27.2 Misdiagnosed and Overmedicated Kids with Kassondra Ola, Part 2

[00:00:00] Science really just has not studied these effects out and it's just unfair to let your child be the lab rat that makes the system more money. You have to be your child's advocate. Improve yourself as a family. Learn anything and everything that you can and guard your child. It may be difficult, but you're in charge of this really, this precious life. Kids can be influenced and molded.

[00:00:28] If your kid is struggling with something and you're worried about their future, you can find creative ways to deal with it that don't involve completely drugging them out of their mind. Somebody get this guy some help!

[00:01:00] Or, put more simply, If you need help like this guy, call your own doctor. 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.

[00:01:28] All listeners should consult with a medical professional, licensed mental health provider, or other healthcare provider if seeking medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Or, put more simply, If you need help like this guy, call your own doctor. It's wild to me the number of psych meds that you were prescribed, even though, unfortunately, I regularly have intakes with adults on a half dozen to a dozen different psych meds alone.

[00:01:50] I pulled these from another podcast appearance you had, but I think your regimen at one time or another, it included, you know, so-called antidepressants, Zoloft, Lexapro, Celexa, Prestique, antipsychotics, which certainly can block dopamine and cause cognitive dulling.

[00:02:11] Things like Risperdal, Seroquel, Abilify, mood stabilizers, including lithium, Lamictal, Depakote, Trileptal, anti-anxiety meds, Buspar and Klonopin, stimulants, Concerta and Adderall, a couple of off-label drugs, Topamax, Neurotin, all that on top of birth control, right? Depo-Provera.

[00:02:34] I am sorry that someone or some people in my profession thought that these were safe and effective treatments for a 10 to 18 year old. What I see so often is somebody has a side effect and it's not really deeply considered that the side effect might be from the first drug that I started. Or even, hey, they're having this side effect, but independent of that, maybe they're not benefiting from the first drug I started.

[00:03:03] Maybe I should stop that one before I look at another drug or reconsider what I'm treating and what I'm diagnosing. Did you have certain interactions where like you realize like this is not very methodical? For me, it was just my mom handed me a book by Jane Pauly and I was reading her experience with bipolar and I'm like, this doesn't feel like bipolar what I'm experiencing.

[00:03:27] I remember when I hit rock bottom with the side effects because it was like at some point, like in high school, I developed like a certain amount of consciousness I didn't have before, which I feel like should have been present before. But it delayed for whatever reason. And then I started coming to. I remember being so sedated in high school. I actually failed driver's ed simply because I couldn't stay awake. And so at this point, I'm trying to do better. I'm trying to keep up with my peers. I'm trying to figure out what I want for my future.

[00:03:56] I'm sitting here thinking if I'm so sedated, I can't even stay awake. How am I supposed to make it in college? How am I supposed to survive without my parents? How am I supposed to have a job? I got exhausted trying to overcompensate for the underlying issues and the side effects of the drugs when like the summer before my senior year. And the senior year is supposed to be the best time because they do so many events for the seniors. You get to do things that other kids don't get to do. It's supposed to be magical.

[00:04:24] But anyway, it was supposed to be the best year. It wasn't. But the summer before that, I was like, I can't do this. I cannot do this. I actually transferred to three different high schools on these medications. I, you know, when I first entered high school, I ended up at Baptist High School. And because of the medications and my previous background, I was just a punching bag for the students. They either stayed away from me or they would pretend to be my friend to get stuff out of me and then humiliate me behind my back.

[00:04:53] It was a lion's den. It was awful. And then that summer after I crashed, I ended up begging to be institutionalized because I was like, look, this is my last year of high school and I'm going to be adult after this. I don't know what my family is going to require of me or if I'm going to be on my own, but I'm not going to be okay unless we figure this out. I told the psychiatric staff, hey, something else is wrong. I can't tell the difference between what's really going on and the side effects of these drugs. We need to wean and taper me off of these and then reevaluate.

