30.2 Vaccine Nuance, THE SCIENCE, and Alzheimer's Drugs with Nikki Johnson, MD

[00:00:00] When I came out of medical school and training, was I one of those people who was like, oh, you should really get all of these vaccines. Absolutely. That's who I was. But as I said in the very, you know, close to the beginning of this, the way we handle COVID, the way we handle gender medicine made me question every single thing that I learned in medicine. Somebody get this guy some help.

[00:00:32] 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 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.

[00:01:00] We could talk about any one of the, you know, issues that I have written down to bring up with you at length for hours and hours, I'm sure. But there's one that you mentioned that not a lot of people are talking about. And I was so hyped to hear you talk about it. It is this absolute disaster travesty that is these new Alzheimer's drugs.

[00:01:21] And in my opinion, as somebody who has treated a significant number of dementia patients, Alzheimer's dementia, and other types of dementia, these drugs do not work. They are extremely dangerous and can lead somebody who may have, you know, a good 10 to 15 years of life left to die a premature death or have permanent complications that limits their quality of life.

[00:01:49] We don't have long-term data on these drugs. And we almost undoubtedly have better, not just preventive treatments for Alzheimer's. There are better existing treatments, whether you're looking at the approved medications in Aricept or Donepazil and Memantine or Namenda, or whether you're looking at what I think is one of, if not, you know, the only real effective psychiatric drug in lithium.

[00:02:16] And even using low doses of lithium is looking like it's going to have a major preventive effect on Alzheimer's dementia in the way that we would like for all of our medicines to work. Building over time and not giving us some superficial bump that makes it look like the med is effective, but not actually having the long-term outcome data and safety data to go along with it.

[00:02:42] So tell me a little bit about your views on these aducanumab or adjuhelm, lacanumab or lakembi, and then the newest one is donanumab. I am not well-versed in these drugs. This is not anywhere near my level of expertise. My primary concern with this goes back to a lot of things that we were already talking about.

[00:03:03] The way I learned in medical school, and probably you also, to think about Alzheimer's was that the primary cause was amyloid deposits. And we recently discovered that the person who did that research and published that research fabricated their data. Multiple people, not just Sylvan Lesney. And multiple people were involved.

[00:03:29] That was then, you know, used to develop all of these drugs. So we were completely lied to in our medical school. That scientific theory was the only theory that was accepted as like, or was the theory that was accepted as the answer. And that's where it went.

[00:03:50] Every study, every researcher who was researching about these drugs went on that supposition, based on that theory, that amyloid deposits were the problem. So now all of our drugs are going to be geared towards getting rid of amyloid deposits. And this is the way we're going to treat patients with Alzheimer's.

[00:04:09] That is, the ramifications of doing science this way are so dangerous, are going to have longitudinal, lifelong to me, I think, or at least endless complications related to it. People are going to suffer for this.

[00:04:33] It's almost like, not quite to the extent of things like the Tuskegee experiment, where they were doing the experiment on people to see, on Black people in particular, because they were disposable people, to see what the long-term pathology of syphilis would be, knowing that there was already a cure for the disease. So this is almost kind of the same thing.

[00:05:00] It's just this neglect of people with a debilitating disease that they know they're going to die from. Let's just see what the progression is going to be like, knowing that this isn't necessarily the right, that this isn't the actual cure for the disease. It's almost like that, right? Or at best, it's not proven as the cause of the disease. And that is at the very best. Right. Yeah.

[00:05:28] You're not talking about a rare disease either. We know that it's not proven as the cause of the disease. We know this. And then we're still going on as if it is the cause of the disease. And we're studying people to see how they respond. Instead of going about and looking for other reasons or other causes of it, and putting those things at the top of the list in NIH funding. That's diabolical to me. Yeah.

[00:05:57] It'll be interesting to see when I take my first recertification exam, what is on there about beta amyloid and whether or not that is still the answer on the test. It sounds like you're familiar with Sylvain Lesney's doctored images and photoshopped images trying to show that removal of beta amyloid helped the rats get through the maze faster or whatever it was.

