Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, everybody. I'm Dr. Ben Edwards. Welcome to another episode of youf're the Cure. Honored to have a colleague and friend, Dr. Tom Rogers. I've recently met Tom through Jamie Winship.
Tom lives out in Tennessee and he's been kind enough to have me on his podcast a couple of times recently and just feel like kindred spirit.
And hearing Tom's story, his testimony, I thought would be encouraging to everybody, to the listeners of general public patients, but also to colleagues, fellow physicians.
We've been so polarized, not just in medicine, but in everything in this country. Just complete division.
And last week talked with Jamie Winship on the show about kingdom versus Empire, separation versus connected, fear versus love. So if you didn't hear Jamie Winship and I on that topic, go check that out from last week.
But Tom, in what the little bit of discussions we've had, I would say is an epitome of someone who loves his patients. He's a common sense physician and I'm going to let him tell his story. But he exited the conventional medical model.
And so for you physicians out there, I want to bring Tom on to encourage you if you're starting to dig deeper into what is wrong with our healthcare system. What is this diet and lifestyle thing and functional integrative medicine and nutrition, holistic stuff, stuff. The corruption that's being exposed. Tom just told me he bought all of his mid levels this book.
This is the new FDA. The head of the FDA, Dr. Marty McCary, blind spots his name in the book. We might get into that in a minute. But there's so much corruption being exposed. There's people being discouraged, patients don't trust doctors anymore. Physicians are burning out, leaving the profession. So I mean, there, there's a lot of negative.
But today you're going to be encouraged because there's a lot of positive. And there are physicians with common sense who love their patients and have stepped out and are doing the right thing. So, Dr. Tom Rogers, welcome to the show.
[00:02:04] Speaker B: Thank you, Ben. It's very much an honor to be on your show.
Your two episodes you did with me on my Common Sense MD went over like gangbusters. And certainly Jamie Winship and Donna, his wife, have been very good friends for years.
As a matter of fact, Jamie married my son in a ceremony a month ago. He was the pastor for that and it was wonderful. So he's one of the most encouraging people I've ever met in my life. If you want to find out your true identity, you need to look up Jamie Winship. So it's really good. It's an honor to be here with you because I don't find many kindred spirits in medicine anymore like you. I come from a very medical family.
My father was a general surgeon, my brother's a surgeon, many cousins and great grandfather were doctors. So I've been following medicine since the 1960s. I'm a 70 year old family practitioner, also got boarded in integrated functional medicine and sports medicine. So, you know, I've done this for a long time and I'll tell you my story how I became discouraged with traditional medicine.
And I'm not one of those people that's on the far end of either side. I like to take the best of both worlds because we do have great medicines out there to treat you. But really we're an over treated country and we've got a very sick population that we're dealing with.
So through many years of practice, I guess probably after about 22 years of general medicine family practice, it just got worse and worse every year with all the onerous EMR coding and dealing with insurance companies having to see 40 to 50 patients a day to make a decent living and being told what to do by non healthcare administrators.
I decided to go out on my own. And really that event was precipitated by two of my own children coming down with type 1 diabetes. I quickly realized I didn't know anything about nutrition. So when I started diving into this thing, I realized that not only did I not know much, what they taught me in that one hour class in medical school was completely wrong.
You know, really, they shouldn't even teach it. They're still teaching the wrong things.
So I happened to sign up for a conference, an integrated medical conference through a 4M in Las Vegas.
And my intention was really, because I'd never been to Las Vegas, was to sign in, maybe go to a couple and then have fun on the strip down there, go to a few shows. But the first lecture just captivated me and it changed the whole course of my practice because they were actually practicing medicine in an entirely different way than I was.
The typical family doctor has seven minutes to spend with the patient and in that seven minutes all you have time for. In the meantime, you're looking at a computer trying to get a code for an insurance company. Now of course I have a cash based practice.
So you're looking at all these codes and by the time your seven minutes is up, all you've had time for was to write a prescription for a patient, for their cholesterol, their blood pressure, their diabetes or their depression or anxiety.
And it was just doctors have become prescription writers. That's what the patient wants, that's what the doctor knows, that's what they do because you want to get them in and out as quickly as possible.
And so when I started thinking about it, my patients, despite all these medications I was putting them on, were still overweight, depressed, they hurt, they're tired, they weren't any better. As a matter of fact, they were worse.
So I started studying integrative medicine, which is really finding the root cause of a problem.
And a lot of times you'll find that it's nutritional, it's lack of people moving and like you say, hydrating, put that as part of nutrition or they can't sleep or they're stressed out, or sometimes there's hormonal imbalances, especially as you get older. You know, I do a lot of longevity medicine because as a seven year old man, I think I've seen and experienced quite a bit in my old lifetime. If I had not made this shift, I can tell you right now, I would have been retired 10 years ago.
And now I have no plans on retiring. I love what I do. I see 12 patients a day, so I have a lot of time to spend with my patients. And I also have some PAs and nurse practitioners that work with me, that I train.
So it's very efficient and I don't have any non medical bosses telling me what to do. Kind of like what you do at Veritas.
