Dr. Tess Gerritsen joins Art Bell to explore bizarre medical cases, like patients waking up in morgues or brain death debates, dismissing near-death experiences as oxygen-deprived brain activity. She traces childbed fever’s 19th-century horror to Semmelweis’s ignored handwashing breakthrough and warns of a potential bird flu pandemic with 55–70% mortality, urging stockpiles and retreat plans. Evil, she argues, stems from human control urges—not genetics—while critiquing persistent hygiene myths tied to tradition over science. Cloning for limbs remains speculative but fraught with ethical risks, as California and Asia push boundaries while U.S. federal funding bans persist. [Automatically generated summary]
I've done about, well, I've done all my life of broadcasting.
Love broadcasting?
Baby, it's in my blood.
Radio is simply in my blood.
There'll be a lot of blood talked about next hour with Tess Garritson, incidentally, but it's in my blood.
And if I'm not here, then I'm on ham radio, as most of you know by now.
And I simply decided, you know, I did do weekends, as you know, for a year.
And I decided, well, that's not really giving me the break because I, you know, look, if you do a talk program, you have got to live that program.
You virtually have to live the program.
And that means day and night you're preparing for it if you're not doing it.
Frankly, doing it is the easy part of it.
And a good talk show host makes it sound very easy.
Well, it's not.
It takes a lot of preparation.
In the old days, I went out and got all the guests.
I interviewed, pre-interviewed all the guests and did everything else.
So 20 years of that is a lot.
And I decided I wanted to spend a little time with my beautiful wife, who for 20 years, you know, supported me.
And so that's what I'm doing.
And I'm only doing two Sundays a month.
To be specific, the third and fourth Sundays of the month.
Now, one exception to that will occur this month.
I will be doing the yearly prediction show.
And on that score, I want to urge those of you who call me to make predictions during those couple of days that I regard this very seriously.
We number the predictions for the year coming.
We review the predictions made for the year past.
And we do this in a very serious manner.
And I expect you to treat it seriously.
I want you to think very hard about the prediction you're making, not just something you're pulling out of your navel in order to call a talk show and get on the air, but a really thought out a prediction, whatever it may be.
Now, I'll be doing those prediction shows.
It seems to me, let me look, on the 30th and the 31st.
And then they're numbered, sealed in the Bell Family Vault until the following year.
So please think hard about it.
Now, the Bell Family is all fine.
All five kitty cats are great.
Sadly, though, Tower is not.
Tower, our bird, has expired.
Tower expired because Tower lived in a house with five cats.
And our cat Yeti made a jump that was unnatural.
Now, our cats don't have front claws because, you know, they're all inside cats all the time.
And if you let them out, coyotes get them.
So to save the furniture and all for a million other reasons, we do.
I'll get emails, I know.
They don't have claws in the front.
Nevertheless, Tower had learned to fly from Tower's cage all the way around the room, navigating, circumnavigating the room perfectly at a high altitude, and then landing back on the cage as exercise.
Well, incredibly, beyond all reason, Yeti, who had been lusting after Tower for, oh, well, forever, since Tower came in the house, actually made a jump from the floor to at least seven feet in the air, snatched Tower out of mid-flight, and then ran into the living room with Tower in the mouth.
And we, of course, Ramona was chasing after Yeti, throwing things at him, unclamped his little jaws and pulled Tower from what seemed like a sure death.
Well, Tower lingered for about a day and then passed on from internal wounds.
So rest in peace, Tower.
He was a good bird, and we did give him or her, we didn't ever really know, six months of life that otherwise Tower would not have had, but it was very sad indeed.
And Yeti, I mean, these are instinctual things in a cat.
You know, a cat wants a bird.
That jump, nevertheless, was unbelievable.
Mid-flight, I mean, really fast, too.
So how he could have done that so accurately, we have no idea.
Yeti, of course, is proud.
He is so proud of himself.
It was like the other cats made way when he walked.
And that's the way he acted and still is to some degree acting.
It's like, all other cats are now lesser.
I did what all of you dreamed of doing and were unable to do, and I did it in midair.
A football analogy would be the pass caught and the toes coming down just a quarter of an inch inside.
You know, that kind of jump.