[00:05:24] And they couldn't promise they would do that. They said, we'll see. But then they weren't really doing that. So I got stubborn and angry and I tried to take control of my own treatment and refuse the medications. This was my first attempt to come off the medications. It did not go well. I got worse. They basically labeled me noncompliant, took me out of the hospital. They tried to put me through my base school, but I couldn't function in it. So they moved me to a locked facility for troubled kids.

[00:05:55] And that's where I started having difficulty breathing. They were telling me that's in my head. I don't think it was. I've heard with protracted withdrawal, you can actually have histamine intolerance. And I didn't know it then, but that's probably what it was. But the teachers, like a lot of the teachers sided with my family and felt sorry for my sister, which I mean, yeah, she was pretty messed up watching me go through all this with the medications. Because first off, I had a bad social sphere and a rough upbringing.

[00:06:25] So I didn't know how to be a good sister. And so, of course, that's going to affect her mental health, which is just a shame. And I'm just going to say this because I really wanted to just learn and be a family person. I wanted to be a good daughter, a better sister. I wanted these things. And the medications and the misdiagnosis absolutely sabotage that 100%. So there are effects on the family members when you drive a child chemically insane.

[00:06:54] Because now they're dealing with the traumatic effects of the behavior. And this is how you turn parents against their children. Because the parents thought that I needed the medication. They didn't force on me and the consequences thereof. The funny part was that the medications were so sedating, I didn't even remember what the behaviors that they had done to me that traumatized my sister.

[00:07:22] So while I'm going through this withdrawal and I need my family the most and my behaviors cracking, trying to come off these meds on my own with no guidance. Because at that point, I think that there was a toxicity and a reason to come off of them. I think if like we examined the symptoms I was going through more thoroughly, they'd probably be like, you needed to be off of those medicines like three years ago. More than likely. Wait, is this your younger sister? My younger sister, six years younger than me.

[00:07:49] With neurodivergent kids, oftentimes what happens to them gets taken out on the family. Right? So, and I mean, it's classic. Hurt kids hurt other kids. Right? It was like that for me. So all the chaos I experienced from other people, I ended up taking out on my sister. As I got better social spheres into social, better social spheres, which is probably, I started, that started happening around seventh, eighth grade for me.

[00:08:14] I changed and I started becoming more cognizant of my behavior instead of just reacting. And I'm starting to realize how at times, even before this, how the medications may have messed with my inhibition and affected her. Now I'm a completely different person. I'm in a completely different place. I don't even remember that stuff at the time. I'm trying to separate what was me, what was normal puberty, what was the drugs, what was my fault.

[00:08:43] Because, you know, at some point you have to figure out what was in my control of change, what wasn't. Let go of certain things and work where you're at. Right? I guess what I'm trying to say is my family has needed trauma support because of the way the meds had affected me and how I didn't get the right help in time before the medications. I was exposed to a lot of therapy, but it was useless because I was drugged out of the ability to utilize therapy. And nobody understood that.

[00:09:12] I can't tell you how many patients I've seen who are long-term benzo treatment and they've had trauma. They've had an event that they need to work through in therapy and work through repeatedly. You know, you don't get over it, but you move through it.

[00:09:31] I've seen so many patients either in the addiction setting that are self-medicating or being prescribed medication by oftentimes, I don't think somebody who's trying to do wrong, but seeing somebody who's in pain and wanting to give them short-term relief, but not recognizing that they may be preventing their ability to process.

[00:09:54] And all of that is to say, I see benzos people living in the same experience that happened years ago because they've taken a benzo every day. It's just this vicious cycle of getting short-term relief from their discomfort at the expense of moving and processing through what has happened and understanding it.

[00:10:20] I can only imagine like you wanted to be able to understand and process, but cognitively you were affected by side effects of medications that weren't helping. And I guess that's my point, right? Like it affected my frontal lobe and my inhibition in more than one way. It affected my emotional development and behavior. It just further ostracized and chemically estranged me.

[00:10:47] And by the time I hit like a certain milestone with my cognitive and emotional development, that was late. And now I'm trying to make better choices, but I'm still at the mercy of these drugs and I can't and I'm speaking out and nobody believes me. They weren't even tracking how the medication were affecting my behavior from the beginning. So now that they think side effects of my medication were part of the underlying problem when they were not.