My practice is called performance medicine and it's just grown like gangbusters, especially when Covid hit, because I treated a ton of COVID like you did. I was one of those frontline doctors that used a lot of early interventions like hydroxychloroquine and then ivermectin, iv, vitamin C, sometimes high dose, prednisone, quercetin, vitamin D.
Early on I knew that something was wrong with our medical system and now I think everybody knows it. I mean anybody that has common sense nowadays knows that that was one of the biggest medical disasters in our country. And it really exposed our medical system for what it is.
It's based on greed and power and these insurance companies and big pharma are running medicine. Doctors have very little to do with it these days unless you step out and do something like we've done. And then you'll find, here's what will happen if you do this. And I would encourage every physician out there, even people coming out of the residencies, to do this, to get out on their own and just hang a shingle kind of like the old timey doctors did and practice medicine like you think it ought to be practiced.
And a lot of people are scared of that because the average medical student and residents, I mean, they're hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. So when they get out, all they can think about is that guarantee that hospital or that big corporation, that big group which are now owned by a lot of insurance companies, including United Healthcare and hospital corporations.
So they're really the ones that are running the operation and they're going to tell you what to do.
And unbelievably, there's a lot of little dirty secrets that patients don't know about how your bonus based on how many statins you put on these diabetics, etc.
And it's unbelievably, really almost criminal in my, my opinion. But so I encourage doctors to get out on their own and get a little experience beforehand. You might even want to go for a couple years in the system just to see how bad it is and how quickly you will get burned out.
But doctors are afraid and they're afraid of getting sued.
You know, I'm 40 years, knock on wood, I haven't been sued.
And the reason, I think, is because I established a good relationship with my patients.
That's what my dad told me when I got out into medicine.
He told me a lot of good things, but a couple of them were, number one, listen to your patient.
They're gonna really tell you what's going on with them.
And then you need to treat that patient as though that's your brother or sister or parent.
And nowadays with my, the way I practice, it's just like going down to the office and helping out, coaching friends.
And I don't worry, I don't practice defensive medicine.
I practice just to help the patient. If you do that and they know you care, you're not going to get sued.
Even if you did, it's not going anywhere. So you have nothing to worry about there if you do this for the right reasons.
And like you, I bring my spirituality into the room with me because that's part of who I am. I'm not afraid to tell people that I'm a Christian and that I'm going to pray for them and that he's a great healer. Hopefully he works through me. And as you pointed out on your podcast with me a couple weeks ago, you know, there's a lot of emotional, spiritual basis to people's health. So if you dig deep enough, a lot of times you're going to find out that autoimmune disease was caused by a childhood trauma.
And sometimes, a lot of times I try to kind of tease that out a little bit. If they want to talk about it, a lot of times it really frees them.
And in the meantime, they get better with all their autoimmune diseases and their chronic fatigue and their fibromyalgia and their irritable bowel syndrome and all these things that we have a name for, but we don't know exactly what causes them. The doctors tend to try to dodge and get out of the room and just write a prescription for them. It's not going to heal the problem.
So there's a big. Probably half of my patients that come into my room have an emotional, spiritual basis for what they're actually coming in for.
And they don't need to be labeled as a depressive or a diabetic or hypertensive. They're just people like we are that need some guidance from us. And that means spending time with the patient. So, anyway, so for the last 19 years, I've been gone on my own. And here's what's happened, because when I did this, I was. I was the first doctor in this region to ever take a bold move like this. Everybody thought I was nuts because I had a huge practice in a large group, and I'm from here. So everybody knows me because I come from a medical family who had a great reputation. They trust me. So I kind of had a leg up in this area.
But here's what happened when I did that, because I just hung my own shingle. I had two people working for me, a front person and a nurse.
And for the first year, I didn't make anything. I didn't really care, though. I knew I was doing the right thing. And by that time, I'd had a little bit saved.
And so here's what happened through all those years, and people thought I was absolutely bonkers by having a medical practice that didn't take insurance.
Here's what happened. Number one, I became a much better doctor.
Number two, I got better patients. And by better, I mean by that people that actually want to see me and want to get better, not they just want another prescription filled.
And the third thing, I was much happier as a person.
I knew that my calling was really medicine, and I really didn't know that until I established my own practice. I'll be honest with you. I became a doctor because my dad was a physician.
And I thought, well, I'll Just do what he. He did. I don't know what else I want to do. I love to be a guitar player, but I'm not good enough. So I became a doctor and.
But, you know, I just really got through. I got by.
I guess I had a good memory. Could pass tests and all that, but, you know, to me, it was. It was kind of a job.
And then I had this epiphany through what happened to my children and going to this conference that just opened up a whole new world for me, both personally and for my own patients. Because, you know, as an older man, I want to take care of myself. I want to have a long health span.
And we see all these people on this gradual decline, and, you know, it's sad. It's really sad. They. They get overweight. They. Most of them have metabolic syndrome. I think 94% of us have insulin resistance. So when you learn a lot about the different things you can do for that, it just opens up a whole new world for yourself as well as your patients. I call myself a biohacker because when you get older, you have. You can't eat what you did. When you're 20 years old, you have to do things different.