I mean, it was incredible.
So yet he's still strutting around like he owns the place.
The other cats are showing respect.
They actually move away when he comes by.
All right.
The webcam photo tonight is of my mom, myself and my mom.
She was just here, is back in North Carolina now.
But there she is.
That's my ma, now in her 80s.
Looks better than I do.
And I, of course, want to plug SMeter.net.
It's a secret way you can sort of listen into the shenanigans that we indulge on amateur ham radio.
And we're going to be talking a little bit about ham radio tonight because I've got a couple things I want to say.
So anyway, that's a webcam shot tonight, my mom and smeter.net, the secret place to listen.
www.smeter.net.net.
Not dot com.
I got so many emails.
I couldn't find it.
.com.
It's not.com.
It's www.smeter smeter.net.
And then you'll find the prompt receiver and other receivers.
Soon going to have one back in Tennessee.
So you can listen to Ham's Back East.
Many emails about this, like this.
Art, I heard the rebroadcast, the Madman Markham rebroadcast, and his Time Machine.
Does anybody know what happened because of him?
What became of him?
I have no idea.
I've not heard from Madman.
And in addition, I have not heard from Dr. David Anderson.
He was another time travel expert, a real expert in the field.
And I'll tell you something.
It's been years now, and he's just gone.
For God's sakes, Dr. Anderson, if you're out there somewhere in our time, get hold of me, buddy, and we'll get you on the air.
Same with Madman Markham.
Love to have a follow-up, as would the rest of the audience.
But both of the men who were really involved in time travel are, for all intents and purposes, gone.
Draw your own conclusions.
A quick look at the usually and not to be disappointing depressing national news.
Bush asserts U.S. is winning the Iraq War.
That's the first story.
President Bush asserted Sunday that the United States is winning the war in Iraq, and he issued a plea to Americans divided by doubt, do not give in to despair and do not give up on this fight for freedom.
In a prime time address, he said all this and more.
Second story in the national news is, Analysis, Bush drops Rosie Iraq scenario.
No more Rosie scenarios.
After watching his credibility and approval ratings crumble over the course of 2005, the president completed a rhetorical shift Sunday night by abandoning his everything's okay pitch to Americans and coming clean.
He was wrong about the rationale for going to war in Iraq.
He underestimated the dangers.
The country has suffered terrible loss, and the bad news is not over.
Even with his high-profile display of candor, a step anxious Republican leaders had been demanding for weeks, Bush remained unyielding.
Mexico's President Vicente Fox stepped up his attacks on the United States' plan to build a fence along the southern border on Sunday, saying it was, quote, shameful, shameful for us, a shameful initiative for democracy.
He said barriers between nations belonged to the last century and had been torn down by popular uprisings, referring to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Build not a fence, keep our people, to keep our people out.
The movie Kong made about $50 million in its debut, doing very well.
People like monsters.
And, of course, I watched with a big smile on my face while our San Diego Chargers ruined an undefeated season for the Colts.
Score 26-17.
It was a glorious game to observe.
Absolutely glorious.
All right, we'll get to the rest of the news, as Paul would say, in a moment.
I wonder how many of you remember the last show I did with Major Ed Dames.
It was the last Sunday program that I did.
And in that program, Ed came up with a brilliant idea to assassinate a top Elkheda leader by causing a bomb near him to go off.
Well, it may not be the same exact target, or maybe it was.
Who knows what Ed had us working on subconsciously, but I did flinch a little bit when I read the following story at CNN.com, titled, Al-Qaeda No. 3 Dead, but how?
Witnesses say missile strike.
Pakistani officials dispute the claim.
Pakistani officials have indeed confirmed the death of a top al-Qaeda official, looks like Abu Hamza Rabia, but witnesses and officials give very conflicting stories of how he died without elaborating.
The Pakistani president said on Saturday he was 200% certain that Rabia, the operations chief of al-Qaeda, the terrorist network, was indeed killed Wednesday.
He was killed north of the border town of Marim Shah.
Now, other Pakistani officials also confirmed the death, but said he died during an explosion at a home in the northern tribal area, in a northern tribal area of Pakistan near the Afghan border.