[00:06:21] Did you see all the other information on Elisir Maslia, the director of the National Institutes of Aging? I thought of the announcement. I mean, you know, about investigation stuff, but I really didn't take a huge deep dive in it. So it's siphoning millions of dollars over, if not billions of dollars, I think it's actually billions, over more than a decade and doing the same stuff with his research. Yeah.

[00:06:49] You know, this is somebody who has been in the neurodegenerative research space for pretty much his entire professional career.

[00:06:55] And you realize that these people don't care about their patients or the general public or advancement of understanding about the disease, even if that means, you know, like Nancy Olivieri, the hematologist who came up with deferral prone and wanted to find a iron chelating, not a cure, but a medicine to help with thalassemias. And partnered with, I think it was Apotex was the company back in way back in 1989.

[00:07:24] After a few years of working on the clinical trials, she said, this is not working. I'm afraid it's going to harm my patients. We got to wrap it up. We got to call it. And the CEO took her to court, battled her for the next two decades over this, trying to get it, you know, saying that she couldn't tell her patients it wasn't effective.

[00:07:42] Like, we've got all this manipulated research leading us down a road and now we're pushing these drugs, even though we know that the research is manipulated on a condition that close to 10 million Americans have. I think I sent you an email on this and it dawned on me because we had that recent big ice snowstorm in January and I'm driving down the road and I see these potholes, right?

[00:08:12] As they're starting to clear off the road. And you can imagine if you have a tiny little crack in the pavement or in the road and you get snow and you get ice that gets embedded within that crack. And then you have a plow come through that then scrapes this ice off. Most of the layer of road is going to be unaffected.

[00:08:35] But in these areas where you got a little bit of ice that is now not just above the road, but also embedded into the road, that plow comes through and it rips off a little bit more than it intended. And so now you've created a pothole. To me, as I'm looking at that, of course, my mind is like, oh, this is what happens with these new beta amyloid removing drugs. Yeah. So what if they're good at removing beta amyloid?

[00:09:02] And sometimes when they do that from the wall or the lining of a blood vessel, they take the blood vessel wall with it. And if they don't take the entire wall, you have an inflammatory response and brain swelling. But if they just so happen to create a break in the barrier of that blood vessel, now all of a sudden you have a micro hemorrhage in your brain. And that is a side effect that is not one in a hundred.

[00:09:28] That is a side effect that on the first class of medications is like 40% of people. And then they'll say, oh, well, only, you know, 15% were symptomatic. Okay. But we can see a process changing in your brain. And just because you don't see the clinical effects of it, if you do a brain scan on me and you see a spot there that wasn't there before, that certainly is something that would give me concern. And then I would want to follow over time.

[00:09:56] The safety profile of these drugs is, I mean, it's absurd that they get accelerated approval, which by the way, should be for rare conditions that people are really desperate. Not for a condition that it's scary in the sense that there's no cure, but it's also something that we've dealt with as a society for, you know, the last hundred years or so as we've lived longer.

[00:10:22] And it's something that people tend to live with for close to a decade, if not longer. And so, you know, when, when my patients try to get enrolled or hospital systems try to get them enrolled in these studies, oh, Nikki, that just pisses me off. It lights a fire under my ass to go out and fight against these things. So I appreciated you bringing that topic up. I've got a series coming out on it over the next like three weeks or so.

[00:10:51] So along these lines, I did a webinar for fair medicine with Adam, Dr. Adam Jurado. He's a OBG. I've got him coming on next month. I've had him on in April or June of last year on SSRIs in pregnancy. Yeah. Well, we talked about the drug McKenna. Yep. Did you know about that? I don't know if the audience knows that, but this drug was prescribed to pregnant women to help prevent premature labor.