20, 30 years ago, I would have told my patients that took vitamins. They were, you know, just wasting their time, wasting their money creating expensive urine. I was totally wrong.
There are great supplements out there. There are great ways to eat.
So I changed my own lifestyle, and here I am at 70 years old, doing pretty well with no intentions of ever retiring.
So I've learned a lot in business as well, and I love running my medical practice on my own. Really. I was telling my son, who is really the CEO of our company now, who runs all the business stuff and coordinates. We have six different offices and a pretty large following through all the platforms, and we post a lot of hopefully helpful information for people.
But I was telling him, this country is made for independent business people.
You don't have to work for a corporation. As a matter of fact, if you do, you're automatically limiting yourself in your life and in your income and in every aspect.
So I've just been blessed with what's happened to me. And when Covid came out, we were treating patients. I mean, it was just criminal what they did and what they told you, what they advertised. The mainstream media, go to the hospital if you get sick, come to the hospital. You go to the hospital if you're not sick enough and ready for a ventilation ventilator. They just said, go home. There's Nothing we can do when you can't breathe, come back.
And that's what happened. And they got put on ventilators and they killed them. Then they gave them Remdesivir, which shut down half of their kidneys and they ended up on with blown out lungs, with chest tubes and then on dialysis. And when we had some great treatments that we used, I personally treated over 10,000 cases of COVID And I'm convinced that number one ivermectin works. You have to use it early and you have to use other things with it, like high doses of vitamin D, prednisone. We did a lot of inhaled budesonide, we took oxygen to people's houses, we ran IV vitamin C on them like you have for the measles. And there's some great treatments out there, but because there's no money in it for big pharma. And here you had the mainstream media and the government, you know, promoting lies. They were the ones touting misinformation, not the frontline doctors. And in the end, if you look into it now, they know they were wrong.
They won't admit it, but they were entirely wrong.
And then it comes to vaccine injuries and long Covid.
I treat vaccine injuries every, every week.
The vaccine in my opinion, number one, didn't work, didn't prevent spread, and it really didn't keep people out of the hospital like they said.
So you can almost predict with a few outliers because I saw it all, I was right there on the front lines. There were a few outliers that you wouldn't have expected to get so sick with this.
But most people that got sick with it had debilitating conditions like morbid obesity, low vitamin D, diabetes, poorly controlled. But so that was, that was an eye opener for the public. They don't trust doctors anymore and you can't really blame them. But there are a few doctors out there and we have great things we do in medicine.
America is a good place to live if you have some strange disease, unusual disease, or you need heart surgery, or you need something very technical. But as far as primary care docs doctoring goes like we do, it's a very bad place to live in. I mean, what are we, 33 in mortality in the world among industrialized countries? I mean it's really a sad state of affairs.
Hopeful that with this new administration like Dr. Marty Macri, that you know things are going to turn around.
We've got a great new administration healthcare team in there. I hope they can do battle with big Food, big pharma, big insurance and promote treatments and doctors that like us, that actually try to get to the root cause of the problem.
[00:20:12] Speaker A: Yeah, well, how was that taken by your colleagues when you stepped out? I mean, I know you're well respected from a family of medical. So, I mean, did they just politely or was there some pushback?
[00:20:30] Speaker B: It's. That's a great question because initially, yeah, everybody thought I was nuts to do this.
And I think because the area I live in, you know, my family has a very good reputation from my brothers and my father and, you know, everybody knew me and they knew I was. I was a good person. And so they came to me.
And like I said before, the people that really wanted my help came. Now that some of the doctors were skeptical, a lot of doctors are still mainline doctors have this. They're one of the worst professionals that have this thing called cognitive dissonance, which Marty talks about in his book Blind Spots. And what that means is, despite all the evidence, what they were taught is dogma for them, they will not change their minds.
Incredible how stubborn that they are.
And for example, peanut allergies. For years of pediatricians, you know, they didn't want to introduce peanuts into a child's diet until, you know, after how three years old and the incidence of peanut anaphylaxis just skyrocketed.
And they finally realized after 23 years of knowing this that you should introduce peanuts early in the child's life and the incidence of anaphylaxis just goes down.
So a lot of the things that we do in medicine that doctors are so busy and so tuned out to really looking at the studies on medications like you were talking about the bisphosphonates for osteoporosis and the statins to prevent heart disease.
You know, they're just ingrained to just write them without really looking into how that's going to change somebody's life.
And we're actually kind of overdoing it with the medications and underdoing it with, well, telling people how to eat as doctors. I had a. I have a live Q and A session every Tuesday night from 7 to 8.
So people from all over the country, we have a few all over the world that this on their live, answering their medical questions. And the other night I got a question from a patient. Hey, I'm gonna. I'm going to get a colonoscopy and an EGD with my GI doctor next week. Who should I talk to about my diet?
My answer was, anybody but your GI doctor.