A Pakistani information minister, Sheikh Rahmad Ahmad, told CNN that Rabia apparently died while working with explosives.
Now, I'm not saying that's a hit in every form, but maybe.
All right.
The Earth's magnetic pole is drifting very quickly.
Now, this is back in the news again heavily.
The Earth's magnetic pole, in fact, is drifting away from North America so quickly now that it might end up in Siberia in 50 years, according to scientists.
The shift could mean that Alaska will lose its northern lights, auroras, might even be more visible in areas of Siberia and Europe.
The magnetic poles are different from geographic poles, the surface points marking the axis of the Earth's rotation magnetic poles are known, to migrate and occasionally even swap places.
This may be part of a normal oscillation, and eventually it may migrate right on back toward Canada, but it may not.
It may flip completely, and we may be in the middle of something right now.
In fact, let me stick my neck out.
We really are in the middle of something big right now.
It's happening if you care to step back and look at what's happening around the world and on our Earth right now.
There is no question about it.
One of the effects of the magnetic movement would be occurring on shortwave radio.
Here's an article, interesting article.
What effect will all this have on radio propagation?
Well, it's clear the regions for best VHF auroral propagation will move as the magnetic north pole drifts.
I'm not clear on how this would affect the United Kingdom, obviously written in that area, but some people speculate the drift of the magnetic pole into Siberia would increase visible auroras in parts of Europe.
If the Earth's magnetic field collapsed during a flipover, we might see increases in incoming cosmic rays and particles in the solar wind, because of course the magnetic field protects us against all of that, which would normally be deflected by the Earth's magnetic field.
This may well affect the ionosphere.
Could we see increased ionospheric propagation at, say, 50, even 70 megahertz?
Who knows?
But one thing's for certain, we live in interesting times.
That's from Ham, M5 aka, and he's sure right about that.
We live in very interesting times.
I work a band called 75 and 80 meters, 3.5 to 4 megahertz.
Now, I must tell you that unprecedented things are occurring.
At this point, when the sun goes down at night, those people that we've been able to reliably hear at 100, 200, 300, 400 miles away, they're gone.
And propagation is gone.
Now, is this the result of the shifting Earth magnetic field, Earth's magnetic field?
I don't know.
But I can tell you, we are in the middle of a big sea change in almost every aspect of what's going on in the world.
I called it the quickening.
And I maintain that what I wrote then is now manifestly becoming the truth.
Since I only have a couple of Sundays a month, I've got a lot for you.
Siberia is melting.
It's part of it.
A peat bog in western Siberia, about the size of France and Germany, began melting three or four years ago and will spark an irreversible ecological landslide and unleash billions of tons of methane gases.
This is potentially awful.
The new scientist, very honorable, reliable new scientists, reported in August, a Russian researcher visited the region which has warmed faster than anywhere else on our planet.
Temperatures increased 3 degrees Celsius in the past 40 years.
Now bear in mind, this ecological area is existing on a very, very tiny temperature gradient.
In other words, a very few degrees rise, and you begin to get a very great deal of melting.
And so already we've got a 3 degrees Celsius rise in the last 40 years alone.
The findings followed a June report that said thousands of lakes in Siberia's east have dried up over 30 years.
And if that's not enough, it may be the latest evidence of global warming.
Scientists for the first time have documented multiple deaths of polar bears off Alaska, where they likely drowned after swimming very long distances in the ocean amid the melting of the Arctic ice shelf.
The bears, you see, spend most of their time hunting and raising their young on ice floes.
But as it gets warmer, the ice flows are melting.
In a quarter century of aerial surveys of the Alaskan coastline before 2004, researchers from the U.S. Mineral Management Service said they typically spot a lone polar bear perhaps swimming in the ocean far from ice once, perhaps every two years.
Polar bear drownings were so rare that they've never been documented in the surveys previously.
But in September of 2004, when the polar ice cap had retreated a record 160 miles north of the northern coast of Alaska, researchers counted 10 polar bears swimming as far as 60 miles offshore.
Polar bears can swim long distances, but have evolved to mainly swim between sheets of ice, if they're there.
The researchers returned to the vicinity a few days after a fierce storm.
They found four dead bears floating in the water.
