Welcome to another series. This one features Dr. Adam Urato, MD, a Maternal-Fetal-Medicine specialist living and working in Framingham, MA, near where he trained at Harvard. Adam is in a unique position in medical culture because of his past experience sounding the alarm on Makena, a synthetic progesterone FDA approved for preterm labor in 2013, despite ONE shoddy clinical trial claiming it reduced the risk of preterm labor (without any impact on morbidity and mortality). Adam felt the trial was flawed and wanted to see more evidence of its safety and effectiveness before he committed to using it. However, over the next several years, others bit hook, line, and sinker on the propaganda bait put forth by the industry, those meant to regulate it, and its subsidiaries. While Adam fought to petition its removal until further evidence about safety and efficacy was completed, Hundreds of thousands of vulnerable pregnant women were injected with a synthetic hormone that, in 2019, was shown to have no evidence of efficacy, and to not be completely safe either. Unfortunately, the FDA dragged its feet for another four years (WTF!) until Makena was removed from the market (interestingly, 20 years after it emerged as a novel pharmaceutical in 2013). Long story short, THIS stance puts Adam in a unique position of scientific and moral authority and as a harbinger of truth in a growingly untrustworthy medical culture. It's hard to call Adam a conspiracy theorist when his Makena 'conspiracy theory' turned out to be completely valid... and therefore, it's hard not to take him seriously when he talks about the risks of antidepressant, specifically SSRI, use during pregnancy, as well as the uncertainty around the widespread use of the COVID vaccine and our divergence from other first-world countries in our current vaccination policies (We are a HUGE outlier in terms of recommending childhood and adolescent, and ESPECIALLY INFANT, COVID vaccination.)
Not to worry, however, Adam keeps it light while discussing really serious and important issues, and talks about the importance of fighting these fights as a happy warrior with an attitude of gratitude. I hope you enjoy.
Thanks for listening. For more social media content, check us out on all social media platforms @Renegadepsych. If you have any comments, questions or challenges to the information we've presented here, if you'd like to be a guest to the show, or if you have general comments, questions, or suggestions, email us at Renegadepsych@gmail.com and follow the link https://renegade-psych.podcastpage.io/ to our website for source material, transcripts, and additional links for my guests. If you feel passionate about our message and what we're trying to do, and you'd like to donate, you can also follow the link in the show notes to our website.
Disclaimer, this podcast is for informational purposes only. The information provided in this podcast and related materials are meant only to educate. This information is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. While I am a medical doctor and many of my guests have extensive medical training and experience, nothing stated in this podcast nor materials related to this podcast, including recommended websites, texts, graphics, images, or any other materials should be treated as a substitute for professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis or treatment. All listeners should consult with a medical professional, licensed mental health provider or other healthcare provider if seeking medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
[00:00:00] This is the teaser for my next series interviewing Dr. Adam Urato, a maternal fetal medicine physician at Tufts Medical Center and Metro West Medical Center in Framingham, Massachusetts, who serves his local community as a full-time clinician and who early in his career refused to use a synthetic progesterone medicine, Mycana, due to what looked like to him a very flawed and singular initial clinical trial in 2003.
[00:00:30] Indicating it supposedly reduced the incidence of preterm labor, which is a huge and unsolved problem in the field of obstetrics, and eventually led to an accelerated FDA approval in 2013.
[00:00:43] For years, Dr. Urato actively petitioned the FDA to remove it from the market, facing backlash from colleagues, supervisors, and even going against the grain of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology with his views.
[00:01:00] Eventually, in 2019, a stage four follow-up clinical trial revealed that it didn't even work to reduce the incidence of preterm labor, much less have a positive impact on morbidity and mortality, and was potentially associated with harmful effects, though it still took the FDA until 2023 to ban it.
[00:01:22] We talk about his experience with Mycana and how it puts him in a unique and strong position on other issues.
[00:01:30] Adam regularly lectures and makes podcast appearances on a host of different issues, and for the last couple of decades has been working to counsel his patients and the general public on some of the consequences of antidepressant use during pregnancy, including their impact on fetal neurodevelopment.
[00:01:50] We also talk about how the COVID vaccine rollout is straight out of the pharmaceutical playbook for new and potentially lucrative drugs, vaccines, or treatments, marketing them as all-benefit and no risk, despite the lack of anything close to long-term data.
[00:02:07] I really enjoyed talking with Adam.
[00:02:09] He carries a positive attitude about his work and doesn't get his feathers ruffled by the broken system, something I need to try to emulate and strive for if I'm going to survive in the flawed medical
[00:02:20] culture that exists in the United States and worldwide today.
[00:02:23] I hope you enjoy the teaser and the series on Mycana, the COVID vaccine, antidepressant and specifically SSRI use during pregnancy, as well as a few classic side conversations and discussion on how to rectify the system in which we operate.