Because they're, they're some of the worst with telling you advice on nutrition, eat whatever you want. Here's what we'll give you this. You don't have any polyps, you're okay. You don't have celiac, you're fine.
Same thing with a lot, a lot of doctors, a lot of pediatricians especially, they're, they're the worst with cognitive dissonance. You know, they're giving too many vaccines at once.
And if you do the research, they're overwhelming these kids immune systems, in my opinion, all at once.
I mean, I've never been an anti vaxxer, but more I look into it, if I had kids again, I'd really think twice about which vaccines and timing and all that stuff.
Maybe when I have grandchildren I'll be able to be able to give them some good advice on it. But you know, it's just so they're, they're, the pediatricians are real. They suffer from cognitive dissonance and they're so busy they just do this and matter of fact, they get dinged, they don't get bonuses if they don't give a certain amount of vaccines.
And I treat a lot of cancer patients as well in conjunction with the oncologist.
And a lot of times oncologists will tell them, those patients to eat whatever you want, keep, you know, you want to have some, you know, sustenance. So eat whatever you want. Doesn't matter what you eat, just eat a lot.
That's probably the worst thing you could tell them because cancer feeds on sugar.
So there's a lot of doctors giving bad advice out there now. They're great at doing procedures and all, but a lot of times they're not good at giving you good advice. You almost have to seek it out yourself and read books like you're, like you just showed me and do your own little thinking, use some common sense, be your own doctor and maybe find an integrated medical doctor like, like we practice. It's a shame though, there's not enough of us.
[00:25:10] Speaker A: Yeah, Covid woke up a whole lot of folks, obviously the general public, but physicians too. And I have some reaching out and I'm going to hold up some of these books I was showing Tom before the show. And this is probably more for the physicians because you know, physicians need evidence and they're not going to budge unless you show them some randomized control trials. And that's fine. I mean, but then we got to look at who funded that. How was that data analyzed? How was it maybe manipulated? How was some of it maybe shelved? That's actually this book here, Bad Pharma, Ben Gold Care. And he goes into that thing called publication bias.
So if a study doesn't fit the outcome that the person who's funding that study wanted, then they just don't publish it.
And specifically there's a study called the Minnesota Coronary Heart Disease Study. This is in 1968-1972.
And they wanted to confirm Ancel Keys original study called the seven Countries Study that said saturated fat causes heart attacks. So they do this Minnesota Coronary experiment.
Half of those 9,000 patients get vegetable oils, seed oils, PUFA, the other half get their standard regular, old traditional saturated fat, tallow, lard, real butter. They followed these two groups out and what they found was LDL cholesterol goes down and mortality goes up.
Well that didn't fit the theory.
So they just put that study, they didn't publish it, put it in the filing cabinet.
Forty years later it gets discovered and gets published in 2016.
That's called publication bias. Ben Goldker goes through that in his book Deadly Medicine and Organized Crime. And this is for the public won't know this, but doctors will. The Cochrane review, Dr. Peter Ghoshy, he was the head of the Cochrane Review for years and Cochran was this independent, used to be independent review board from doctors all over the world and would just give straight up. Here's the raw data, here's the summary. Like for flu shots, what do flu shots do for you? And they. And Cochrane has a review.
It's like from 1968 or something, I don't remember exactly. But it's all these studies, they come back and summarize it and the influenza shot, the vaccine reduces your risk of getting influenza 1.2%.
But the, the way the data gets manipulated. That's what he talks about in the book the Illusion of Evidence Based Medicine. And this is by John Joradini exposing the crisis of credibility in clinical research.
And guys, I'm just going through some of these books for the physicians that might be listening. The Truth About Drug Companies. But the author, that's the key on this one, Dr. Marcia Angel, MD. She was the New England Journal of Medicine Editor for 20 years and came to the conclusion this whole, and this is pre Covid the whole system's corrupt and she writes this book about it. You can learn more about what we're talking about if you read that book already held up this with Marty, the Blind Spots. And we'll talk about that more in a minute. And there's more I don't want to go through. I've got five more sitting over here, but those first five probably plenty for the physicians out there.
If you need some evidence as to why our outcomes are so poor and why this system just ain't working, you can grab one of those books. But why did you decide to give this book to all your nurse practitioners, Tom? And that's Dr.
Marty's blind spots book.
What in particular motivated you to do that?
[00:29:06] Speaker B: Well, I just happened upon that book because I'd heard a lot about him from. He's a Johns Hopkins general surgeon who has published about more than anybody, any doctor out there. So I just read it. I read a book a week and I try. A lot of times I'll do book reviews on my podcast.
So I just read that and it was just astounding, astounded about some of the things he was talking about. And he's a well respected surgeon out of Johns Hopkins, so nobody can even question him. I heard about him during COVID because he was one of the ones that kind of like Dr. Botachari out of Stanford who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration that said the government was doing this whole Covid thing wrong.
And so it just intrigued me. So I read it and I just said, hey, we all have to have a copy of this. And I want them because they, I teach them and they practice like I do. So they're kind of extensions of me. They're a lot smarter than me. So I just, the way I hire people, I hire people that are smarter than me and my whole office runs better.