[00:11:12] So they're really losing the patient to the side effects of the medication. And then when I take matters into my own hands to try to save myself, it turns into a further disaster. Because like you said, you can't just come off these drugs. And so like I will sometimes describe it as a metaphor. In a metaphor, like I was a dark angel coming to the light. Didn't have really good circumstances. Didn't know how to navigate them.

[00:11:37] Once I started heading in the right direction, it was like everything in the dark side's power was thrown at me to keep me from coming. Coming, you know? Because I mean, there's a lot of kids who go through a lot of troubled things and they have a rough start. But they come out of it as decent people. Or even stronger people. Yes. Yes. Because like I'm not going to pretend to be like I was a perfect kid with no issues and the medication made me worse.

[00:12:05] No, I had underlying things as a result of what was done to me in my environment. And not really knowing how to navigate that. And I needed extra help and guidance to resolve that. But these medications just kind of trashed my journey and made it a crap show. You know? It was like it really made things worse, not better. And it's amazing because my family, they're amazing people.

[00:12:29] And over time, we've come out of the trauma that this has caused and we're starting to heal. But we've been deprived of each other and separated from each other and really offering the understanding and support we needed from each other because of this. And in fact, they actually had better luck with the medications. At times, they needed some to deal with the stuff. They had better luck with it than I did, but they weren't polydrugged at the same age as I was.

[00:12:58] The whole experience and not having enough knowledge and information about how this affects people, not enough knowledge and information of how this affects kids. It separated me from them. Like it really did isolate me. And your providers not obtaining enough knowledge and information about your case specifically over time before you make that big decision to treat a kid.

[00:13:24] Obviously, I'm very against, in general, medication of definitely kids at the really young ages. I'm not crazy about medicating kids of any age, but there certainly are exceptions to that. And I recognize that.

[00:13:41] But if people in my position are going to go down that route, they need to track things like your mood and your symptoms over a long period of time and not just rely on some subjective reports or one source or two sources of collateral. Or rely on a 10-year-old who doesn't know how to communicate their needs effectively, even if you take out any trauma that occurred before that.

[00:14:11] Or even if you take out the social communication problems that can come with something like autism. Like you still can't rely on a 10-year-old to be able to describe in great and accurate detail what they're experiencing just because they're not developed to a degree to be able to do that.

[00:14:32] So if you're going to make this decision to instigate really powerful chemical agents for a young person, you better have a lot of information. And it better be very, very methodical in the approach. From the provider standpoint, we go through a lot of school. We take so many tests.

[00:14:55] It is an intense pressure cooker of paying a lot of money and then having to perform well on tests that unfortunately are not designed like the real clinical world is. On the test, there's A, B, C, D, E.

[00:15:14] And I've got to make as many correct choices as possible on as many tests over a long period of time to get the credential to be able to provide medications. But I think that if you don't have a very conscious awareness of that fact, you can get to a situation where you're sitting down with a patient and you have this mindset like, no, I've learned it all. I've taken the test. I've proven myself that I know this. You didn't take those tests.

[00:15:43] But the reality is you're the expert on what you're feeling as a reaction to a medicine or on what you're feeling in terms of the symptoms. But I think that might be where some of that comes from, this rigidity with like, I've learned this. And emotionally, it's kind of hard to let that go if you see and talk to people who are telling you their experience is different than what you learned. Yeah, exactly.

[00:16:12] The whole thing with the bipolar misdiagnosis is the doctors didn't realize that the side effects were doing this and the stress of the side effects were doing this. And because they were taught, you know, oh, people feel better on medications and then they come off and then they relapse and mess themselves up and do things that everyone regrets. And so they just thought that me needing to come off the meds was part of the bipolar. Like, it's so easy to mistake the behavioral side effects of the medication as the underlying problem. And it's almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[00:16:42] So you're just stuck and people are just mislabeling it. So like, after some really hard things that had happened, I actually got kicked out of my house for trying to come off the medications in high school. I lived with a high school friend who took me in. I bounced around to like three different houses. I'd become unstable on the medications and then didn't really have the right tools to come off properly. So it made me more unstable. So like, I just wasn't right. And nobody knew how to interpret the behavior.