[00:11:19] So if pregnant women who had already, you know, have premature births or were at risk for having premature births. Another condition where there's no effective drug. With that. Yes. And so with that accelerated approval process, because it's no effective drug. And now, yeah, there's this emergency because, you know, we want to prevent preterm labor.

[00:11:41] We want to prevent, especially in black women who are more likely to have complications in pregnancy because there's this disparity in health care treatment that we're having. This is an emergency issue.

[00:11:52] But when there was actually data that showed it wasn't working and, in fact, it was actually harmful to pregnant women, there was still a push and a political push to keep the drug on the market just because of the perception that this is the only thing that we have to do something about this problem. And all of these things kind of going circling back to the beginning of this, you know, of this conversation is these are the things that we learned in medical school. Right.

[00:12:21] And those images, I still have those images. We had to take pathology exams. I don't know if people understand this or your audience. You had to take pathology exams. We had to look at those images and we had to define the amyloid deposit or look at the structures around it to talk about Alzheimer's disease. I still have those images from those fraudulent papers in my head because that's the way we were taught these things.

[00:12:49] And so every student, every trainee, everyone studying this stuff comes up having to learn this over and over and over again. And it all goes back to one, the money and the money and the lack of ethics that's within the whole kind of organization and the science, what makes the science, the science. It is complex.

[00:13:15] It is not going to be easy for us to break that down. But I am hopeful that all of the transparency around these things is really going to have people more skeptical about what they're reading and what they're learning and demand a lot more transparency. What we are seeing happen, though, is there is this huge pendulum of distrust in science altogether.

[00:13:42] The people in industry who make these drugs or work for these companies and do the research and from doctors in general. And that is going to have detrimental effects, too. Yeah, I mean, I think a common theme that I'm starting to recognize, especially in the last 10 to 15 years, some of these entities that stand to make so much profit off of these essentially their missions.

[00:14:09] Right. This is a kind of a gamified code or a game that these companies play where they try to create this seed of doubt. And they use the things that we as humans are most passionate about, things like race inequality, gender inequality, political ideology. They use them as a force for manipulation to try to sell a product. Yeah.

[00:14:33] What do you make about how how these kind of industries try to divide us using these really hot button social issues? Well, look, what I'm trying to do in general, my goal is to just present information and I try to present it evenly.

[00:14:54] I present people who have an approach, you know, they may either agree with the current, you know, scientific doctrine or they may disagree with it. But I want people to just present good evidence, good sound evidence and then have the conversation from there. Because if we don't do that, if we ignore the people that we think have been doing things the wrong way or we include the people who have a new way just because it's a new way.

[00:15:22] And it's against this traditional way that we all have proven is wrong or whatever. Then we're completely missing the middle and the real answer. But we do have to have a conversation. The biggest problem, though, is that our medical establishment, even our political fora are discouraging this type of nuanced discussion. So it's just going to have to be us doing it. So podcasts like yours doing it. I encourage everybody to speak up.

[00:15:51] I don't care what station you're in. Do it. It takes one person to start the train rolling. Even if you don't get a bunch of people at, you know, who are agreeing with you publicly, you're going to get people who come to you and say, oh, yeah, I really believe that. That would be true. Thank you for speaking up about that. They'll do it privately. But you're starting to develop a little bit of an army of people who are willing to push back. It's very frustrating that not everybody else is doing it.

[00:16:20] Not or not a lot of people are doing it. But somebody has to. Somebody has to be the start of it. I think we're just obligated ethically, morally to speak up when we know something isn't right and something doesn't make sense, especially if we're harming people. That's such an important point. You mentioned this earlier that it's not about just achieving the goal of reforming health care. That's a huge goal.

[00:16:48] That is something that any individual one of us is going to have a hard time moving that needle to a significant degree. But you said my role is in trying. I've got to be trying. And I feel the same way. You know, I didn't start this podcast for years after wanting to get started with it until eventually I let go of the goal. And I said, what is the value? The value is in trying.

