The Decay Of The American Medical Establishment | Dr. Drew Pinsky

This is something I did not know until the COVID outbreak. 70% of physicians are employees. I didn't know that. They raised their hand and they did such a job.

And they were afraid. There was fear, fear, fear. Fear was rampant in my profession. And so people just shut the hell up.

And you had hospital administrators dictating how doctors could read a patient. And telling patients to go home, come back when you're over to your side of 60%. This was astonishing. Dr.

Drew Pinsky is a board-certified internist and eviction medicine specialist with over 35 years of experience in national TV and radio, as well as the New York Times bestselling author and host of the Dr. Drew Podcast. All over the past couple of years, crises like COVID-19, fentanyl epidemic, skyrocketing rates of chronic illness have pulled discussions about America's national health to the forefront. Dr.

Drew's nuanced focus on public health has been a valuable resource to millions of Americans, particularly as our trust in our expert class has deteriorated to his foreglow. In today's episode, Dr. Drew shares his personal experience being censored by the legacy media and his biggest frustrations around the pandemic and its aftermath. He also surveys the decay of the American medical establishment and highlights the backward incentives in our governmental agencies.

While we navigate an extremely polarized political moment, the restoration of Americans' physical and mental well-being should be of paramount importance to all of us. Don't miss this important conversation with Dr. Drew Pinsky on this episode of The Sunday Special. Well, Dr.

Drew, thanks for stopping by. It's great to see you. It's been a minute. It has.

It's been a while. So you're now joining us in Florida, but you're still living in L.A. So I'm going to start by badgering you about that. How's L.A.

treating you? Why are you still there? Am I allowed to say this show? I love coming to South Florida because everybody's happy down here.

It's crazy how much more vibrant and palpably happy everybody is, and particularly young people. It drives me crazy. In California, young people look at the economic opportunity, they look at the landscape, they're like, everything sucks. Why should I do this?

Where am I supposed to put my bed? Should I become a doctor? Why would I do that? It's like, really, it's so discouraging that it depresses me.

And here, the vibrancy, you can see it. You can smell it. So it's nice. Congratulations.

Thank you. Most of the country does not know that, but I visit here and I see it. This is one of the things I think that California gets away with, especially if you're in big cities. I grew up in L.A., I spent my entire life in L.A., I spent three years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but aside from that, I was in L.A.

my whole life. And one of the things they do when you're in L.A., when I say they, I just need kind of just living there. I'm a person. You were in the Valley, weren't you?

I was in the Valley. I was in the Valley, where everyone looks down their nose at you because they're from the Valley and they act like you're on a farm or something. But living in L.A., the treatment is sort of like in New York. There are only a few places on the map that actually matter.

And if you're anywhere outside of those places, that's not actually like an important place in the universe. And then you spend five minutes outside of L.A., in, say, South Florida, or hell, in Iowa. And you're like, this country is amazing. And there are amazing places here.

They're way easier to live in where people are a lot nicer than in L.A. Yeah, and so it's why I like traveling around and doing things. It gives me a break from back there. But I'm stuck there.

We've lived there forever. My practice is there. My kids are there. It'd just be impossible.

So here we are. I'll visit you guys. You should. And then you should buy a house here.

And then you should take everyone else. I swear to God, Dave Rubin says, every time I speak to that guy, it's the same thing. I got two of you on it. And I owe you another apology.

You've forgotten this, but Ed Kroll and I do a podcast still to this day. And you called me one time, and I said, Ben, I apologize. Because I told you, I forget where I told you this, but I made the case that media wasn't biased. I was on HLN and CNN for years.

They never told me. They never ever got involved with what I said until I ran afoul with them. And then it was on. They were very censoring.

And so apologies again. I look for opportunities to apologize, and this is one. I look for opportunities to receive apologies, so we're definitely in sync here. Donald Trump.

Like, what is up with this guy? And I was like, I don't really know him, but you know, there's some narcissistic qualities, but you know, it's not a malignant narcissist because he's family. You know, you can't maintain a relation with your family when you're malignant narcissist. And he never sleeps, and maybe there's a little bipolarity.

And then I would say, but be careful. We have had presidents, great presidents, with bipolar disorder, with alcoholism, with depression, and some of our best presidents have been people with certain proclivities. I mean, that's an extraordinary office. Extraordinary people should go into it, and that comes with certain liabilities.

Not all liabilities are, strictly speaking, a problem. It's the only one that affects functioning. Like Abraham Lincoln, his depressions were profound. There's a story of him dragging, I think it was Willie behind Robert in a wagon, and the wagon spilled over while he walked to the Capitol building.

He left his kid like a mile back, and he was so lost in his depression, he didn't even notice it. Anyway, so the next morning, I come to my radio station. I had a daytime radio show at the time, and the general manager goes, hey, that was really interesting. Could you do that for 30 seconds for our website?

And I said, I think I can get it done in 30 seconds, and I did. And then I was getting up, and he goes, you know, it's an election season. We have to have a balance. Can you do 30 seconds on Hillary?

I said, funny thing, her doctors just released her medical records this morning. She had a transverse sinus thrombosis and a stroke. They had her on arm of thyroid for unclear reasons. They were treating the hypercredulability without a workup.

I had lots of questions about what her doctors were doing. So I did 30 seconds on why I thought there was concerns about her medical care. Not that she was unfit for office, not that there was anything wrong with her physically or mentally, just that these medical records made me very concerned. Drudge report next morning, headline, finding a doctor that says she's not fit for office.

