparently was expecting me. So they took me right in. So he had about 10 of his best students and they were all standing around. So they sat me down and they asked me questions, blah, blah, blah. And then they examined me. And if you've never had a gynecological exam with ten doctors in the room, you've missed out on one of the most interesting things in life. But there I was and it was going and it was a serious situation. So one of them said, finally after they'd talked to each other over me for a little while, they said "Well, what if she's pregnant?" And they looked at each other like "God, what a concept!" And they said "Well there's only one way to find out." And at this point in time, the only person in town who had a sonogram that showed moving pictures, remember this time sonograms were basically stills, the only one who had one that showed moving pictures was a gynecologist over by another hospital, St. Joseph's. So I had to drive over there, because they called him up. I drove over there and he whips out his handy-dandy, super device and does the sonogram and lo and behold I was in fact pregnant. You could see a baby with the heart beating. But there was also a very large tumor in front of the uterus.

So the whole point of this story is that one out of something like 12 or 13 doctors got it right.

Pierre: Yeah, it made me think about the one interesting statistics confirming your take on it. At least in France, you have life expectancy statistics according to social/professional categories. And doctors have, on average, a life expectancy that is lower than the national population in general. So you start wondering to what extent do I give my credit, will I believe someone who's not able to take care of his own health, and put my own health in his hands.

Jason: Yeah. I was diagnosed by a doctor who said I was morbidly obese. And this is coming from a doctor who obviously had liver disease, A-sites and a swollen belly like it was about to burst.

Laura: Yeah, that was really funny.

Jason: And then I saw him, I went back to that same clinic, I saw him.

Laura: Well you went on the paleo diet and lost 60 kilos in like nothing flat.

Jason: I lost 60 kilos in nothing flat. I came back and I saw him and he had swelled even more and now he was morbidly obese with the liver disease and liver spots.

Laura: And you were skinny minny.

Jason: And I was now smaller than him. And I just thought it was rich. It was funny. I get a little bit of schadenfreude.

Joe: We've been talking trash about the medical industry and doctors and all sorts of things, but it has to be said that we would probably be in a much worse condition if we didn't have modern medicine.

Jason: Well that's the line that they sell you.

Laura: Yeah, well let me tell you my positive story.

Joe: Put it this way: if we were eating and living in exactly the same way we are today and did not have modern medicine, people would be worse off.

Laura: Yeah, let me tell you the positive thing. The positive thing is I believe that the judicious use of antibiotics has saved many, many lives.

Jason: Absolutely.

Laura: I believe the childbirth attended by physicians has saved many, many lives because I got into genealogy a few years ago and I was doing all of these genealogy charts and blah, blah, blah, and it was just absolutely astonishing the numbers of women who died in childbirth that you could map on a genealogical tree and husbands that would marry two or three wives because they had two or three wives died one after the other in childbirth. And in fact, I have five children, and two of my deliveries my children would have died if I had not been in a hospital with competent medical care. One of them is sitting right here beside me. He was born with the cord wrapped around his throat and he was strangling.

Jason: Like a Furyan. Ahhhh.

Laura: He was strangling as he was being delivered. And my youngest child had to be borne by an emergency Caesarean in the middle of the night because she was trying to deliver sideways. Her arm came out and the doctor said "Oops, this isn't going to work. So hold it while we get you prepped" and so for 45 minutes I held it. (laughing)

Jason: Hold it!

Laura: Yeah. Try that when your body is screaming "Deliver! Deliver! Deliver!"

Jason: Well that's the thing; the bad medicine rides in on the benefits of the good medicine.

Laura: Well there are many, many fine doctors. And I have known some fine doctors. And I've known some very intuitive, caring doctors.

Jason: Absolutely.

Laura: But I would say that the percentage rate is about four to six percent of all the doctors I've ever encountered or known are the really good ones. And the other 94 to 96 percent are really just mechanics. They're okay, but...