[00:17:16] The value is in having these conversations. Even if 10 people listen to this conversation, you know, if we can move the needle on a couple of them, if they can have an impact on a couple of more, then we have done our job in trying to move the needle of health care. And that is all we can do. That is our role. It may seem like a daunting task, but it's so important that we speak up on these issues.

[00:17:43] Maybe the hottest button issue with RFK, I think tomorrow they'll vote on his final confirmation, which I am skeptical that he will be confirmed still just because he is going at least with what he says he's going to do, which is what I'm going by. And what my, you know, hopefulness around his role in HHS is clean up food and clean up pharma.

[00:18:11] Now, when you're saying those things, my, the skeptical part of my brain is like, there's so much money backing those entities that they're going to lobby as hard as they can against his confirmation. But on the flip side, appreciating nuance and pushing back against the very candidate that I was pushing for well before he ever joined Donald Trump, because my biggest passion is healthcare reform.

[00:18:38] And you could have given me anybody who stood up there and said, I'm going to try to reform healthcare in these ways. And I'm like, well, thank God somebody is at least saying that it's a huge problem. Right. Right. And what we're doing is not working. We're dying earlier. We have worse maternal fetal outcomes. We've got worse outcomes with chronic disease and all of these autoimmune conditions and et cetera, et cetera.

[00:19:06] So we get to the issue of vaccines. You know, I saw Bernie Sanders and RFK going back and forth on vaccines. And for the most part, I was a little turned off by Bernie's yes, no kind of trying to push him into a position of yes or no on vaccines in general, which is not what the conversation is about.

[00:19:26] But I also have to give Bernie a little credit because he brought up a picture of the children's health defense on their website that had these little onesies, no vax, no problem, which is also can be very dangerous to say, okay, I'm going to either get every vaccine that is on the schedule or I'm going to get none of them.

[00:19:49] That is inevitably going to lead to the resurgence of some conditions that we don't want to see the resurgence of.

[00:19:57] So as somebody with 20 years of experience, and I can only imagine countless different patient populations asking you the questions about vaccinations, you and I have already discussed a lot of our skepticism towards the COVID vaccine being brand new and having this force fed data kind of shoved down our throats that was whole and accurate.

[00:20:22] And seeing the public stance, government stance on this thing change month to month to month. So let's try to appreciate and provide some of that nuance for our viewers and listeners. Where does the data fall on vaccines that you would absolutely for your own children, for your patients, for their children, say you should absolutely go ahead with this schedule.

[00:20:48] And then maybe these are the ones that have some uncertainty and these are the ones that are very, very uncertain. So this is an actual, this is a fantastic question. So first of all, my kids are fully vaccinated with the exception of COVID.

[00:21:04] I am doing, you know, it's been a, it's been very difficult to get, you know, pull a bunch of people together and do everything else that I'm doing at fair, but I am doing informed consent webinars on vaccines. I actually have one in March that we're doing on the COVID vaccine itself. I did one on the HPV vaccine with scientists and we just talked about what the data, the actual data is.

[00:21:30] I look at one of my favorite people in medicine, asking the question about the vaccine schedule and efficacy of each vaccines and deciding to sort of relook at them is Dr. Tracy Beth Hoag. I worked with her with urgency of normal. We came up with a toolkit on how to get kids back in school. We talked about masking and we talked about the COVID backs and that kind of thing, but she's actually licensed to practice in Denmark.

[00:21:58] And also in the U.S. Obviously lives and works in the United States. She worked with Governor DeSantis on his COVID policy as well on, served on a panel. But she has been doing a dive, taking a dive into looking at the vaccines themselves and looking at an alternative approach to the vaccine schedule. It's in addition to looking at each vaccine.

[00:22:24] It's hard to pinpoint her down because she's so busy to get time, but I am working with some other really good scientists who do look at this data. And what I think we need to do is review all of it since the beginning. Which ones were actually proven to be efficacious? Which ones do we still need? And in what order? And how many do babies actually need to get?