If you can learn that trick, you're gonna be doing well in business.
But you're, you're exactly right about that low fat diet. Here's another thing I'll say. Who should you talk to if you have heart disease about your diet? Anybody but your cardiologist, because they're still touting a low fat diet. I like a high fat diet. High good fats, less seed oils, less high glycemic carbs. It's really based more on insulin resistance than it is cholesterol. Cholesterol does not cause heart disease. I'm convinced of it.
It's an innocent bystander a lot of times. So yeah, I mean, the general public is not going to know this stuff. So hopefully some of these doctors that are coming out will know this stuff. Yeah, it's just sad the way doctors are being trained. I was asked to give a presentation to a group of third year family doctors in the residency that were about ready to get out into practice. And so they asked several doctors to come talk to them about the business of medicine.
And so I was asked because I run a cash based practice and nobody else around here does that.
So the other physicians were.
Worked for big groups and hospitals and it was really eye opening to talk to those residents about to get out.
Each of them were hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.
And it was funny because I could just tell what I was telling them was going in one ear and out the other.
It didn't impact them one bit.
What impacted them was one of the, one of the other physicians got up there and said, this is really good one. She said, I've been in practice for 10 years and she worked for a large group.
And she said, I learned very early on I was called in by the finance department to learn how to do the EMR better. And I learned that I just did six more clicks per patient on my computer. That meant $3 million more for my group a year.
And she was like proud of that.
My jaw was just hanging up. I thought that's the, that's just sums it up right there. Yeah, it's all based on money and greed and running people through like they were cattle.
And it was just sad to me. So if there's any doctors out there listening to this, let me tell you something.
If I had to do over again, I would hang my own shingle on day one.
I would go on to my own. Your whole life and your whole practice will go better. You'll be a better doctor. You'll be more financially independent, you will make more money eventually.
And because owning your own business is the way to go for any, anybody in this country, if you own your own business, it's such an advantage. So. But there's two kinds of people. Those that want to just work for a paycheck from 9 to 5 and go home. Then there's, I call them entrepreneurs that want to work for themselves.
And the people that do that are going to be much more happier. They're not going to get burned out.
But some people just want to work for somebody else. That's fine, but at least work for a group that's run by doctors and not insurance companies or hospitals.
Hospitals are becoming so corrupt, it's unbelievable.
And if you are a patient in the hospital nowadays, you better have a family member go with you that knows what they're doing. Because like you said, the third leading cause of death in this country is medical mistakes. Mistakes. You have heart disease, you have cancer and Right. Close to cancer, medical errors and mistakes.
That covers a lot of things, including medication, over medicating, etc. But look what happened during COVID Yeah. I mean, the worst thing you could do is go to the hospital.
[00:34:38] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, and I want to encourage these physicians too, that the demand is there.
The number one chief complaint, the number one of new patients coming into our practice now is not some crazy weird symptom. I mean, we'll get those still. But then the highest volume of people calling, I just want a pcp. I just want a doctor that I can trust.
I can't trust my doctor.
So the wake up that has happened in the general public, that just driving demand. So any physician that's listening this be encouraged. I mean, you can do it. You can get, just like Tom said, just listen to the patient. And when you have 30 minutes or an hour to spend with them, you can do that real easily. And the patients will eat it up. They will, they will be knocking your door down.
[00:35:29] Speaker B: You will be blessed. My waiting list is about five months long to even get in to see me. And I have 11 nurse practitioners and PAs and they're. They're as busy as I am. Yeah. And people love it.
[00:35:41] Speaker A: Yeah. Our waiting list had been the same historically for 10 years, we've had six month or more waiting lists. So we opened our wellness program with our health coaches just to try to offload some of that. And lo and behold, it turns out people get well just with health coaches and then they need, they can get off the medical waiting list. It is awesome. And I know every doctor that does what we do, they see the same thing. Because the body has a design to it. There are certain inputs the body needs and certain other things the body doesn't need that will destroy or cause dysfunction of our various pathways. And you just simply have to give the body what it needs, avoid what it doesn't. It starts to function. And when it functions, blood sugar comes down and blood pressure goes down and migraine headaches go away and fatigue improves and infertility goes away and everything starts to work. And so these symptoms go down in a way and diseases magically go into remission.
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[00:38:16] Speaker A: Shifting gears a little Tom, I'm going to quote a few studies here and we can get your comments on them, but part of this is also directed to these to physicians because you made the comment a second ago.
In your opinion low fat diets shouldn't be recommended that fat cholesterol don't cause heart disease? Well, I just want to confirm it's not just Tom's opinion. This Journal of American College of Cardiology August of 2020 the Re it was a review study and the name of the title is Saturated Fats and Health A Reassessment and a Proposal for Food Based Recommendations.
The conclusion of this study so what the Journal of American College of Cardiology was looking at is saturated fat causing heart disease and all. So review study will go back and pull all the data from all these different studies and here's a conclusion quote Several foods relatively rich in saturated fatty acids such as whole fat, dairy, dark chocolate and unprocessed meat are not associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease or diabetes. They found also another study this is March of 22 and this is from JAMA.