And I was like, uh-oh. Well, that I heard from the highest echelons at CNN. Shut up. Just shut up.

No more from you. No more talking. And I was like, I'll have you set the record. Shut up.

We had decided a month before that we were going to cancel my show. The following week, the cancellation date was coming maybe two weeks hence. We canceled the show. It looked like it was canceled.

I said, let me go on the air and straighten this all out. Shut up. And then I was not allowed to speak ever again on that network. So there you go.

And it is making the rules around what you're allowed to say about various presidential candidates. So I'm old enough to remember when John McCain was running for president in 2008 and there were all sorts of questions about his health and his fitness when he was 72, which that looks like a spring chicken in American politics. And he's 12 years older than and Tim Wallace is right now, 13 years older than Kamala Harris and fully nine years younger than the current president of the United States and he's running at 72. And whatever questions you had about his health and his fitness, all those were perfectly appropriate.

Then you hit 2016 and you couldn't ask what the hell was going on with Hillary, which was collapsing into a van in the middle of the race. By the way, that happened like two days after my crisis. And so I went, see, he's right. People connecting these dots that are unrelated too.

And then he got 2020 and it was perfectly obvious that Joe Biden was already diminished from what he'd been and he was no great shakes, but certainly wasn't unhealthy in 2016. He was clearly diminished by the time he hit 2020. And if you mentioned that, then this was considered completely out of bounds. You were not allowed to talk about his age.

He was a grand old man of the Republic. And then for three long years, we were told that you're not allowed to ask anything about what's going on with him. How about my profession? You're not allowed to believe your lying eyes.

I mean, there are things in medicine that are just, when we treat medical students, we show them videos and pictures. So when they see it in the clinic, they'll know it. One of those conditions is Parkinson's. Parkinsonism, not Parkinson's disease.

That's a diagnosis. But if you want to see Parkinsonian features, mask-like faces, not very expressive, that's Parkinsonism. We would show a video to a medical student of someone like Joe Biden and say, that's Parkinsonism. But if you said that publicly, how dare you make a diagnosis?

No diagnosis. Just describing what we're seeing. We're seeing Parkinsonism. Just like if we saw a rash, we could describe the rash.

We might not be able to say what caused it, but we can't describe it. No, it's totally amazing. So my wife, the family doc. So obviously, when you're training in medical school, you're doing exactly what you're talking about.

I mean, it's not as though you're seeing patients from your first days in medical school. We're seeing videos and pictures. Correct. They're showing you features.

They're saying, if a symptom looks like this, then give a differential diagnosis to all the things that could possibly be Parkinsonism, maybe that's what's going on. Well, you can say Parkinsonism has these common causes. Parkinson's disease being one of them. Vascular dementia.

There are Lewy body dementia. There are various things that can cause it. And people don't... No, Joe Biden's had two neurosurgeries, right?

I mean, he had an aneurysm. He had two neurosurgeries and that can cause something called gliosis, which can lead to Parkinsonism. But meanwhile, you were allowed to, for years and years, and you're speculating about that from psychological conduct. When it comes to psychology, psychological diagnosis is actually super tough because the symptoms are very often quite vague.

I mean, you're talking about symptoms like he talks a lot about himself. Well, you can say things like he never sleeps. You can say that. And go, hmm, what kind of people never sleep?

Hycomania makes you never sleep. But guess what? Lots of very successful people are chronically hypomatic and it's not a condition because it doesn't have any functional significance. Okay, I can say that.

Exactly, but you get all these diagnoses. He has narcissistic personality disorder and this means he's going to blow up the world or he has sociopathy or something like that. That was perfectly fine. For three and a half years you mentioned anything about Joe Biden.

You were totally out of bounds. So much so that they shut off the entire Democratic primary process to prevent anyone, including RFK Jr. with whom your friends, from really running against him Well, remember everybody, I want to get your eyes for a second. May I speak directly to you then?

Here's what happens. 20% of the people are hypnotizable immediately. They are the ones that respond to propaganda and they're nothing you can do about it. They're the ones that were calling in Tim Walz's helpline to report their neighbors because they weren't wearing masks.

That's 20%. 10% throws the BS lag right away and is thinking, is autonomous because this doesn't feel right to me. Let's figure this out. 70% is everybody else and that 70% is the group we need to gaffe into reality and keep them fighting for things like freedom of speech and things that they need to fight for because they just want to live their lives and be left alone.

But that 20% is the one you need to worry about and those are the ones that get swept into these propagandistic shifts so quickly and they feel like that's what's happening. It's the 70% that needs to become more objective about this and look at it. And the certain media bias is this sort of indoctrination. 100% go with it.

And it has massive downstream effects because the reality is that institutions in order to function always require a core level of trust. Any institution that functions has to have trust. You have to have trust. Your doctor, you have to have trust with.

And when you have another institution, the media in this case, that just says that there's certain things you can talk about, certain things you can't talk about, promotes actual false narratives about health, for example, then what it ends up doing is infecting these other institutions. And those institutions respond to incentive structures. They don't want to be smacked by the media. So they start changing how they do business in order to avoid getting clubbed by the media, which takes us to COVID-19 and medicine, a lot of stuff that you've been talking about, which is sort of the perversion of the medical industry.