[00:02:40] Hope after listening, you're able to foster an attitude of gratitude, be a happy warrior, and enjoy our conversation.
[00:02:48] Thanks for listening.
[00:02:51] Somebody get this guy some help.
[00:03:01] Medications are chemicals.
[00:03:03] They're not growing on trees.
[00:03:05] They're synthetic chemical compounds being manufactured in chemical factories.
[00:03:09] When you put them into your body, they're going to have chemical consequences.
[00:03:14] And when you're pregnant, they're going to cross the placenta, they're going to go into the baby and the chemicals are going to have consequences for the developing baby.
[00:03:22] I try to be a happy warrior.
[00:03:24] Keep working hard, seeking the truth, fighting for patients and the public.
[00:03:28] I'm a small dog fighting against the big dogs out there with the pharmaceutical industry and the massive power of the drug companies, et cetera.
[00:03:37] There's no shame in getting knocked down.
[00:03:40] The shame is in not getting back up.
[00:03:42] Keep fighting another day and trying to do what's best for patients and the public.
[00:03:48] The COVID vaccine, we were told initially that it was basically 100% of the vaccine coming out of the gate.
[00:03:56] And essentially there was no downside, no side effects, no risks to it.
[00:04:03] It's sad.
[00:04:03] I'm laughing now because the absurdity of it, you're injecting people with this news, it's synthetic chemical compounds.
[00:04:12] The thing is basically like a miracle in a vial.
[00:04:15] And then actually it's more like 90%, 80%, 70%.
[00:04:20] And then, no, you got to get another one, et cetera.
[00:04:23] These studies have been done again and again and again.
[00:04:27] There's going to be a movement like save the rats, stop exposing them during development to the SSR antidepressants because we already know from study after study that these are having effects.
[00:04:38] They'll have different copulatory behavior.
[00:04:41] How they socialize will be different.
[00:04:44] People have referred to these as autistic-like behaviors.
[00:04:47] I went to Harvard College and Harvard Med and I stayed local.
[00:04:51] I ended up completing my maternal fetal medicine fellowship at Tufts Medical Center.
[00:04:55] And then I've been practicing maternal fetal medicine in Framingham since 2005.
[00:05:02] Next year, 20 years practicing in this community.
[00:05:06] So I'm taking care of friends, neighbors.
[00:05:10] It's really important to have an attitude of humility, but also an attitude of truth seeking.
[00:05:15] I'm not trying to win every argument.
[00:05:17] I'm not trying to beat you over the head with my argument.
[00:05:20] I'm not trying to beat my patients up or trying to figure out when it comes to medications in pregnancy, the effects that they're having to try to do what's best for patients, the public, the community.
[00:05:33] My mom always uses that phrase to have an attitude of gratitude.
[00:05:38] In the current culture around medical research, what is true research?
[00:05:42] What is manipulated?
[00:05:43] Seeing the situation unfold early in your career with Mycana, you had the courage to stick to your guns, to fight for your patients.
[00:05:54] Ultimately it puts you in a unique position because you have the clout.
[00:05:59] You have been right on a major issue that so many told you, you were wrong about for so long.
[00:06:07] It subsequently got FDA approval and then started making that drug company hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
[00:06:14] That first trial right out of the gate, I thought, you know, there's really something wrong here.
[00:06:18] Once it's approved and they're making billions off of it, they don't have a lot of incentive to do the second trial, which may show as it did here that it doesn't work.
[00:06:28] The tragedy here is the poor women who were rejected with that thing every single week after 2019 when we knew it didn't work.
[00:06:36] It really is outrageous.
[00:06:38] When you're pregnant, you don't want to be putting things in your body, whether it's medication, vaccination or whatnot, unless you're sure that they've been proven fairly definitively to be safe, to be effective and to have a health benefit for the mom and the baby.
[00:06:53] And that's a general rule of thumb.
[00:06:55] And then you describe those things.
[00:06:56] You let the patient make up her mind what she wants to do.
[00:07:00] The approach that the United States has taken with child vaccination for COVID vaccine compared to the rest of the world, we're an outlier.
[00:07:10] The rest of the world is not recommending it for young children and it continues to be recommended here.
[00:07:16] The recommendations from the CDC and the FDA seem to be more aligned with what is going to maximize profit than what is going to maximize what's best for patients in the public.
[00:07:30] The FDA is getting about half of its budget from the pharmaceutical industry and the CDC as well receives significant funding from the pharmaceutical industry.
[00:07:41] The commissioners of the FDA, when they leave, they go to work for pharma.
[00:07:46] When you've got that level of entanglement between bodies like the FDA and the CDC and the drug companies, the public completely loses faith, stops following the recommendations.
[00:08:01] I've wondered if people are going through residency and then they start to have questions about this model that psychiatry is today, what ends up happening?
[00:08:13] What do you do?