[00:22:49] I know for sure that I questioned the hepatitis B vaccine when it first came out for infants. When I was in residency at the time, we used to have these things called morning report where we would actually talk about cases that happened. We'd have attending faculty there. We'd have residents from at different levels and we'd have medical students. Everybody was kind of sitting in this room. We're talking about a case, how best to treat patients.

[00:23:13] And I remember the period when we were actually learning that the CDC was adding a recommendation for hepatitis B vaccine to be introduced to the newborn infant. And this was when it was first starting. And I was one of the people saying, wait, wait, wait a minute. The rationale for introducing that vaccine was because the moms weren't being protected.

[00:23:39] So there was a risk that they would actually pass down hepatitis B to their child or their child would get it later on through sex. Right. In birth, correct? Yeah. Like during the birthing process. During birth and delivery. The child can contract hep B from the mother, but the mother has to have an active hep B infection for that to happen. Correct. So it was completely irrational. It was all like this, this guise of like, let's prevent these babies from getting it in the first place. When we really, you're not doing that at birth.

[00:24:09] That's not happening at birth. We know this. They knew that, that that wasn't happening. It was just, let's get them started while we have them as a captive audience. Basically, that's really all it was about. And so did that happen with these other vaccines? How did they get approved? We know the vaccine approval process is very different. The discussions around it are controversial.

[00:24:31] The line between what we're doing to actually prevent something from happening versus what we want to prevent needs to be drawn clearly. And I think the line is blurred. I am not against vaccination. I don't believe that there is good evidence that proves that vaccines cause autism. There's lots of other things that correlate with a rise in the diagnosis of autism.

[00:24:59] But I do absolutely 100% think that we need to look at them again, in light of everything that we've learned about how the process for developing them and getting them approved goes. And the fact that we aren't really doing any longitudinal studies in children who've received them to see if there's been some sort of harm.

[00:25:23] And the only harm data that we actually have is all case related based on the VAERS reporting system. It is the most unreliable reporting system that we actually have because it's all voluntary. And it's case by case. And a lot of the information shows a relationship. There's a correlation between a patient having some symptom, you know, after they've gotten a vaccine. And we don't know for sure that it was the vaccine. There's lots of speculation about it.

[00:25:52] But this is, it's real and it's honest. And, you know, you have parent accounts who say, you know, their kids lost the light in their eyes after they got a dose of, you know, whatever, either an MMR or a DTAP vaccine. I don't know what's true and what isn't. We shouldn't be ignoring people who have these questions and concerns. We should be doing everything we can to find the information for them. And that's what I think it's missing. I think we need to do that.

[00:26:18] So I don't give any blanket recommendations for parents because I'm still, I'm relearning. I've challenged myself to relearn what the efficacy is, what the approval process was and what we know about these vaccines. I don't want to see a population of resurgence of the measles or kids who are dying from, you know, varicella pneumonia. I mean, I personally got chicken pox. I was pretty sick. My brother was really sick.

[00:26:48] And then my sister had milder disease. So, you know, everybody's, you know, going to be different. Some of these diseases that the, you know, that there are vaccines for don't necessarily prevent a life-threatening disease, but we still do it. You know, so, I mean, the mumps, you know, mainly is for, you know, testicular involvement. So that men don't become infertile, right? So that men don't become infertile. And I think that's important, right?

[00:27:16] We do want people to be fertile and reproduce, but do girls need to get it? Like all of these questions we need to start asking. Are we going about this the best way to prevent disease and infectious, you know, disease from spreading? I don't know the answer. I really don't. So when I came out of medical school and training, was I one of those people who was like, oh, you should really get all of these vaccines. Absolutely. That's who I was.

[00:27:41] But as I said in the very, you know, close to the beginning of this, the way we handle COVID, the way we handle gender medicine made me question every single thing that I learned in medicine. And I'm fully open to learning and relearning things. Yeah. I mean, we've just got to be open to challenging the beliefs we were taught in school. Not to say that we discount them without a second thought. No, we challenge them.