So let's talk about that. I want to talk about that in the context of sort of your own experiences, COVID-19, big pharma, and also with regard to our case, which I mentioned earlier, you and he have become pretty close. So let's talk about what has happened to the medical industry. The lack of trust that people have that sort of like how people feel about Congress, like 8% love Congress, 80% like their Congress person.

Most people still like their doctor. Most people hate these medical systems and don't trust any of it. What's going on? Let me take it all the way back.

Let me start at the beginning. It's going to take a few minutes. Okay. So I started practicing in the late 80s.

If you remember at that point, the HMO phenomenon was occurring. So people were being considered risk pools. They were part of a risk pool and you could reduce the medical cost by putting people into these giant populations where the organizations, the insurance resources made money by restricting your access to care. That's literally what they were doing.

There was also just private practice at that time. My dad was a family practitioner. My uncle was a psychiatrist. Thank God I got some of their judgment and I saw what they went through.

They lived in sort of a golden age where all they concerned themselves with was the well-being of the patient in front of them. They had deep relationships with all of them. That was being systematically dismantled in the 80s. So it's been going on a long time.

And there's one story I experienced that really was the cornerstone of insight into what was happening back then. I started running a drug treatment program. So my story is I'm an internist by training. I was doing general medicine when you could do intensive care medicine.

I was doing hospital medicine, outpatient medicine, but I also had this second job in a psychiatric hospital where I was running medical services and I ended up running their addiction services. So I was just getting going running the addiction services in the program at this free-standing psychiatric hospital. And I got a call from a friend of mine who was a really excellent physician who had become essentially an internist administrator running an HMO. He started developing those models.

And he called me and he goes, hey, you know, I need a three-day detox from your program. I go, look, man, three-day detox. We've been doing the three-day detoxes for your patients. They come back in two weeks.

Of course they come back. It does nothing. What are we doing here? I said, I'll tell you what.

You name your price. I will treat them across my resources. We'll manage them as an outpatient. And we'll keep following them.

My staff can't tolerate these three-day detoxes. These people come back, come back and then die. And he goes, no, I want a three-day detox. I go, I just think they're not going to bounce back.

He goes, oh no, they'll bounce back. But if they do that three times, they'll lose their job. Then they're no longer my concern. I was speechless.

I was like, you're a physician. How can you? And he literally, I was like, he could tell I was just like dumbfounded. And he said, he goes, I'm an insurance resource now.

I'm not a social agency. So I can't tell you whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. Okay, that was HMOs. So that's where we started falling off the cliff.

The next great misadventure in medicine was the opiate crisis, which I was fighting mightily against. Here's how that works. Can I, can I, okay. And this will sound very familiar to you.

In fact, I'm going to correlate it with COVID as I tell you the story. In the end of the 19th century, the hypodoric needle was developed as well as morphine sulfate and methadone. And at the end of the Civil War and during reconstruction, we physicians brought the first opioid crisis to America. We literally were the distributor.

We were the source of everything. We were the drug dealers. And it was a massive opioid crisis. The Harrison Narcotic Act was a response to that that put physicians in prison for prescribing of opiates.

That stopped it immediately. It created an absolute phobia of prescribing opiates to patients. When I was in training, we would use them only very occasionally in a surgical setting. You would not give them to cancer patients.

Well, in the 70s, a group of nurses and doctors realized that was dumb and we should be developing a way of managing pain with opiates for cancer patients. Of course we should. So they had a great idea, but then they kept going. They said, oh, no, no, you know what?

The answer has always been here all along. It's the opiates, the poppy flower. It's the opiate. We should get rid of pain in America.

There should be never anybody experiencing pain everywhere, anywhere. They were starting to catch on. They were getting some momentum. The pain management world developed.

And then some wise attorneys realized that they could step outside of the malpractice system and civilly prosecute physicians and criminally for inadequate treatment of pain. Now that the standard of pain management had developed in North Carolina and Florida and California, doctors were having these million-dollar suits and going to prison for inadequate, not giving enough pain medication. Well, that stopped this again. Everybody stopped in place and we sent all of our pain patients to the pain management doctors who took the position that they were a white hat profession.

I had quotes from them saying, literally, we were the salvation. We were evangelists. We were going to save America from pain. Pain became the fifth vital signs.

And there were several certain personalities that went around and got the VA. Pain is the fifth vital sign. Got the medical societies. Pain is the fifth vital sign.

Then the standard of care in all these subspecialty professional societies. Pain is more important than your pulse. And you couldn't leave an ER without a pain scale and 60 Vicodin in your pocket if you've ever had a knee twinge. This became the standard of care.

And so I was fighting mightily against it. I was getting sanctioned by the Department of Health by the California Medical Association, by my own hospital administration. Why? Because I wasn't treating my heroin addicts in withdrawal who were uncomfortable with an opiate.

Think about how insane that was. So this was going on until I don't even know if people know how it stopped. I was actually at a White House symposium and Jeff Sessions came in. And this was, he stopped it.

People don't know that he did this. He came in and he goes, can I see what's happening here? He goes with his little sudden withdrawal and he goes, I'm going to stop this in about three or six months. Here you watch, I'm going to do it.

He put a bunch of doctors in prison for overprescribing. The whole thing stopped right away. And then people started looking around like they woke up from some sort of trance going, well, what have we been doing here? And of course, no apologies to me.