Pierre: There's been some major progress as mentioned, of obstetrics, in antibiotics, infectious disease and mechanical surgery. It's not black and white. Today in 2013, if you check the efficiency ratio, if you look at the amount that is invested every year in research, in medicine, health in general, and the end results, I'm not sure that over the last decades modern medicine has been increasing its efficiency.

Joe: Yeah, we've got a call here, so I'm going to go ahead and take it.

Caller: Hello?

Joe: Hi, what's your name and where are you calling from?

Caller: Hi, it's Tiff from Ohio.

Joe: Yeah. Welcome to the show. What's your question?

Tiff: Oh thanks. Well it's not really a question. It's more like a comment, but you kind of switched over to more positive stories, but I wanted to know if you had time to talk about psychiatry and how big of a fraud that is. It's hardly even science at all.

Laura: That's going to have its own show, psychiatry.

Tiff: Oh, okay. Yeah, I'm a psychiatric nurse and it's just mind-boggling just how ridiculous it is, its guess work.

Jason: Major fraud.

Joe: Tiff, what's your take on psychology? Have you any experience with it?

Jason: It's psychiatry she said.

Joe: Or psychiatry.

Tiff: Yeah, I'm a psychiatric nurse. I've been doing that for some years and I've worked in the psychiatric field in another capacity for some years and it's just prescribing one med after another, changing the meds, prescribes another med, it's just ridiculous. And no one ever gets better.

Joe: You said you'd worked in the field for a long time?

Tiff: Yes, I'm a psychiatric nurse.

Joe: So you must have seen a few things then in terms of bad lies?

Tiff: Yeah, I've seen a lot of things, some very incompetent doctors. I've seen shock treatments which is weirdly fascinating but also quite sad. So it's just a big joke to me. I don't know how else to describe it.

Laura: Well watch this space because we're going to talk about psychiatry and psychology, give it its own show and then you can come on and talk to us about it.

Tiff: Okay, cool.

Joe: Alright Tiff. Thanks for your call.

Tiff: Thanks. I enjoy the show.

Joe: Alright. Bye.

Jason: Yeah, it's kind of criminal because everyone is trying to fix people's minds, right? And no one ever asks the question why are people going so nuts? Why are there so many manic depressives that need all these anti-depressants? And maybe it's because the world really does actually kind of suck a lot of the time, especially for a lot of the people.

Laura: Well I think one of the biggest problems is coming back to the issue of medical science and diet. Doctors just simply don't want to go there. We know a person whose father was dying. He was quite ill. He was diabetic and he had some heart conditions and so on and so forth and he had to have his potatoes and his bread and his sweets and everything and adjust his insulin so that he could eat it. And one day this friend of ours ran into his doctor on the street and asked him "Do you think maybe changing his diet would help him?" And the doctor just guffawed and said "Nonsense, stuff and nonsense man. Diet doesn't have anything to do with your health!" This was a doctor who said this! Can you believe that abysmal ignorance?

Jason: It's criminal.

Laura: It's criminal!

Jason: It's negligence. There has to be a point at which the incompetence of a person who's supposed to know certain things when that information is available to lay people. They have an obligation as a professional, to know about it. And not knowing about it is incompetence. It is criminal incompetence. It is malpractice.

Laura: Well compare that doctor who says "Stuff and nonsense! Diet has nothing to do with your health!" to this nutritionist you encountered at the hospital who said "Oh, you have to drink this milk with these vitamins and have this cheese to get these B vitamins" or whatever it was they wanted you to have. At least they had the concept that something you could take into your body could improve your levels of a certain element in your blood.

Jason: It was a nice attempt and all.

Pierre: It reminds me of a story. I met a nutritionist actually during my stay in the hospital. And she asked me what I was eating. I told her about this paleo diet. And this nutritionist was pretty lucid and actually the saying goes like "One of the first proofs of competency is to know the limit of your own competency". And so I described my diet and she said "You know, over 30 or 40 years of professional experience, I've read everything about nutrition and its contrary. And now frankly, I don't know. So they call it whatever they want and I don't know what is good. I don't know what is bad." She was lucid and at the same time she was putting her finger on something that is quite true. The waters have been so muddied, they're so much...