They're looking at statins and it's a review study, a meta analysis systemic review.
This is I was trying to find the Author Brian by rne was a lead author, Paul O' Brien.
21 randomized controlled trials were examined and they were looking for efficacy of statins in reducing total mortality and cardiovascular outcomes. So heart attack and stroke. What are these statins doing? How effective are they? Conclusion Reductions in the absolute risk of all cause mortality death from anything 0.8% the best treatment the United States of America has and in our stable of Physicians, all these clinics and hospitals, the number one killer of Americans, heart disease. And the best tool in our toolbox get you a 0.8% reduction in death, a 1.3% reduction in heart attack and a 0.4 reduction in stroke.
This is March of 22nd JAMA Systemic Review meta analysis. That's gold standard. That's the highest level of evidence.
And how many doctors are still and the general public.
Statin, statin, statin, stat. You got to be on a statin for a 0.4% reduction of stroke and a 1.3% reduction in heart attack and a 0.8% reduction.
It's almost unbelievable. And actually I just had a reporter in my office today interviewing me and I quoted these studies and I said, but you know what? And you kind of would have to see these charts to get the dramatic effect. If you did a bar graph with a 0.8%, a 0.4% and a 1.3%. I mean, you barely even can see the little blip of the bar.
But what the doctors see, what the drug reps bring, the posters and the that are in the medical journals advertisements, the bar graph goes way up here to a 36% reduction in heart attacks is what the advertisements will say 36% when the truth is 0.8 or 1.3 for heart attack.
And that 36% reduction, it's called relative risk reduction.
The 1.3 or 1.2% is called absolute risk reduction.
But all the doctors see is this bar graph in the 36. But there's little asterisk on that 36. And if you go read the fine print, it literally says in a randomized controlled trial, this showed that in this particular study, I'm talking about Ascot study, that's for Lipitor, showed that in the placebo group, the ones taking the sugar pill, 3% of them had a heart attack.
In the Lipitor group, 2% had a heart attack.
Your average standard person is going to understand that's a very minimal change. That's a 1% reduction. Three minus two is one. That's called absolute risk reduction. But the doctor thinks it's a 36% because the number 36 and the bar graph say so.
And this seems almost just unbelievable because this would be called false advertising in my world if I put some supplement or diet up on my website, said this is going to reduce and it was just a statistical gymnastics to get me to that number. That looks really good. This is, but that is absolutely how doctors are trained to the relative risk reduction is what they've been told. And I know I'm going on for a minute here, but I'm going to wrap it up after this one more study.
This study, the one I'm about to quote, the point of the study was to see will patients more likely agree to take a medication, take a treatment, if the doctor describes the benefit as relative risk reduction or if he describes it as absolute risk reduction.
Let me read the name of this study.
This is From February of 22 and the study was about osteoporosis. But the name of the study communicating absolute fracture risk reduction in the acceptance of treatment for osteoporosis.
The goal of the study, I'll just read directly from it. Healthcare professionals frequently communicate the benefits of treatment as relative risk reduction in the likelihood of an event occurring.
In this study, we are going to evaluate whether presenting the benefits of osteoporosis treatment as relative risk reduction compared with an absolute risk reduction will change the patient's attitudes towards accepting the treatment.
We surveyed 160 individuals at a specialized osteoporosis clinic for face to face consultations between May of 2018 and January of 2021. And we scored each patient's response if they were likely to take the medication, unlikely or somewhere in between on a scale of 1 to 5.
Here's the conclusion or no here from the rest of the study. Here's some of the body of the study.
The data they were pulling from six years of using a bisphosphonate that's like Fosamax.
A thousand patients took Fosamax for six years and another thousand patients took nothing for six years. And here's the difference. Out of a thousand patients, the ones who took Fosamax or the bisphosphonate, eight people had a hip fracture.
In the other group, 12 people had a hip fracture.
That's a difference of four people out of a thousand.
So that's a difference of 0.4%.
Okay, that's the actual number over six years, four people different, 0.4%. Going back to the study, the conclusion the study found participants were less likely to accept treatment when it was presented as 0.4%.
They were more likely to accept the treatment if it was described in relative risk terms of 40%.
But they literally, in the conclusion, they say while presentation of data as absolute risk reduction more accurately reflects individual benefit and helps facilitate shared decision making, clinicians should be aware that this will lead to a proportion of patients with lower fracture risk declining treatment for osteoporosis.
I know that was A lot. There. There's a lot of words, lots of clinical stuff. But guys, translation, this study, they had to do a study to see will patients accept treatment if you give them the truth?
This drug gives you a 0.4% reduction of risk of fracture. Or will they be more likely to do the treatment if you lie? I'm going to say lie. Or if you manipulate.
You skew this data with a relative risk reduction calculation to say it's a 40% reduction. 40 to the average layperson means 40 out of 100 people are going to reduce their fracture risk when it's 0.4 out of 100 people.