It's 15 years of fighting it. Sound familiar? In COVID, you have an evangelist, Dr. Birx, running around saying lockdown is the only way to do things.

Masking is the only way to do things. Society's picking it up, regulators picking it up, and all of a sudden, an evangelical physician gets a hold of the regulatory system and now it's on. It's the same exact playbook as the opioid crisis. I think the thing that people have trouble understanding is how a scientific profession purportedly gets captured this way.

You understand how people get captured ideologically because it's all very vague and it's all floating up there in the clouds. When it comes to science, the general idea was that it was all data-driven. And when it came to things like pain as a fifth vital sign, you're talking about, for example, self-reporting, it's completely unscientific. I mean, people self-reporting their own pain levels, it's completely subjective.

There's no way to actually measure it on any sort of serious gauge. Not only that, but there was never a single study that showed that opioids were useful in chronic pain. In fact, I remember because of the regulatory setup, you had to go to symposiums to maintain your license on pain management. And I remember I went to one and the doctor stood up and went, one of the pain specialists, he goes, yeah, you know, we've never really had any data that she does opioids are useful, so let's figure out how to use them safely.

It's like, why are you using them at all? It's like, what are we doing here? It's like incredible. In the California Medical Society, I actually put out an encyclical saying that like, there's no studies so far, but we're going to tell you how you should be using these things.

Never, ever any studies in chronic pain. In fact, there still is no studies in chronic pain. Occasionally, it's a little useful. Suboxone is very useful in chronic pain.

We're having difficulty getting people to adopt that for some reason. Wow. But it's people. It's human beings.

At the core, they're humans running all these organizations. And it's shocking to me when that happens. In COVID's case, it was flabbergasting. It was gobsmacked that there was capture stem the stern to where the publishers, the great storied medical journals that I rely on and love, suddenly weren't publishing alternative points of view.

I mean, the way science evolves, it never all goes one way. It just doesn't work like that. There's just sort of a consensus that builds, as you build more studies, create more studies, built on different assumptions, different analytics, different incredible structures. And you start to learn, oh, this is probably the probably, not necessarily, probably the truth.

And we've reached a consensus. If you don't see other points of view, I only saw things in one direction. I'm asking good. I'm not seeing good.

I knew something was wrong. And RK Jr. was the guy that alerted me to the fact that there had been a capture. And once he started pointing it out to me, I was like, oh my God, he's right.

What in particular did he point out to you? First, it was the cozy relationship with the FDA and the pharmaceutical companies. And then it was how media buys. I never could understand why pharmaceutical companies were advertising this obscure medication that very few people would use.

I understand they'd be very expensive, and maybe there's a big profit margin or something, but why would you be, why those medications that are just not that commonly prescribed? Right. And he meant, I think it was him that pointed out to me that, no, no, they're not trying to raise awareness about that product so much. They're trying to brand awareness, of course, but they want to capture the media.

They want the media companies to be their customer and to listen to them and to be unable to criticize them or to run foul of their version of the reality at that point. And then he pointed out that he thought that the three majors, the publications, and you can see in the British Medical Journal out loud, that some of the majors have been captured in some way. And he said he was going to bring them in and say, you solve this. His theory was that they were captured by pharmaceutical companies.

I'm not sure, but that you solve this or you're going to be prosecuted as a RICO. And I thought, oh, I just woke up. Oh, yes, somebody's got to stop this. So we get objectivity back into the medical literature.

And one journal that I could see through was trying, was Annals of Internal Medicine. They published a study early in COVID on a combination of Luvox and an inhaled corticosteroid. And I thought, ah, and it was a positive study. It showed a positive effect on COVID.

Only study of any positive treatment other than vaccine therapies for COVID. I thought, well, at least they're publishing something. There's more Dr. Drew in just one moment.

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God bless and thank you. I mean, one of the things that was very hard during that period is if you were a person who was data-driven, sir, broke down into three groups, as you mentioned. There were people who were immediately skeptical. There were people who were immediately buying in.

And then there was, you know, a group of people in the middle. I sort of counseled myself in that group. People were trying to follow the data. The problem is that when the data is bad and when the data is skewed, it makes it almost impossible to follow the data.

But for the physicians in that group, if they spoke up or raised their hands, and this is something I did not know until the COVID outbreak, 70% of physicians are employees. I didn't know that. They raised their hands. It was their job.

And they were afraid. There was fear, fear, fear. Fear was rampant in my profession. So people just shut the hell up.

And you had hospital administrators dictating how doctors treat patients and telling patients to go home, come back when you're out of 60%. This was astonishing to me. It was... I kind of get nauseated when I think about it.

It's just such a transgression of your oath. And the immediate next thought I have, by the way, is a friend of mine, Aaron Cariotti. Have you ever talked to Aaron Cariotti? You should speak to him.

Aaron Cariotti is one of the principal plaintiffs in the Missouri vs. Biden case. He was the head of bioethics at the University of California Irvine Medical School for years. He was a story professor.

He was a psychiatrist. The students loved him. He was the chairman of the bioethics department for years, lecturing students on bioethics. And one of his contentions was, you know, when it really comes along to take a bioethical stand, it's probably going to be hard.

And that's when you have to really walk the walk. So the mandates came along. And he looked at the data and said, I don't think you have criteria for a mandate here. And I've warned you forever that I'm going to have to do the hard thing when the tough time comes.