[00:17:11] Like most of the people I stayed with, like thought I needed to be on more meds and I was doing this to myself. But I ended up staying with my grandmother for a little while. I ended up back in the hospital. Then when I was in the hospital, they put me on more meds than I had started out with. And I continued to get worse at this point. Like the physical and neurological issues were so bad. While I was living with my grandmother, I was ready to end it. And I tried. Didn't end up going through with it.

[00:17:40] But the... I'm sorry. There was a point in all this and... This happens to me all the time. What I try to do is go away from it consciously. You know, if we start talking about Martha Stewart, that new documentary about her and distract ourselves consciously from what we're wanting to talk about, then it'll pop back in there. Do you really? Yeah, I remember now.

[00:18:05] So after a whole lot of pain and just being like rejected and misunderstood and kicked out of many different houses, being further off, distressed by society and feeling like an utmost fool and not having mental or physical stability. We did eventually get a re-evaluation and we found out that I had Asperger's syndrome, which has now been fused with the autism diagnosis. And how old were you? Like 24, probably.

[00:18:34] So can you imagine like just being polydrugged for 10 years, having your symptoms misjudged as your character and your personality and like having to stand up for yourself and nobody believes you and it makes you worse and now they're judging you even more? That speaks to the hubris that I talk about that can be so detrimental to a learning clinician. You have got to get out of your own way.

[00:19:00] Like I'm sure you look back and it's like, how do you let somebody go 10 years on 15 to 20 different medications and not step back from that situation and say, gosh, maybe I'm wrong. Yeah. Such an important message to providers. It is okay to be wrong.

[00:19:22] It is not okay to be wrong, but be so mentally unprepared to ever think that you could be wrong that you won't even entertain that idea. Right. That's how you're going to do really, really irreparable harm is not stepping back and saying, hey, you know what?

[00:19:43] If I don't know anything about medicine or psychiatry, what I do see is that, well, I've tried four treatments in this class and three in that class and two in this and none of them are working. Yeah. Maybe fundamentally what I'm looking at is not what I thought I was looking at. Yeah, exactly. I think that's the whole point of medicine. It's actually the privilege of having a medical license. You get to sit there and be like, oh, this isn't working.

[00:20:12] Let's figure out why it's not working and tell everyone else. Let's pioneer and advance this area. It's not supposed to be like, oh, we learned this. That's how it is. And it's done. No, no. Now you're a part of a progressing journey of increasing knowledge and figuring out what you're supposed to keep and what you're supposed to throw out. And that's what makes you the hero. That's what makes you a productive part of your patient's life. And you never want to lose that.

[00:20:39] If you're harmed by a drug that you knew was a possibility because drugs, chemicals have consequences and our biology is all unique and distinct from each other. If you're harmed by a drug and you come back to your doctor or provider and you say this happened and the doctor provider says, well, gosh, that informs me about something I didn't know about before.

[00:21:06] It makes the harm that you experienced much easier to overcome because you know that even though you went through a trial or a tribulation, that ultimately it allowed that person who's going to go and treat, you know, hundreds, thousands of other people to learn from it. We've got to speak to people who are doing this on the provider side.

[00:21:31] Let them know that the point of this is not to demonize every provider or set the expectation that when you're providing a medical service that you're going to be perfect. It's to let people know it's okay to make mistakes. It's not okay to make mistakes and then hide from them or have this hubris that doesn't even allow you to acknowledge that there's been a mistake made.

[00:21:57] Those people will never grow and they will be the same practicing clinician when they're 65 that they were when they were 35. Exactly. And that's not what you want. Tell me a little bit more about, you know, the process of long-term recovery. None of that process was graceful. It was awful for me. So like I said, in high school, I begged to be institutionalized and withdrawn and then reevaluated. They didn't have the facilities to do that. They didn't tend to take me off of everything anyway.