This is the kind of garbage that has got us in the mess that we are in.
Doctors are told 36% reduction with with Lipitor in heart attacks and 40 reduction in hip fractures with bisphosphate. And it's an absolute misrepresentation of the truth. The doctors don't understand this, though. And like you said, Tom, they're too busy.
So they're just taught in school. This is the protocol. This is the drug regimen. Here's the benefit. Relative risk reduction. Go do it. And they dump into a clinic with the hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, all the peer pressure, all the protocols. The insurance isn't going to reimburse you unless you put your patient on a statin.
[00:47:58] Speaker B: They bonus you if you don't. They bonus you if you do. So.
[00:48:01] Speaker A: Yes. So you're incentivized to do the pharmaceutical that has very minimal benefit.
And that medical error that Tom talked about, Third leading cause of death. Medical error.
Fourth leading cause, prescription drugs appropriately prescribed, not overdosing, not mixing up the meds and accidentally giving someone a paralytic agent when you're meant to give them a B12 shot. No, we're talking drugs written pharmaceuticals appropriately prescribed for the standard of care for this condition, but just normal side effects of medication.
It's a disaster.
And when doctors are actually woken up to this fact and the crazy thing, the patients, the public is waking up faster than the doctor. And that's why trust in Doctors dropped from 70% to 40% and falling. And they're fleeing the system and they're looking for folks like us and we're too booked up.
It's just. So the Back to the original why I brought Tom on, to encourage, encourage the general public, but encourage physicians. So general public, send this podcast to your physician.
Maybe he'll pick up one of these books, the Illusion of Evident Evidence Based Medicine. Maybe he'll go look at the ASCOT study and see this absolute versus relative because there's going to shock them. And I'm gonna put a plug for David Brownstein. David Brownstein in his book the Statin Disaster. That's kind of inflammatory title but he goes through not only Ascot and Jupiter and I think it's the top 15 trials for statins. And he has a column right there, relative risk reduction, absolute risk reduction number needed to treat. And there's your top trials right there. And you can go right down and highlight that absolute risk reduction and get your calculator, do the math. And that's what JAMA already did it for you. I'm telling you what it is. It's a 1.3% reduction in heart attack. But Brownstein lays it out, he goes through all this math also in that book, absolute risk reduction versus relative risk reduction.
For the regular folks out there. I know this maybe get their blood boiling a little bit, but this is going to be part of the solution, guys, as you talk to your doctor in love and, and give him hope there is a way out and then support him when he goes, go with him.
[00:50:21] Speaker B: Yep, yep.
[00:50:22] Speaker A: And that's we're going to turn this thing around. But Tom, I. Sorry, I kind of hijacked this interview.
[00:50:27] Speaker B: No, no, no, you're exactly right. And I'm going to quote you on that. The public is wisening up quicker than the doctors are. That's exactly right. I mean I wouldn't take a statin or bisphosphonate.
Look at all the side effects they cause. I've seen them. As a matter of fact, the compliance rate of both those is very low.
I mean the statins especially because in about a third to a half of the patients, they have so many muscle aches they can't tolerate it. Plus it, it raises your blood sugars, it can lead to increased rates of dementia, bisphosphonates can actually cause necrosis of your jaw and severe reflux. That's why there's so many instances of where you can't lay down after you take one.
So I mean that should tell you something right there that you shouldn't be doing these things. The stat I heard about taking a statin, if you took a thousand, and this works out very well with the stat you gave me. If you took 1,000 people that had known heart disease, gave them all a statin, which they do, it may save one out of a thousand from having a non fatal heart attack.
That's how low it is. And I guarantee you the side effects are going to be way higher than the 1% that you're talking about. That I'm talking about. See, less than that. But so people don't understand relative versus absolute risk. Dr. Peter Attia talks about it all the time. But yeah, it's a shame. It's driven by the pharmaceutical companies that are in bed with the fda. That's why when you finish your term at the fda, you go make big bucks with the pharmaceutical companies that almost every time. Yeah, it's a sad state of affairs.
The public is waking up. They are there. There's some things about what is evidence based medicine? It's kind of hokey, to be honest with you, when you say, oh, I have to have evidence based medicine on this. Well, that's a very nebulous term in itself. The other thing that I take issue with at times is the Hippocratic oath, do no harm. Yeah, well, sometimes that means you're not doing anything. Oh, I don't want to take a risk. I don't want to try anything on you because I don't want to harm you. Well, like Covid, that they took that do no harm. Well, why don't you do something?
When somebody needs something, you try something.
And what we did with COVID was repurposed drugs, cheap drugs that pharmaceutical companies couldn't make any money off of.
And the FDA putting that picture of the horse, would you take horse medicine for your Covid? Well, that's a, that's a Nobel prize prize winning ivermectin drug that is very safe. So is hydroxychloroquine. We use that in this, in high doses for years.
With COVID we were using it for five days and they would say, well, this may hurt your eyesight or it may cause a fatal arrhythmia.
Yeah, just didn't.