I have to raise my hand now and say, you don't have proper justification for a mandate. And I have a bioethical problem with what you're doing here at this school. You need to be put on leave and then fire. I mean, it was incredible to watch.

And I think even today, it's hard to tell what interventions were supposedly good when interventions were... I mean, there are certain things here at this company we actually sued OSHA to prevent a national vaccine mandate that the Biden administration was having to push. We went all the way to the Supreme Court. We stopped that from happening.

We internally at the company. We never had a mask mandate. We never had a vaccine mandate. We opposed all of that.

On a personal level, you know, I will say that I think early on in the pandemic, I bought what was being sold with regard to vaccines, particularly. I said... Yeah, I was certainly sympathetic. I mean, they were out there publicly saying that it was 99% affected in preventing transmission.

Not that it was preventing that. It was preventing transmission, which of course would make the case for some sort of herd immunity. And I'd never been in favor of a mandate, but my case was okay. Well, I'm not going to get it.

I'm not going to die from it. But my grandmother might. So I should get it. And then it became clear they not even tested for whether it was transmissible.

It's totally psychotic. And that finally came out a year and a half afterward, where Pfizer came out and said, oh yeah, we never even tested that. We just kind of tried it out that statistic and it was parroted by everybody. At the same time, you have people who have now taken this to, I think, the reactionary extreme, which is that no vaccines ever are good.

Vaccines in general are bad. That's unfortunate. And what should people think about when they're thinking about vaccines in general? And also, where do you kind of come down when you look at the data with regard to how effective or ineffective were mRNA vaccines with regard to COVID?

It seems like the data sort of suggests that if you were very obese and very old, it was better if you took it than if you didn't. And otherwise, there was really no reason to take it. Remember, most of the data was collected around alpha and delta, which was a completely different illness than Omicron. And the Omicrons that have followed have all had different characteristics and features, but they're much, much milder.

So my patients are all vaccine-boosted. My medical patients that I've followed for 30 years plus are old. They looked at the data. We discussed it.

I actually didn't have the data to give them a proper risk-reward analysis. I really didn't have it. I didn't realize I didn't have it, but I didn't. But still, I probably made the right call and gave them all vaxxed and then boosted.

But as it went along, I was like, I don't know what we're doing. We're no longer vaxxing against the current variant. We're vaxxing against the variant from 6 or 12 months ago. The illness is so mild.

We have vaxxed. It works like crazy in elderly patients. What are we doing? I don't know.

If you'd like to take it, please do. But I don't know what we're doing. I can't give you a risk analysis. I can't do it.

It's just not available to me. And that's insane. That's insane. If you're 25 years old, the risk of Omicron to you is zero.

The risk of the vaxx is non-zero. That's enough. That's it, right? And myocarditis, I don't know when myocarditis became a mild condition.

When my kids were growing up, when everything got a viral illness, the thing I would always worry about is, no, please don't get myocarditis. Because it's a dreaded illness. It can cause some death. It can cause some death down the road.

It can cause myocardiomyopathies and require the need for heart transplants. It's just a mess. Let's say it's one in 5,000. That's a compare to zero in 5,000.

And you're mandating that. I swear to God, I hope you'll take this on. If you're a college-age student and your college mandated you to get this and you develop myocarditis, you should sue the hell out of it. That is an insane, insane thing.

And now they did not protect you. It didn't protect anybody. And it only puts you at risk. What are we doing?

I mean, the FDA was pushing on kids. I got vaccinated when it first came out, but certainly my kids are not vaccinated. And listen, I'm looking forward to the Novavax and Covaxin. You want to push vaccines?

Why don't you push those two? Why aren't we pushing those two? I can't understand it. Why only those are the only mRNA platform?

There are two excellent vaccines available. Push those if you've got to have a vaccine. Go ahead. So on the other side, what happens when institutions get discredited or when they start to fall apart?

The normal human response is can throw the baby out of the bathwater. So the idea is that Big Pharma in general, everything they produce is bad, which of course is not true. Big Pharma produces every drug that your grandmother has taken to hospital. Literally all of them.

I prescribe them. I take them. They've been my handmaiden for my whole career. They've been my partner.

My whole career. I don't lose a knife. I use Medicaid. I use pharmacology.

It costs billions of dollars to develop these drugs. This idea that you can just cut off the money source from Pharma by cramming down pricing based on the federal government's demands. That's a great way to destroy all R&D. Correct.

Isn't that in the so-called inflation reduction act? Didn't they do that to like intruder and things? These are major breakthroughs. It costs a billion dollars to bring it to the market.

And then you have five years to make your profit. And then it goes off patent. That's why they're so expensive. That's it.

And this is what's tired about policymaking is that there really is very little room for black and white thinking about these sorts of things. There's to be specific as humanly possible. Again, the anti-faction movement has gained a lot of ground on both the right and the left in the aftermath of COVID-19. That's the kindest blush you could give to the medical literature.

The other thing is you can't get stuff published if it doesn't go with the narrative. Do you know that the Danish physician that showed that 90% of the adverse reactions were in a certain pool of vaccine? It was a great study. It took her like three years to get published.

No one would publish it. That's a very important observation. It should have been an emergency. We all came to him and let's figure that out.

They also won't publish papers to debunk things. So they will only publish new things. And so what that means is that there's no incentive for anything. There's no incentive for a researcher to duplicate a study to find out whether it's true or not.