Jason: Intentionally so.

Pierre: ...incompatible information. And black and white and released in that way that for a lay person, it's very difficult to separate the truth from the lies and to follow the right direction.

Laura: Well there's one really simple way to think about it.

Jason: Cui bono?

Laura: Well, not just cui bono, but since the beginning of the campaign to increase the consumption of grains, vegetables, fruits and so forth, and the reduction of the consumption of meats and fats and so forth, the rates of cancer and heart disease have gone through the roof in tandem with that activity.

Jason: Isn't the increase in diabetes is like 800 percent?

Laura: The increase in diabetes, also. So you've got three of the major plagues of our civilization: cancer, heart disease and diabetes, that went sky high exactly in concert with...

Joe: The change in diet.

Laura: ...the change in diet that was instituted oh, what? They were beginning back after the Second World War, I think.

Joe: Yeah or even before it. But there's an article I have here about wheat and it's that wheat contains not one, but 23,000 potentially harmful proteins. So just on the idea of your diet not being related to your psychological state, when you're consuming toxins and possibly brain toxins as well, that can cause all sorts of physical ailments and these modern diseases, like you just mentioned, obviously you're not going to be in a very good psychological state if you've got diabetes, or if you've got heart disease, or if you've got cancer. And there's an indirect link clearly there, if not a direct link between diet and psychological states.

Jason: What is it about the cells in the gut that are like neurons or something?

Laura: Yeah, you've got a bunch of neurons in your gut that controls your mood. Well there's another thing. We've spent a lot of time with our research team reading the scientific papers. And reading papers on diet, various diet forms, scientific studies and so on and so forth, and what we have found repeatedly is when they do these so-called scientific double-blind studies that they insist upon before anything gets accepted, they make such egregious, I mean just horrible decisions about how to conduct these tests, that there is absolutely no way you can rely on their results as any kind of scientific standard. For example, they did a test on whether or not vitamin C helps with cancer. Well, I'm going to go to the caller. We've got a caller.

Joe: Hi caller. What's your name and where are you calling from?

Caller: Hi, my name is Paul. I'm calling from New Jersey.

Joe: Paul.

Paul: Hi. I just wanted to first of all, thank you for the shows. I listen every week and it's great. Just wanted to make a comment regarding pharmaceutical industry, I worked there for more than nine years. And I observed all the things that you guys were talking. One thing the way it works is in the industry, it's all localized, like the first guy doesn't know what happens and the clinical psych doesn't know what happens in IT. And it's all localized. Because of that, really nobody knows what the other guy is doing. For example, I worked in IT. IT guy goes and gets the data what the representative is saying to the doctor and how many prescriptions he makes. This guy takes the data, goes to the doctor saying that "Okay, you are writing less and taking this many times to lunch" and all that. It's not as if that even doctors doesn't engage with the representative. So they go back to the front desk woman and they take them to lunch. So they use quite a lot of pressure tactics by feeding them or giving some gifts so that the doctor writes certain prescriptions per month.

Jason: I was just going to say at what point is that not Judas behavior? If your thirty pieces of silver for killing people or hurting people is a lunch and a couple of gifts, then you're an evil person. That doctor who writes one of those bad prescriptions and kills somebody. The person who prescribed the thalidomide or whatever it was, to those pregnant women, if he did that because some salesman took him to lunch? That's 9th ring of hell kind of evil, you know?

Joe: Well that's kind of been debated though, the idea that these little gifts that pharmaceutical companies give to doctors and stuff as well that actually influences them, is debatable. But what's not debated is the fact that pharmaceutical companies pretty much produce most of the articles. They do their own medical research and they send them to journals and medical journals that doctors read and take as gospel, basically those medical journals, they get most of their advertising money from the same pharmaceutical companies. So the journals that are producing information are not only producing information from the pharmaceutical companies that are producing the drugs, but they're also getting money from the pharmaceutical companies for their magazines and for producing and for making their money and making profits.