[00:53:44] Speaker A: Well, in evidence based medicine, along with what you're saying, because the original definition, I went and found this when they first started talking about this term and it's about when I was in med school. It was a few years ago. But that original definition, the best available published peer reviewed literature, in conjunction with your clinical experience and expertise, in conjunction with your. The patient's values and clinical experience trumps the published data and patient values trump the clinical experience.
The patient is actually the boss.
[00:54:28] Speaker B: That's exactly right.
[00:54:29] Speaker A: There's so much unique individuality to the human being and we can stay totally in the physical realm. The microbiome is so unique in everybody and even our genetic makeup is so unique. There's companies now that will draw Your blood, look at your genetic makeup to tell you how are you going to metabolize this particular medicine?
How are you going to be able to detox this particular kind of or whatever. There's a uniqueness to us and the uniqueness of the microbiome. The microbiome is communicating to your immune system.
It's helping generate your neurotransmitters for brain health.
It is keeping the gut healthy and the gut integrity, the lining of your gut preventing hyper permeable gut or leaky gut. The uniqueness of all that. But even going deeper into the quantum or spiritual realm, how a thought and even Harvard is published on this. A thought rooted in bitterness, anger, resentment, changes the structure of the water that your DNA floats in and thus changes the shape of the DNA that that double helix will tighten up and thus change genetic expression based off of thought. So what randomized clinical control trial that's studying a pharmaceutical can take into consideration the thinking and the microbiome and other unique factors? It's impossible. So to do this huge trial and try to standardize everybody to a one size fits all approach when we're so unique and individual, it's never going to produce best outcomes. That's where the human being comes in. The clinician with compassion and love in his heart and can speak to those deeper things and encourage the patient and use his clinical judgment. Like in the measles.
I don't read the media much but what little bit all these experts up there, wherever in the ivory tower.
Budesonide is not a treatment for measles. Well that these particular experts had never seen a measles case in their life, but they had some evidence based or lack thereof, you know to go to, to form their opinion.
But the clinician who was on the boots on the ground, seen 200 plus little babies and the small children and experienced the through his clinical experience, noted inflammation or pneumonitis and that budesonide worked beautifully, witnessed that.
That's evidence that Trump's any lack or any previous published data. This was a unique strain or who knows what the unique circumstances were of this environment. We've got glyphosate everywhere. The unique genetic makeup of this Mennonite group just. We've lost our common sense, Tom. We got like five minutes left. You're the common sense MD podcast, but I'll let you have the last word and wrap this up. Comment on any of that if you want to, but also talk more about your podcast or just how people can follow you.
[00:57:26] Speaker B: You're exactly right. About this the way patients trump anything. And my relationship with a patient is I'm working for the patient.
Doctors think they're on this God pedestal, and what they say is what you do. And when a patient asks why, they get offended.
It's embarrassing to be a doctor when that happens. I've had patients tell me that they gave up their regular doctor, their family doctor they'd gone to for years because they didn't take that COVID vaccine, which I don't know anybody that doesn't regret taking it, that they throw them out of their practice because they didn't take the vaccine, wouldn't even let them come in the office because of that.
That's shameful on doctors.
I mean, that is a really shameful physician. You know, we are no better than anybody else in this world. And our patients, we are working for them and we work with, we listen to them. But like you said, the gut microbiome in integrated medicine, we always start with the gut because you have to, you have to fix the gut first or you're not going to get anywhere with their Hashimoto or these autoimmune diseases, especially that they have. But, you know, and I admire you so much for treating the measles kids.
I mean, that was something I'll never forget. And I spread the word about you, you know, as far and wide as I can. You know, if you have a guy like RFK Jr contacting you and really praising you for what you did, then that goes a long way. That's like your mission in life and you've done it and you'll continue to do it. And my admiration for you is just off the charts.
But I do try to use in my practice common sense and love for the patient. If you do that and you have a little bit experience under your belt and you know what works, then you're going to be a good doctor. Doctor. And I know I'm in Tennessee, but if I was in Texas, you would be my physician. If I could get in to see you, without a doubt.
[00:59:40] Speaker A: Well, Tom, thank you for those kind words. Our goal is to teach you how to not need a doctor, so.
[00:59:46] Speaker B: Exactly right.
[00:59:47] Speaker A: Likewise. If I was in Tennessee and I needed a doctor, you'd be the first one I'd be calling.
Thank you for being on the show. Thank you for being bold and stepping out there. I know you've impacted tens of thousand, probably hundreds of thousands of lives, you and your team. So keep up the good work and thank you for coming on and hopefully encouraging the audience and and physicians in particular, that there is a better way. And. And you can have success, you can have peace, you can have true joy and fulfillment in your life, and you can have just the best doctoring can be good again.
So thank you, Tom, for being on the show.
[01:00:26] Speaker B: Thank you, man. Appreciate it.
[01:00:28] Speaker A: All right, everybody, we'll be back next week.
This will be on all the podcast platforms on the website. Check it out, send it to your friends, send it to your doctor, and we'll be back next week with another show. Bye. Bye.