If you duplicate it, you find out it's true, you're not getting published. And if you duplicate it, you find out that it's false, you're probably also not going to go. So it gets shelved, it gets drawered. Or it gets obscure publications where it goes on one of the, what do they call those, websites where it's peer-reviewed.

And no one reads it. Right, exactly. And so you can see why there's all this distress. How should people approach things like vaccine schedules for their kids, for example?

Well, please don't do that to me. It's not a question. I have poor kids. I would make sure you have a pediatrician who's willing to discuss it with you.

If they're saying just take it, you're dumb. If you don't, you've got the wrong doctor. I understand it takes time. I understand pediatricians have no time.

I get it. It's impossible. It's impossible to get a doctor. It's impossible.

Particularly a general pediatrician, general medicine, family, I'm sure your wife tells you to actually pay your employees. And it's just impossible. And to actually be independent and to the job, it's impossible. So when a patient comes in and wants to chat about something like this, it's challenging.

But you need to talk to your doctor about it. I have a grandchild coming in and I'm worried about it. I'm worried about it because I've seen measles. I've seen how horrible it is.

And most people haven't seen that. They think they're never going to see that. My first kid, she actually was vaccinated for pertussis. She got pertussis anyway.

pertussis is horrifying. You watch your kid turning blue is not a fun phenomenon. Right. And I am from the school.

You've got to remember, I was from the school that vaccine therapy is one of the top three advancements in history of medicine. The only thing that really made a difference in medicine was vaccine therapy, sanitation. I'm forgetting what the third one was. Maybe anaerosis or something.

Yeah. And even that's got some problems. And now I'm like, I don't know, maybe the world is flat. I don't know.

I'm open to anything now. Right. And that I think is part of the problem. How do we reestablish some...

Well, that's the point. And I think RFK has the idea, which is you have to untangle the incentives and the cozy relationship with the regulators. And you have to really do the right research and do it properly and do it well. And that, and that observational studies are inadequate.

It's just, it's not okay to say, well, use it a lot. It's generally okay. It's like, that's not, that's not medicine. I mean, this does raise a bigger issue that RFK has talked about a lot, which is we've seen extraordinary increases in diagnosis of a wide variety of conditions ranging from obesity to autism in the United States.

And RFK Jr. suggests that a lot of this is because of food supply problems with the food supply environmental issues. For sure, food supply. I'm with him on that.

That RF food supply is a total rate of... I've got a great guest for you coming up. You ever heard Callie Means or his sister, the ENT doctor, Dr. Means?

One of the leading surgeons at ENT left her practice to go fight this fight because she started looking at all of this coming in and said, there's a root cause here and it's food. And her brother was a lobbyist for the food organizations. He left and became an evangelist. Be careful.

Anybody's evangelizing about anything. Be careful for this project. And he educated me that, you have to remember, the tobacco companies, when they pivoted, they pivoted to food. And they brought with them their scientists and their lobbyists and their marketers and have deployed the exact same strategies that they use with tobacco.

Make it addictive, protect it with a lobbyist, and market it aggressively. Brainwash people. That's our food supply. And look at what it's doing to us.

You have to really be careful about what you put in your mouth. So what are the biggest problems for people to avoid, you think, in terms of the food supply? I remember hearing this from nutritionists and dietitians way on that real foods. Things that come out of the ground.

Things that grow on trees. It's fine to eat chicken and fish and beet. Please eat it. Beans, nuts.

But things in a package, generally be careful about it. Be a label reader. And when you see seed oils, vegetable oils. I mean, that whole story is another story that's crazy.

The fact that we pivoted off butter and tallow into things that are carcinogenic when you heat them up and get stuck in our fat and are metabolically destructive to us. That's all marketing and lobbyists. The entire corn syrup industry. It's unbelievable.

Corn syrup is way worse for you than sugar. Both are bad. And yes, corn syrup is worse. And seed oil and vegetable oil, infinitely worse than tallow and butter.

And butter is still hard. Margin, way worse than butter. Think about that. Think how hard margin was pushed on us.

You look at all these issues and you're trying to just kind of make your way in the world and figure out exactly who to trust, how to rebuild those levels of trust. And it seems like... Trust them. I mean, no, I think my answer is don't.

I mean, trust and verify would probably be the answer for everybody. I think that this goes to government. It goes to health. More importantly, it goes to media and marketing.