[00:28:08] We receive new information openly, which is, again, it's not easy to do. It can be a lot easier psychologically to step back and say, no, I know what I know and you're wrong. And it takes a lot of work and openness to shift your views. Again, it doesn't have to be drastic. You don't have to go from, you know, not questioning any vaccine safety or efficacy to questioning every single one.

[00:28:33] And I think that's the danger here is that, you know, you go from recognizing, well, obviously the COVID vaccine with how it's being presented to me with what I know from medical school about respiratory RNA viruses and how rapidly they mutate to become more transmissible and less deadly.

[00:28:52] Yet I'm not being told that by the media or by the government doctors and scientists, something that has held true for respiratory viruses since the beginning of time. But then the danger is when, you know, you question something like polio or MMR. And again, I'm not saying that we shouldn't study those. But if there is too much of a pendulum swing on that issue, then you will start to see outbreaks of these things.

[00:29:20] My buddy who's been on the podcast before, a pediatric epileptologist says, you know, we're going to start to see some of the other side of that argument where people have a permanent medical complication of contracting the disease because they did not get vaccinated against rubella and they lost their hearing, for example. So again, it's a very nuanced issue.

[00:30:10] I mean, polio, I know there are questions about the polio vaccine, but you look around and people are not, you know, dying and losing their respiratory capabilities or losing the ability to use their legs, becoming paraplegic from this, like what happened 50, 60 years ago. And again, you can say that you want to study that vaccine as well.

[00:30:34] But I think we got to kind of layer that with this is still a recommendation for people, but look at it with a fresh eye in terms of safety and efficacy. Try to find you the best polio vaccines because there are multiple ones out there and not expose people to unnecessary risks if one of the vaccines causes more neurologic issue than the other. So I just think it's important to clarify some of those views because as a politician.

[00:31:03] Well, I mean, and I think it was actually a fair point to make Bernie Sanders is without his over the top hyperbolic presentation of the whole thing is a fair point that that he did change his mind on things. And what I get concerned about with Bobby Kennedy is that he does have some absolutist, you know, ways of thinking about things. So like even just with the foods, you know, our foods are making us chronically ill.

[00:31:31] We're spending more than any other nation, but we're getting chronically ill because our foods have all these things in them. But he's also declared that he wants to produce good science and go back to gold standard science. So I'm 100 percent for that. I just want to be sure that he's going to be open to actually the science that disagrees with his opinion if it is out there.

[00:31:51] Right. Because we don't have a definitive causation or, you know, association between pesticides or food processing, you know, preservatives and our chronic illness. Because when I actually look at illness data or at least cause of death in our history, you look at the top 10 common causes of death have been the same for the last several decades.

[00:32:15] The one major thing that changed before the 1930s when we started introducing pesticides, people were dying from infectious diseases a lot more. And a lot of that was foodborne. And so that is one thing that has changed. And then now longevity types of diseases are taking us more than anything. But yeah, are we having are we diagnosing more chronic illnesses and children and seeing more of these things?

[00:32:42] Yeah. But is that effective our ability to diagnose? I don't know. There's so many factors that could be confounding any type of relationship here that we're not looking into. And I just want people who are, you know, like 100 percent, you know, behind him to understand that. And I also want him to be open to that as well. I don't want the pendulum, like you said, to swing so far to, you know, the direction where we completely, you know, we just say, let's trash everything that we did.

[00:33:12] And then let's just now do it this new way, because that's setting us up for other potential problems as well. Let's start looking at let's look at the organic products. Let's look at the organic pesticides and preservatives that we're using. A lot of those are actually ones that are being used in the conventional industry as well. But let's look at those, too. Are they actually, you know, doing harm to the environment? Are they actually doing harm to us? Are they diminishing the level of nutrition or, you know, that we're getting from these food components? I don't know the answer.