Jason: And there we come back to cui bono.

Laura: Yeah, but one thing you're saying, that they put pressure on them to write a certain number of prescriptions of a particular drug every month. Is that correct?

Paul: Right. Because these people do give fees and give tickets to the pharmaceutical conferences and all that stuff. So they are actually somewhat obligated. I have personally seen the representatives forcing the doctor, forcing literally saying "Oh, you only wrote two prescriptions for this month. What's really going on?" And the unfortunate thing is not too many doctors are engaging the representatives. That's the reason why pharmaceutical industries pretty much reduced their representatives. Instead they went directly into television advertisements which is a big cash cow to them.

Laura: Advertising so that the patient will come in and demand their new drug.

Paul: Yes. After that, the pharmaceutical drugs sales gone up very exponentially.

Laura: That's as crazy as policemen being required to meet quotas for speeders. "You've got to catch 50 speeders this week or you're not producing".

Pierre: Yeah, there are some documented cases that illustrate what Paul mentioned. Usually doctors will hide the bonus given by the big pharmas as scientific conferences. But when you dig a bit you see that the scientific conference is nothing scientific. It's organized in the Bahamas, in a five-star hotel for one week and there are few conferences. So you can hide what is basically corruption. And another point you mention, and that is very interesting is the total disconnection between the R&D, the engineering of the molecule, to what the molecule really does and what the doctor knows because basically the FDA or the equivalent agencies in other countries will provide an official notice listing the pathology, the contents, the side-effects and positive effects and nothing else. Nothing about the history and that comes from the big pharma, this notice. And 99 percent of the doctors, they don't go further than that. They only have this notice that is written by the ones who make profits from it. So in conclusion we can say from what you said Paul, that doctors are a) ignorant of the fundamentals of the drugs they put in their patients' bodies and b) they are corrupted because their drug choice is not made by knowledge or the objective of treating the patient, but by profit and greed.

Paul: Yes. There is one more thing is because doctors are pretty much dependent on the data, that is not word data, basically on the papers whatever the representative gives, but that data comes from the half a billion dollar clinical trials that contains a hundred different steps. Even these clinical trials are based on what they do on the patients. Now in the last decade a lot of these tests are moved to countries like India and other third-world countries. Of course India is not third world, but other countries where doctors can be managed extremely easy. So this whole clinical trials for which they have hundreds of statisticians which will be running all this data in so many functions, medical functions, to come up with the conclusion they want which they are supposed to send to the FDA and the FDA is supposed to approve it before these people can fill these and give it to the doctor. So this many people are invested into the whole process, they can literally do anything they want, actually. Since there is no policing, it's all because even in the FDA it's basically that's where these pharmaceutical companies hide a lot of FDA people, in their legal services, so that they can act as consultants or whatever it is. So everybody is basically quoting somebody else and everything is localized to their own world. This is completely pathological.

Laura: Yeah, the pharmaceutical companies are the equivalent of the pedophiles in the Catholic Church. Only they are the pedophiles of medical science.

Paul: Right. Yes.

Juliana: Pretty much.

Laura: So that kind of answers our question: Is science a force for good in this world? Is the Catholic Church a force for good? Well, science, or the Catholic Church, either one, could be very powerful forces for good in the world in their respective ways. But because they've got this corruption and they avert their eyes from it or they don't, as Paul just said, they don't police the activities.

Jason: What's worse is they police it in the opposite direction. They suppress dissent within their ranks. The machine has to keep going. The spice must flow.

Juliana: And it's like in every other profession in the world nowadays, you get creative people who get attacked because there is good research. It just doesn't get published or it doesn't get promoted because it's very close to the truth, so you have one side of people, really creative people who get attacked. Then you have these doctors who have to obey because they have to feed a family. And then you have a big majority of doctors who have lost curiosity.

Jason: Exactly.

Juliana: And what makes science good is curiosity.