There are... the persuasion and brainwashing game is at an all-time high in this country i have something that stayed with me from the 70s uh i don't know why it stayed with me but it came back to me during covid which was i was watching a tv news uh interview like a 60 minute type interview and it was on pravda and somebody like uh one of the old 60 minute guys was in russia talking to him the the lead anchor on pravda television mike wallace was hammering this guy like but you've you told the line of the government you don't do the objectivity you don't only pirate the brainwashing he was really hammering the guy and finally the guy went hey he goes we have a different set of priorities than your media in your country in our country media is a political instrument in your country it's a commercial instrument trust me there will be an alteration of your system and really what's behind what got me was all this panic all this bull that was i thought at the beginning i didn't realize the government was involved with it i thought it was just to capture eyes if we make you panic you'll watch us and that's a commercial priority watch us so we can sell our time so we can make more money i mean and you're right it was a political priority as well there's an underlying moral system that had been set up by those who were pushing the covid lockdown regime did you see a zuckerberg just yesterday a couple days ago just published this letter that he will not do that again i applaud him for sure i mean that's what i want i want people to go you know what i made a mistake i will not do that again everybody's got to do that i made mistakes i look for opportunities to apologize wherever i can well what was amazing about the covid crisis or the foe crisis is that the unwillingness to even recognize basic medical facts like people are not equally vulnerable to disease like this is like the number one thing that we all refuse to recognize it was like if you're a 10 year old child you're just as vulnerable to this as an 85 year old woman one doesn't say no one is saying one death is too many right one death is too many we're not in a pandemic anymore right because the pandemic is defined by excess death so if we have one death i don't want to talk about it i remember from the very earliest days i remember because you're covering the stuff and saying okay people want proposals my proposal was basically the proposal from sweden which was so if you're 20 you should be in the workplace you shouldn't be at home you should be out working and then you know what they'll get covid and they'll be fine and then you should transfer everybody who's 40 and then i'll get covid and then i'll be fine and eventually what you'll end up with is either herd immunity or shielding the elderly it's a great barrington declaration yeah of course is the poster child for the excesses of covid this is a wonderful man a brilliant epidemiologist and you destroy him that you went after him by the way when i was canceled uh somebody put together some video tape i'll be trying to get ready to calm down in the early days and made it look as though i was saying throughout the pandemic you had no risk and they cut out the one thing i really got wrong at the beginning which was you know we just went through this h1n1 pandemic i got that that was terrible it killed 300 000 people and the obama administration did a good job with that and you don't even know what happened and now we're gonna this would make a million people we could but we're gonna destroy the world because of it isn't there an intermediate step we could make and i would say the same thing every comment i made i said look i work the cdc and dr fauci have been guiding life through my whole career just listen to what they say and they'll get us through this that's what i got wrong i didn't realize i was older and of course they cut that out of every comment i made and that was the one thing i actually got wrong so obviously you spent a lot of time talking about physical health and mental health there's been a lot of talk about the mental health crisis one of the things about psychology is that again many of the diagnoses in the dsm-5 it's very very hard to diagnose things properly in psychology because again symptoms are much bigger if there's a rational rational understanding you can look at it condition is a trait it may become a disorder but at this point is a trait if it doesn't affect functioning work or school your financial health your legal status your relationships your physical health if it's not affecting one of those areas it's a trait and yes you get treated for it we don't want to become a problem maybe a very enlightened careful practitioner could say you know this could be a problem most people aren't motivated to do the work though until it becomes a problem so it's very hard to treat people until they really have motivation now i want to kind of get on that because when it comes to something becoming a disorder as opposed to a trait we say it's affecting function in order to even define what it means to affect function there has to be some standard of what functionality looks like which means there has to be a norm i mean if for example your trait means that you only want to work 35 hours a week is that affecting function if it means you're dating certain types of people not other types of people not only that not only that the patients have denial about it so the family so your your notion of hey i can only i only dig 30 hours of work a week maybe a functional problem but you don't identify it as such uh because functionality used to actually have a definition which was the norm yeah doesn't destroy the norm anymore the real question becomes aren't we all to a certain extent self-diagnosing because instead of us looking at somebody acting bizarrely i think i'm napoleon but i can go to work and have a relationship yeah you're like well but you think you're napoleon you got a problem yeah as opposed to you know what it used to be as opposed to what it is now which is well i mean as long as i go to work and you know have a relationship even if you think it's napoleon is that really a huge deal and that's a very weird standard for it is a weird standard it is the world we are in uh here we go another thing you're upset about and let me just say this one thing before i go on to this topic the physician patient relationship has been under assault my whole career i've spent my whole career fighting it you know by the insurance resources and the regulators and the hospital industry we lost we lost we saw it during covid we lost we have to start empowering patients which is i know you read things for uh the person for twc the wellness company that's why i got involved with them because they are taking stuff right to the patient and dr kelly victory is on my medical board with me said you know five years i was like maybe it's a little crazy but now you're crazy if you don't do this you've got to be ready you've got to be on your own you've got to do it yourself so that's why i'm deeply involved with those guys so for the record on napoleon side and homelessness i'm gonna get to a little bit next this idea that practitioners can't judge so to speak we have open air hospitals in our cities these are psychiatric hospitals without walls okay it's populated by serious illness and drug addiction that's what's there if you think about it if you have serious enough brain disturbance that you cannot find a couch to sleep on or a family member put you up for a minute you have to lie down on the sidewalk that's a specific thing that's it and you can't take advantage of the billion dollars of resources that are available particularly los angeles lots of resources available so you have open air hospitals being run by social workers social workers are not trained to they're not doctors they're not trained to even diagnose or manage these conditions and they are trained to meet the patient where they are that is the most insane thing i've ever heard if i if i met my drug addict patients where they were well then i'd probably hand them heroin too you have to fight the illness you have to be able to identify it see through the denial assess it and know what's needed to fight it it's hard you meet patients where they are you just enable the illness