[00:33:42] There's some good data that shows some sort of kind of improved nutrient density of things when we are naturally farming or growing our foods. Does that alone improve our health? I don't know the answer to that. Yeah, let's not fall into the trap of, you know, anything that's new is safe and effective, regardless of, you know, where it's coming from or how reasonable it sounds that it would be safe and effective. Let's prove it.

[00:34:09] Even if it comes to the, you know, the newer health waves of this vitamin or that vitamin or this supplement or that supplement, show me the data and then we'll go from there. I love that point you made about pesticides. And, you know, again, you and I at the dinner party are going to find ourselves in conversation because we've ostracized ourselves from both other sides of the room.

[00:35:01] That's a great point. And there's millions of people who are, you know, who are, you know, having enough cutoff of oxygen to the brain to permanently alter their ability to function moving forward.

[00:35:22] That are a 35 year old living in a 60 year old's body because of the infarcts of oxygen that they've had against their kidneys or their lungs or their livers. An absolutely huge problem. Wish we had more time to discuss. But I think it's really interesting for me as I had my children in the last few years. And then these issues, I'm a psychiatrist. I'm not somebody who makes a lot of specific recommendations to my patients about vaccines.

[00:35:50] But with having kids, it became a really important issue for me to try to better educate myself on. My kids are fully vaccinated, but there is a fear of doing the wrong thing that I absolutely understand from a parent's perspective.

[00:36:06] One of the pieces of information and data research that has really helped me to make my decisions is comparing my country's system and schedule of vaccinations to other first world health care systems. And when you do that, there is a lot of overlap. But then there are some distinct differences. One which you will never hear the media talk about.

[00:36:33] COVID is not recommended around the world to six month olds like it is here. And in some nations, it's not recommended for children at all. And in some places across Europe, it's not recommended to young men under the age of 30 due to the risk of cardiomyopathy. You know, these are things that you're not going to hear on the news.

[00:36:57] But all you have to do is get onto Google and start looking at the way that other countries recommend their populations get vaccinated. That's why I like Tracy Beth Poe's record. You know, she actually did a post on X several months ago where she sort of listed the way that Denmark does it, that comparison, and then talked about how she'd like to look at doing something similar, you know, here in the United States.

[00:37:24] You know, this really thoughtful approach, you know, to doing it. Like we have this data and a lot of these places that have like really, really where their public health is their, it's all of their medical health. So, you know, they have this uniform government sponsored, you know, healthcare. They do have the ability to get a lot of data that we don't have in a situation where we don't have government sponsored health here. A lot of our data that we can get from that here is just basically Medicaid or Medicare, you know, patients.

[00:37:52] And so it's a good system that we can get data from and then do a comparison. And so why not? What's the harm in it? There's nothing. Same thing with food. Look at places where certain additives are banned and the things that you're worried about when you look at the mechanism of action of these different food additives in terms of causing disease.

[00:38:15] Look at the rates of whatever it is that you think is affected by this pesticide or that pesticide and compare it to a place that doesn't have those in their, you know, general food supply. And then you can start to build more evidence. Again, I don't think that if you're a true scientist that you ever get to 100% certainty on an issue. You get to a degree of certainty that you feel comfortable making a recommendation.

[00:38:43] But you better damn well be appreciative of the massive amount of unknown and uncertainty that exists in our fields and what we do. We are trying to make the best decisions as possible and recommendations for our patients with as much information as we can in a way that is communicated to them as effectively and efficiently as possible. And at the end of the day, that's our role.

[00:39:13] Provide informed consent. Let the patients make the decisions that are within reason. But ultimately, I hope that we can get back to that. And I appreciate the work that you've done and continue to do, especially on the advocacy side. And, you know, I hope that a few years from now we can have different words to describe people like you and me. You know, that maybe we will be called nuanced instead of extreme in either direction.