[00:08:15] You get odd looks from some of your colleagues and some of them want to put a tin foil hat on you.
[00:08:21] There's a really telling stat.
[00:08:23] In 1987, point two percent of Medicaid insured youths were on any psychiatric medication.
[00:08:31] And as of 2018, that number is almost 20 percent.
[00:08:37] We are over medicating the crap out of our kids and who knows what kind of impact that's going to have in the long term?
[00:08:46] I have patients who come in regularly.
[00:08:48] They'll be on Prozac, they'll be on Zoloft and they'll tell me that the only counseling that they get shot with is that these don't affect the baby.
[00:08:55] It doesn't make any sense.
[00:08:57] If it's a chemical that goes into the brain, it's going to have chemical effects.
[00:09:02] That's what chemicals do.
[00:09:03] Chemicals have consequences.
[00:09:06] So the human developing fetal brain needs to do all that wiring and serotonin is a cell signaling molecule.
[00:09:15] It's telling the neurons where to go, how to connect, that sort of thing.
[00:09:20] When you add an SSRI antidepressant in throughout development, you're going to alter those kind of connections that are so crucial to the formation of the brain.
[00:09:29] There's now, by my last count, about 10 MRI studies that have shown the impact of SSRI antidepressants on the developing fetal brain.
[00:09:41] One of the craziest things I've seen in my field, I'm seeing a patient who's suicidal.
[00:09:47] What I'm supposed to do is prescribe them a drug that puts them at increased risk of killing themselves in the first two weeks of treatment.
[00:09:57] When I have another drug that has much better proven evidence that reduces the risk of suicide in lithium.
[00:10:07] People have looked at this and says it does look like it may be causative, certainly in young people, increased risk of suicide with SSRI antidepressants.
[00:10:17] And I believe there's an FDA warning on that for young people, for children then into the younger ages.
[00:10:23] And there's some concern even beyond that in adults about actually causing suicide with the initiation of these drugs.
[00:10:30] There is this black box warning for adolescents, but the drug doesn't know when you turn 18.
[00:10:37] The answers that we generate about things, whether it's about lithium or about the effects of antidepressants in pregnancy, there's a scientific answer.
[00:10:46] But then there's also a commercial answer.
[00:10:50] And the answer that typically gets out to the public is the commercial answer, because so many of the people providing information, whether it's the key opinion leaders or the commercial media or the professional medical societies are funded by the industry.
[00:11:08] The journalists here have done a very poor job of actually informing the public, unfortunately.
[00:11:15] Corporate media does basically what you'd expect corporate media to do, which is to cover things with the commercial answer to these questions, cover things in such a way that are going to increase sales and profits.
[00:11:29] If you were to study this, we in the United States are probably the most pharmaceutically exposed human beings that have ever existed on the planet.
[00:11:41] The pharmaceutical industry is so powerful that all of those protective layers, the regulators, the government, the journalists, the professional medical societies, they all become subservient to the pharmaceutical industry and start to in fact act like branches of the pharmaceutical industry.
[00:12:01] Instead of really standing strong for patients and the public, they're essentially cheerleading pharma in many ways.
[00:12:09] It was much more lucrative for the American Pain Society to take money from Purdue Pharma and essentially put out recommendations that would increase Oxycontin use.
[00:12:19] That's not a conspiracy.
[00:12:21] It's just how the cash flows to Purdue Pharma, then it flows to the American Pain Society.
[00:12:29] Everybody's making money.
[00:12:30] It's not of conspiracy theory per se.
[00:12:33] It's just how it looks when everybody's focusing on profit and not on doing what's right by patients and the public.
[00:12:45] Somebody get this guy some help.
[00:12:54] Thanks for listening.
[00:12:55] For more social media content, check us out on all social media platforms at Renegade Psych.
[00:13:00] If you have any comments, questions or challenges to the information we presented here, or if you'd like to be a guest to the show, feel free to email us.
[00:13:06] Renegadesyke at gmail.com.
[00:13:08] Follow the link in the show notes to our website for source material, transcripts and additional links for my guests.
[00:13:12] And if you feel passionate about our message and what we're trying to do and you'd like to donate, you can also follow the link in the show notes to our website.
[00:13:18] Thank you.
[00:13:18] Disclaimer.
[00:13:19] This podcast is for informational purposes only.
[00:13:21] The information provided in this podcast and related materials are meant only to educate.
[00:13:24] This information is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice.
[00:13:27] While I am a medical doctor and many of my guests have extensive medical training and experience, nothing stated in this podcast nor materials related to this podcast, including recommended websites, text, graphics, images or any other
[00:13:35] materials should be treated as a substitute for professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis or treatment.
[00:13:40] All listeners should consult with a medical professional, licensed mental health provider or other health care provider if seeking medical advice, diagnosis or treatment or put more simply.
[00:13:48] If you need help like this guy, call your own doctor.