[00:22:27] You know, I took things into my own hands and it was disaster. It made things worse and only further separated me from my family, even my church and my friends. And I had a few people who are exceptional human beings who came alongside me through this that were just amazing. I think I ended up going back on one or two of them out of like maybe the four or five. And then when I ended up back in the hospital, they just put me on more. And I started trying to wean off slowly on my own at some point.

[00:22:57] And this was probably between 2011 and 2012. But I really would waffle back because I didn't know how to do this. My mind wasn't right. I was going through so much. But I cold turkeyed everything summer of 2012, whatever remaining was on. I was done like late summer of 2012. And that was protracted withdrawal at its finest. I think I had akathisia. I could barely eat because I would get really bad pain with small amounts of food.

[00:23:26] It was very hard to breathe. I'd have muscle tension and twisting. Like you couldn't necessarily see it, but I could feel it. And it felt like it was so strong it was going to damage my connective tissue. So I was in pain everywhere. And I ended up trying to work for a chiropractor at the time. And the only relief that I got, even my mutely and temporary, was through chiropractic adjustments from this terrible pain. I didn't know this at the time, but I had Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. It was part of my underlying genetic condition.

[00:23:56] So what I really had was autism spectrum. So I had all of that. And then I had Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, which means I had fragile connective tissues. I needed physical therapy. I needed to be careful about certain things that I did. When you have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, you're not supposed to have manual manipulations. It can affect your connective tissues more. You can develop cervical instability. And I did develop cervical instability to the point that it was actually surgical. But that did not get diagnosed till 2018 because I was so unstable.

[00:24:26] When you have someone going through protective withdrawal, they can't eat. They have akathisia. I had my intuition telling me I needed to come off and not knowing how to do that properly. And I had other people telling me that I needed to come. And I'd been gaslit so much, I couldn't make my own decisions. And I didn't know who to listen to myself or everybody else at this point. That was a process in itself. In our minds are products of our early relationships. And because those minds are programmed to notify us about anything that may negatively impact our survival,

[00:24:56] when you've got a big question like, how or should I come off of these medications, you're going to feel one thing that Cassie feels is like, I think these are making me worse. But then you're likely at the same time dealing with the conscience voice of the authority figures that say, well, no, maybe you shouldn't. And the doctor said this or my parents said this.

[00:25:20] And it makes for a confusing existence just as an adult. But as a kid, as a young adult, it can be very confusing, especially when you don't have decades worth of knowledge and experience learning about these things. Many times I felt like I was going to drop dead. Who knows what two years of that did to my nervous system. So now I develop cervical instability because I'm grasping for stability mentally and physically.

[00:25:51] And my family doesn't understand what's going on. So I'm fleeing to strangers who don't know what to do. I'm completely off the wall. And I was also on a birth control that I thought would cure the bipolar because I had heard that sometimes birth control will stabilize hormones. And now you don't have any bipolar. So I actually had started that on recommendation of my family because I thought it would help everything. And I found out later that that particular birth control, Deborah Provera, like there were testimonies of women on YouTube for the longest time.

[00:26:20] I don't know what happened to them. I looked them up recently. They're not there anymore. They were talking about how they became head case anxiety. That made no sense. A lot of them attempted suicide. So I'm on depo and these psych meds. Now I'm coming off of both of them because... It was completely wild. So first of all, I had the side effects from the medications. And then I started going into protracted withdrawal and then straight into cervical instability. The horrors into a system that thinks that this is all my fault from the beginning.

[00:26:49] And it's not your fault. I mean, and I just mentioned that again because that is how our minds work. Even though we've made a determination consciously that, look, there's a lot of factors that I didn't have any control over that went into my journey and my experience. But that nuisance of the mind will be like, well, what if that's wrong? There's so much uncertainty in medicine, in psychiatry.

[00:27:14] I just don't know how providers figure things out without directly and intensively involving their patients. I have medical and psychiatric knowledge and years of experience, but every single patient I've ever worked with outside of major traumatic brain injuries, they know better than I do what's happening in their experience.

