We know that at the hospital medical students, residents, and hospitalists dive into a Flexnerian orgy of tests, treatments, and more tests. Is this helpful? We'll go back in time and look at Osler's dream at Hopkins before it became the poster child for Flexnerian medicine.

People are losing weight on the new drugs, but at what cost? First there is the financial cost: we're paying $35 billion a year for these drugs, and don't be fooled, all of us are paying. While insurance pays nothing for nutrition or exercise, it gladly pays for this. And these drugs are untested long term, with some horrific potential side effects if you take them for a long time or if you stop them. This is how our pharma industry works: big promises, little data, hide the side effects, but no money for actual lifestyle changes. Maybe these drugs will be great, likely they'll have severe long term problems, but we are all paying a steep cost to put pharma profit over truth and not spending any money for real determinants of health: diet, exercise, stress reduction. A shot seems appealing and requires no effort, but it can't substitute for what we know will work.

Alan and Andy discuss specialty care and its inherent dangers. We tell about specific patient examples, why excessive specialization seems appealing but results in over-testing and over-treatment, and how we can instantly change policy to mitigate the damage from specialization. Ultimately specialists are paid more to convince people they are sick and lead them down a road of testing, procedures, and medicines.
A few book and article recommendations:
-No More Tears, by NYT journalist Gardiner Harris, which explores the history of Johnson and Johnson and the complicity of media, the FDA, and academic medicine in the drug company's deceptive assault on the American public with dangerous drugs and products.
-FDA Approved and Ineffective, by Shannon Brownlee and Jean Lenzer, in The Lever magazine, showing that much of what the FDA approves is both dangerous and ineffective as they bow to the wishes of Big Pharma. Click Here for Article.

Alan Roth and Andy Lazris discuss screening for prostate cancer to explain how screening can be less beneficial, and more dangerous, than advertised. Just finding it early doesn't mean you've done yourself a service.

The Drug Industry was front and center in the creation of our health care industry. The reforms that created modern healthcare in 1911 and beyond were predicated on developing a research infrastructure in medical schools and in the medical community to generate money for industry. Nothing really has changed. Now the drug companies have control over federal agencies like the CDC and FDA; over academic research and academic doctors who are paid to conduct research designed by drug companies; over consumer agencies like the American Diabetes Association, Alzheimer's Association, and the American Heart Association; over Congress members from both parties who they pay; and of course over the media where they advertise endlessly They have taken over the reigns of our clinical protocols and even invent diseases like prediabetes and osteopenia to sell more drugs. We dissect this situation and talk about solutions.

In our book, A Return to Healing, we dissect what is wrong with our health care system, and show how you as a patient can better advocate for your own health in a system that often deceives you for profit. But too, we want to fix the system and we explore a feasible solution at the end of the book, one that is simple to achieve and one that would lead to massive financial savings at the cost of improving your health. We discuss this idea in our newest podcast.

In the show Apple Cider Vinegar, the writers create a binary: the good and all-knowing doctors vs the charlatan nutrition gurus. The gap is so wide between the two approaches that the reader is left thinking that in cancer, as in all things medical, doctors always have your best interest in mind and if they thought you should change your diet they'll tell you. Doctors are not trained in nutrition and are taught to view your body through numerical measurements that, if abnormal, can be "fixed" with drugs or procedures. We will talk about why diet is so important and why doctors fear talking about it.

Whether it is in attacking Kennedy, or in refusing to acknowledge what is dysfunctional about Medicare, Democrats use us vs them binary thinking to defend the medical system. By finding easy targets that seem inane, or by inventing those targets by twisting the truth, the defenders of our horrific medical system prop themselves up by posing as the reasonable ones. David Frum in the Atlantic did just that in his piece "Why the COVID deniers won." The very title presents a binary: we are the COVID accepters, those are the COVID deniers. What is a COVID denier? To Frum, its anyone who disputed the gospel of Anthony Fauci or who questioned the need to take an experimental vaccine. Frum defines science as listening to the "experts." In fact, the science he uses in his article is absolutely absurd and unsubstantiated, and the experts he points to are the very people who lied to us, bullied us, censored us, profited from COVID, and turned their back on scientific discourse. He admits, for instance, that closing schools was a mistake, but at the same time discredits the many scientists who from the start said just that. He notes that COVID was not dangerous to the young, but labels anyone as anti-scientific and dangerous--even those very young people--who didn't want to take the COVID vaccine or who denies that COVID was a severe universal threat. He presents no nuance about the vaccine, never brings up that government databases have shown it to be the most dangerous vaccine in history, and that not a single study has demonstrated that it had or has any public health benefit. His notion of science--do what my self-selected experts say and censor everyone else--and his "facts" about COVID--all of which have been debunked--push him down a road that props up the very people who stood in the way of a scientific and humanistic path through COVID, leading us to the worst outcomes in the world. That's COVID denialism: questioning bad science, dangerous mandates, poor policies, and censorship? As we will see in this and the next podcast, by erasing the common-sense middle ground, and by positing every medical issue as an us vs them binary, the system stays afloat, even as it continues to harm those who it tricks into submission.