Laura: Look at this doctor in the UK, Andrew Wakefield, the one that did the studies that shows that there is a definite connection between the mercury in vaccinations and autism. And they put him through such a horrible campaign of smearing and defamation and just tearing him down. And then about six months later another study came out and said the same thing. He was vindicated, but all anybody remembers is that he was stripped of his license or whatever evil things they did to him.

Joe: The inquisition.

Laura: Yeah, they put him through the inquisition because he came out with a really powerful study that said that there was a definite connection between vaccine and autism.

Jason: It's Galileo all over again.

Joe: It gets really sinister though when you talk about the FDA. That's the Food and Drug Administration. That's a government body, and they're in bed with big pharma. And that's food and drug, i.e. they are promoting types of food that people should eat, i.e. the "My Plate" kind of food pyramid, which is heavily weighted towards grains and that's producing all these illnesses. And then they're following that up by kind of...

Laura: Allowing.

Joe: ...rubber stamping...

Laura: The pharmaceuticals.

Joe: ...big pharma to provide drugs for this. So it's just a recipe for perpetuation of illness.

Laura: It's a pathological condition in medical science. That's what it is. Medical science is infected with cancer.

Jason: Well yeah, but like as Chu was mentioning before, a lot of the pharma companies are also involved in the agriculture companies as well. It's the same board of directors on both companies or something like that.

Juliana: Yeah, we mentioned that on the show about GMOs. It's all the same. They're having people not only get sicker and sicker, but also gladly pay for both their poison in the food and their drugs.

Jason: And the company that's making both of them is owned and that's the same company that's paying for the research that's saying it's beneficial.

Laura: And also supporting the medical schools.

Jason: The medical schools and the journals.

Laura: And giving the scholarships to people who want to become doctors and making sure that they pass their tests.

Jason: So where's the money. And then we go back to this doctor, this Wakefield guy, and the way he was treated and it's the same kind of thing that happened with Galileo. And that's usually a big sort of thing that people list. And they say "This is why we resisted church. This is why we wanted secularism. This is why we wanted secular governments." This is all this stuff. And then everyone says "Yeah, remember Galileo". And here we are.

Laura: Giordano Bruno.

Jason: Giordano Bruno or something like that.

Laura: Yeah, Bruno's the one they burned at the stake.

Jason: But he was little bit insane to be quite honest. I read his book. He was crazy. (laughter)

Paul: Yeah, actually I just want to mention one more point about this localization. One day actually I read an article in the newspaper saying that one of the drugs my company produced has 50,000 cases. I was scratching my head at that time because there is some woman from the legal department asking me about how many drugs they sold in what region, by what doctor. We're not supposed to store information by doctors, but the pharmaceutical company goes around it by saying that this chip code and they have something called (inaudible) based on that. They will find out which product group, because they are not supposed to store even by product, they are supposed to store it by product group, but they come around and they group it in such a way that they can easily figure it out.

She was working with me for a couple of months to figure out where the prescriptions happen and all that stuff. But I never realized that this is the same data I'm providing as they're collecting because there are 50,000 cases of sickness from that specific drug. Look at it, the company can tell what 20,000, 30,000 or 40,000 people across because people are working together because they are bonded by the signatures they make in specific projects that they work on. So they are not legally supposed to tell each other. Now one of the data I'm giving, what was they're use, I don't know. I call it, what is that corporate constitution like they have their own constitution type of thing. What one can do and what one cannot do. It's so localized that it's literally mind-blowing. And also anybody can do anything with it.

Joe: Completely sewn up. And that's the take home message. Anyway, thanks for your call Paul.

Paul: Thank you. Bye.

Joe: Okay, we're going to wrap it up there for this week. We've done this one.

Laura: You've heard it straight from the horse's mouth, somebody who works for big pharma telling you exactly how it is. So, I rest my case.

Joe: Alright. Thanks to all our listeners and our callers and we will be back next Sunday at about the same time, or probably exactly the same time. So hopefully we'll see you then.