that's what enabling is you have to have a team and you have to fight it to save that life a kid i've got to know now he wrote a book called crooked smile who told me the other day he'd just been off the street a few years now he's thriving and he said you know when i was on the street i would meet these caretakers and they would all pat me on the back and go you're a victim of capitalism if we get socialism communism and this will all stop in the meantime here's your heroin can you imagine that that's disgusting that is murder that is a form of negligent murder or enabling or it's giving a suicidal person a gun it's murder it's some sort of manslaughter and it's active and our politicians are participating in that negligent manslaughter if they didn't have qualified immunity somebody would have to go after that again a lot of that relies on this bizarre redefinition of functionality because we're both defining it up and defining it down so you're totally functional if you're living on the street and eating you know from a shopping cart what are you to say man it's their life man but also you can diagnose yourself as perfectly dysfunctional if you are a college student who has feelings you get a bad day and now your functionality has been broken harm has been done to you and society's job somehow care for you and you may need medication so the person who's living on the street in their own feces does not need medication that person just needs a different economic system the person who is rich and actually needs to roll the hell up that person actually requires medication apologies again guilty i brought some of this thing on i thought it was important for us to understand about mental health and to really be invested in it i had no idea where i was gonna go but i think this is why you know as when one institution falls apart i think all of them fall apart to a certain extent you made that point and i think that is true and i think the chief institution this didn't sound like i don't right feel but it is uh the chief institution that fell apart actually were churches and communities when churches and communities fell apart everything fell apart your doctor used to go to church with you that's who he was with you everybody everybody had a functional community in which you knew each other and you had the same general orientation for what was true and what was false and when that fell apart and when truth became absolutely relative truth cannot be relative in one area and remain stagnant and absolutely clear and set in another and so as a country that has moved into a post-truth era we tried to divide off the sciences from everything else the scientific truth different kind of truth you can have falsification it's carl popper either works or it doesn't but it turns out that's just as vulnerable to the same kind of post-truth mentality that destroyed everything else we have a post-value post-truth society and then we just applied that to medicine we said okay well we'll redefine functionality for example i hope people listen to you because there is immense factual truth embedded in what you're saying and it's really where bill maher and i forged our relationship and he went cornell and emerson and our training was about ascending to the approximation of the truth human brains can't get to the truth you know that's why we have a spiritual life that's helping us you know ascend beyond what our limited instrument can give us the truth has become an old white guy concept and has no value and that is very dangerous and back to your point about church and community when i was growing up what do the neighbors think right so even just our neighborhoods so our communities dissolved i mean you're right the church community but that had many layers to it that dissolved all at once uh yeah i mean communities create broader you know ripple effect for broader communities and that's what happens there's the reason that burke suggests that families are the platoons of society i mean that's what they are you can have always been so when you destroy all those things what you get is just chaos yeah so the community and the family and the relationships these are things that we have to rebuild i mean you're absolutely right and the truth has value the truth has meaning and we need to use our best practices to try to ascend to us i don't know what else to say but that the fact that that is not i get defeated thinking about this because it's so discouraging to me that the system that i value so much higher education is perpetrating all this and so you're doing nothing if you're not making the mind changing the brains changing the minds so that they continue to learn continue to grow continue to ascend to something like the truth if you're turning them into parrots into things that just parrot what you know what you say is the truth or what is relatively the truth i don't know where we go i don't know where that goes it just seems like an empty circle this brings us full circle this is why we have to have experiments in democracy like california and florida so we can tell what works and what doesn't it turns out nobody acknowledges it though that's the problem it's not acknowledged well i have found one beachhead in all of this uh and that is speech we should all at least be defending that if we can all defend speech and really stand up where it is most difficult again my peers and expositions who didn't do that because they're afraid of their bosses you must speak what you think is the truth and speak up and speak loudly and take risk and do whatever is necessary to maintain and protect that speech then i feel like we'll find our way through this but if we if we allow speech to be undermined it's just so easy to point at that as the one thing that could get us through this i mean imagine we can't even have this conversation and who knows i'll probably get canceled for having this conversation right and you know what fine it's the way it goes these days i'm like okay well that's not my no because that's not my job my job is to stand up and talk uh and if you don't like it great let's engage with it i'm delighted with that i saw where jay bodhacharya invited peer hotels to a standard i mean great let's see those two guys talk but if we be quiet or get or you've heard this notion of you're platforming bad people you platform somebody like that what is that word when i was on cnn you're beloved cnn and hln i used to interview nazis and white supremacists and trying to figure out what's going on with them and i wasn't platforming them they gave their position they exposed themselves you judge for yourself what's going on with those guys i'm platforming that's the weirdest word in the world anytime you hear somebody saying we're platforming block them dr drew it's great to see hopefully we'll see much more of you down here in florida i hope so you know this conversation has upset me i'm sorry oh i'm sorry not because of you because it's reflective of so much we're contending with these days in this country and let me just say i just think this country was founded on brilliant ideas and i was uh i was rereading some of lincoln's speeches you know the better angels of our nature and the mystic chords that bind us and the the graves of every patriot and malice towards none i mean these are words that we should we should lean on right now and get us ourselves back together and just realign with the principles that were laid out in these brilliant documents at the beginning they were they were an approximation of the truth they were based on the entirety of human human experience with government prior to that point and guess what they work if you let them work they're not just a piece of paper they're brilliant ideas that we can lean on and we should well again it's great to see you thank you so much for stopping by today you bet the ben shapiro sunday special is produced by samana morris and mackham associate producers are greg pollock and john craig editing is by phil california audio is mixed by mike coramina camera and lighting is by zach ginta hair makeup and wardrobe by fabiola christina title graphics by cynthia angulo executive assistant kelly carvalho executive in charge of production is david warmest executive producer justin siegel executive producer jeremy boring the bench