[00:27:39] There is no way for me to understand their internal experience. It doesn't matter how much I know about medicine. So just to kind of like wrap up, what are you up to now? And how are you taking what has happened in your life and your journey and trying to help other people prepare for their interactions with the system? You know, first of all, I'm making sense of what happened

[00:28:06] and realizing that just because I had a rough start didn't make me a bad person or even a bad kid. I didn't have the circumstances that I needed to pull through the same way as other people. But I eventually came to. And by the time I came to and started making better choices and realizing what life was about and how I wanted to purposely build who I was, I was sabotaged by a bunch of drugs.

[00:28:31] I really had to go deep and separate my identity from that whole entanglement because it was a mess. I'm utilizing therapy at this point to kind of help recover from all that and pick up the broken pieces. And the whole point of mosaics is you can take a bunch of broken pieces and make something absolutely beautiful out of it. You can even make something more beautiful than it was before.

[00:28:57] So just because you have a difficult life does not mean that it's over. Through a lot of tenacity and not giving up, I found a medical team that's looking at my situation critically. We're getting to the root causes. We're addressing the cervical instability and the joint instability, which, I mean, that mainly came out of not knowing I had Ehlers-Danlos to begin with and then going to get treatment for the protective withdrawal. So we're dealing with that.

[00:29:24] We also found out I've got, like, jaw stuff going on that might be contributing to the cervical instability. So there may actually need to be a surgery to fix that. And I'm currently just trying to take it easy, trying to learn how to pace myself, not hold things against myself. I'm learning how to take my time because my life just isn't going to look like some of the people who don't go through this.

[00:29:52] They get to orient and choose things and have just a better, easier path. And that's not my path. And that's OK. But I am trying to go to school. I'm trying to get a degree, as like I mentioned, when we opened, because I want to help people in the mental health field. Like, I want to help be part of the solution to some of these things we've talked about. And I'm sharing my story because I think it's important that people know just how destructive this can be for families who actually love each other and want to help each other.

[00:30:20] And I just want to put out there, imagine for parents who aren't really equipped to have kids, who don't have good intentions, who don't have healthy parenting techniques, how that can make a kid vulnerable. Like, we need to really protect those people. Because if you can do this to a family that otherwise wants to help each other, but that kind of gets sabotaged because of misinformation and following a system that they trusted, that they didn't understand the blind spots.

[00:30:48] What about these kids who don't have those healthy family dynamics? We're just leaving them in the most abusive situation ever. Some of them are not going to make it out. You know what I'm saying? They're not going to have that. And we're drugging those kids. Yeah. That statistic about, you know, six times more likely in foster care to be on a psychiatric medication. Yeah.

[00:31:10] We're trying to take behavioral problems that are so much more often related to traumatic experiences and adverse childhood experiences, which can also precipitate biological or genetic mental conditions. But we're just taking those and trying to medicate away the behaviors. Instead of trying to understand them. And that's pretty clear when you look at that population getting those drugs six times more likely.

[00:31:39] How many times have you told this story, you know, in like a public forum? I've opened up to you with more details than I ever have in a public forum. Every time that you do tell your story, it gets a little bit easier. It takes all of the mess of things that occur in our minds and our brains that we sit with internally and you externalize it.

[00:32:05] You create that path of how to make sense of what happened to you repeatedly. And eventually you're just left with the scar. That's why I keep reiterating that this is a very positive thing that you're doing. And it does have an impact. If three people listen to this and it impacts them in a positive way,

[00:32:30] and then those three people are able to pass on that impact to three more people, then you have this exponentially building effect of your impact. But your mind and my mind with doing this podcast are still not going to give us that credit. That's why I think that a lot of the times when we give credit, whether it be to other people or to ourselves, it's got to be conscious. Yeah.

[00:32:59] And I really appreciate that encouragement because I, you know, I did become a lot more timid and reserved through all of this. And I think the chronic gaslighting had something to do with it. So I'm still trying to work out of that. But I do think it's so important for other parents and people to know you're developmentally and behaviorally and neurologically sabotaging your kids when you're exposing them to drugging and polydrugging. Children are in a state of development.