[00:39:43] Or maybe we will be called as somebody that isn't paid by any entity to promote the views that we're promoting. We are promoting them because we believe them. Not because I have some product to sell you that is, you know, oh, American health care is this crock of, you know, BS. And here's this product that Dr. Ethan Short has and it'll fix all of your ales. And yeah, yeah, you're paid by big pharma there, Dr. Short.

[00:40:09] And, you know, when I did urgency of normal, I was accused of, or the whole team was accused of getting paid by the Coach Brothers. You know, like, look, bring on the big money here, the dark money, because I ain't getting that. I'm barely scraping by here. Yeah, and that's so important to understand the... I was important to that too, that time period too. Understand the motivations of where information is coming from too.

[00:40:33] You've got a government that is standing to make money or at least appease its biggest donors via the decisions that they make. Okay, that's a little bit differently than a career researcher on lithium who doesn't get paid by any pharmaceutical company who is investigating it because they think that it works as a preventive measure against dementia at low doses. That's a lot different. There's no big lithium fund out there.

[00:41:00] There's a lot of small companies that make a lithium medication product, but none of them are able to patent it and have a brand that they can sell exclusively. So again, it's not perfect. It doesn't mean you can just rely on motivations or financial interests. It's another piece to the puzzle that we absolutely have to consider. Any final or closing thoughts?

[00:41:25] Again, it's been wonderful talking to you and I think the nuance in our different viewpoints and the extremes of all of these kind of hot button issues in the field of medicine. Thank you so much for having me and giving me this opportunity to speak about what I think about, the work that I'm doing at FAIR and Medicine. I'm excited to see your continued work. I'm glad to have found you. I'm glad to know you're out there and people like you are out there. It's so inspiring that there is a group of us.

[00:41:55] We do exist. And we're not all, just like any other group, we're not all a monolith in medicine. And I hope to see us grow a movement of people who want to really look at the data, look at the information, do the best thing for our patients and work with our patients. Not just, you know, tell people what to do just because we think it's the right thing. And then also just challenge the system, challenge the science. So I'm excited.

[00:42:19] I hope that your listeners or watchers would actually tune in to some of the FAIR and Medicine webinars and some of the other work that I do. Because that's the kind of stuff that I'm going to be continuing to do on this coming Wednesday at noon. I will be talking with a scientist, a journalist, and a physician who have a nuanced approach in a different way about some of the things that we were talking about.

[00:42:43] And they may not necessarily, you know, be in agreement with the crowd who follows RFK Jr. But I'm going to let them have their say and talk about what they think about the upcoming administration, what they think that means to medicine and industry and science and journalism. If folks want to look on X at the FAIR and Medicine or LinkedIn or Facebook, that's where it's usually announced. We also have a X account for FAIR and Medicine as well with the announcement for those things.

[00:43:12] So if people aren't on social media, just go to my website, drnicki.online and find out more about me and get the links to work that I'm doing. They can reach out to you directly on your website, correct? Just like you did. Absolutely. And if folks feel inclined to donate to help me continue doing this kind of work, that would be helpful too. It's not tax deductible, but it does benefit me.

[00:43:36] It goes to, you know, me surviving without a life, you know, practicing as a clinical medicine so I can continue doing the advocacy work that I do with writing, speaking, and just really telling the truth. Absolutely. And you can also reach out directly to myself, the Renegade Psych podcast, renegadesych at gmail.com. We got a YouTube channel on Spotify, on Apple. I've got a podcast page, but I need to get rid of it because I haven't updated that thing.

[00:44:04] And it's just too many things to update, you know, to put a blog out for every episode. And, but yeah, so thank you again for coming on. Thanks again for watching and or listening. If you're passionate about the subjects that I discuss on the channel, do me a favor and like, comment, subscribe. Do whatever you can to make your voice heard that these are problems that must be addressed in our society.

[00:44:33] If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, I want to hear them. Feel free to reach out on social media or email us at renegadesych 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.