[00:33:29] They're developing their bodies. And when you put a drug of any kind in it, now you're messing with that. Science really just has not studied these effects out. And it's just unfair to let your child be the lab rat that makes the system more money. You have to be your child's advocate. Improve yourself as a family. Learn anything and everything that you can and guard your child.

[00:33:54] It may be difficult, but you're in charge of this really, this precious life. Kids can be influenced and molded. If your kid is struggling with something and you're worried about their future, you can find creative ways to deal with it that don't involve completely drugging them out of their mind. You're only interfering with this process. And I've heard it over and over again. Like, Yosef had some people on his channel where they have literally come out and said to him,

[00:34:22] I don't remember a good portion of my life because I was so drugged. You're taking your child out of things. When you drug somebody up like that, they're just not there. And when you take them off the drug, now they have to deal with things that they couldn't address before because the drug was just masking that or just making them too dull. There's so many things you can do as a parent. And I do want to take the time to advertise. I just found out recently, earlier this year, there's an All of Us NIH study.

[00:34:52] It's worldwide. They're collecting blood samples from people. Well, researchers, when they get to your sample, who knows how long that's going to be, they're following you for 10 years and they're just studying the genetic components of things. Get involved in that. Do a family study. Donate your genetics. It's free because they just want to advance science. And you can find out things about your genetics that you may not be able to afford.

[00:35:20] And just keep doing your own research. You don't have to completely believe and be a part of the medical system. And I will say that there are positive things about the system. But you have to be able to do your own research and figure out what's beneficial and what's not. And you have to be able to figure out when the doctor is receptive, when they're not receptive, and when they're pushing things for money and when they're not. Because you've got doctors that are in this for the right reasons, and then you've got doctors who are not.

[00:35:50] Or sometimes doctors have the right intentions, but they get caught up in the model. Most people have really good intentions. I think most people are just somewhat ignorant to the underpinnings of the system and the things that happen behind the curtain. To go back to the analogy, let's work on stopping the pollution upstream. Instead of trying to scramble to take this for your sleep, take this for your energy when you wake up,

[00:36:20] take this if you get too anxious because we gave you too much energy after you woke up with this other drug. And we live in one of the most unhealthy countries in the world that allows crazy amounts of additives in our food that creates inflammation. And again, it's not that medicine is bad. It's that if we are going to use medication, we need to start at a really low dose. Give it time.

[00:36:46] See what the effect is over time and counsel our patients on that. Hey, we're not going to try to figure this out in a day or two. It may take a year, but we're going to err on the side of caution and safety and support you in as many ways as we can that don't have side effects and use medications cautiously, but when they're appropriate. And again, just always feel like it's okay to go back to the drawing board and say, gosh, you know what?

[00:37:15] This is complex and it's okay that I don't understand all. You know what? There's a lot of things I don't understand. I always bring up the Dunning-Kruger curve effect. Are you familiar with it at all? I am not, but it sounds scary. Oh, you're going to love it. You're going to love it. I'll do a screen share real quick. These are the scariest providers. They're the ones who are at the peak of Mount Stupid where you knew nothing. Your confidence skyrockets. You went to medical school.

[00:37:45] You passed all your tests. You got through residency. You think you know everything. You're practicing. Because of that, you are practicing poorly. Your actual competence is low. And I've been here. I think maybe I'm like here at this point. But it's hard. It is very difficult. I've talked to other providers about this.

[00:38:08] It's hard to say, gosh, a lot of that stuff that I learned was either incomplete or sometimes flat out incorrect. And it's hard to say, yeah, okay, I don't know nearly as much as I thought I did. But it's necessary in order to get to an actual, you know, higher degree of competence. I love that chart. That is so fantastic.

[00:39:02] Feel free to reach out on social media or email us at renegadesyke at gmail.com. And if you'd like to be a guest of the show or you have a connection to somebody that you think would be a good guest, let us know. Thanks again for listening. Disclaimer. This podcast is for informational purposes only. The information provided in this podcast and related materials are meant only to educate.

[00:39:31] 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, text, 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 health care provider if seeking medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Or, put more simply, If you need help like this guy, call your own doctor.