Extrapolation of survey data suggests that on the order of 40 bears may have been swimming and that many of those, of course, drowned as a result of rough seas caused by high winds.
So there you have it.
All the while, our ocean currents, the ones that give Western Europe the relatively balmy weather, are beginning to stutter.
I'm sure you've seen the headline perhaps on Drudge last few days.
And the fear is they may halt, as in the coming global superstorm or the day after tomorrow, the movie that was based in part on that.
And of course, we wrote that as well some time ago, and it sadly would appear to be coming true.
So what we have going on in front of us is a shift.
The following is from Whitley Strieber's Unknown Country, but I assume it appeared elsewhere, certainly.
Another asteroid headed our way.
Yet another asteroid is heading our way, and it could hit us in 31 years.
Will this one spell our doom, like an earlier one did for the dinosaurs?
This one is called I guess it's a pophis.
Apophis, that looks right.
After the ancient Egyptian spirit of evil and destruction, the asteroid is now aiming for Earth.
In fact, it's being watched by astronomers all over the world, and it looks like it will hit a body of land.
If it does, they may try to figure out how to deflect it or break it up in space.
Most asteroids that hit the Earth land, of course, in the ocean, since oceans cover most of Earth.
NASA says that an impact from Apophis, which could come in 2036, would release, ah, this isn't bad, 100,000 times the energy of the nuclear bomb that was detonated over Hiroshima in World War II.
No matter where it does hit, we would all be affected by the nuclear winter that would affect millions.
We'd get effects, certainly, from dust particles being released into our atmosphere, and that probably would bring on nuclear winter.
It's probably what killed off the dinosaurs and would do a job on us.
Astronomers have tracked this rock ever since it was discovered in June, but it has only started worrying them now because they say the odds of it hitting Earth in 2029 are becoming very alarming.
We don't have much time to lose.
It will take many years to design, test, and build the technology we need to deflect the asteroid.
Meteor expert Monica Grady says an impact by this rock could cause mass extinction, and we're overdue for the big one.
So that'll give the next generation something to worry about a little bit, huh?
There is a legacy of the tsunami out there, and it's not a good one.
There's a dead sea, a dead zone, devoid of all life, has been discovered at the exact epicenter of last year's tsunami, four kilometers beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean.
Scientists taking part in the World Wide Marine Survey made an 11-hour dive at the site five months after the disaster.
They were shocked to find narrow a sign of life around the epicenter, which opened up an 11, make that 1,000-meter chasm on the ocean floor, a 1,000-meter chasm.
Instead, there was nothing, nothing but eerie emptiness.
The powerful lights of the scientist submersible vehicle, piercing through the darkness, showed no trace of anything living.
A scientist working on the Census of Marine Life Project, Ron O'Dore of Dalhouse University in Canada, said, quote, you'd expect a site like this to be quickly recolonized, but it just hasn't happened.
It's unprecedented.
And speaking of unprecedented, that's the right word.
I just got a quick fast blast from another ham operator, John out there, who says, Art, I have to disagree with the comment on the propagation on 80 meters.
The band isn't dead.
It's just fantastically long.
Conditions to Europe, especially Scandinavia, have been fantastic.
Well, yes, John, I understand that.
But that's not been the nature of 75 and 80 meters since I've been licensed in 58 up and down through a few sun cycles.
It is unprecedented that on a regular basis, as soon as the sun goes down, propagation for the short range completely disappears.
And that's part of a pattern, John, of change that's occurring, whether it's to do with the Earth's magnetic field or some other ecological change.
The sun cycle notwithstanding, I have never, ever seen anything like it in my life.
And while it's great for talking to Europe, it's not so good for talking to your buds.
And beyond that relatively minor difference and change, I mean, it's not a big deal that we can't talk to our friends, but it is a big deal that it's changing like this because I believe it has never done this before.
And it's part of the larger change.
It's just one small aspect that I'm able to observe as a radio person that I think points to what's going on, the bigger picture, that is to say, with our environmental changes.
They're predicting another bad hurricane season, maybe even tragic hurricane season ahead.
That shouldn't be a surprise for anybody.
Storms are going to become more and more violent as time goes on.
And the zero mass I'm not sure about within the gravity of Earth.
unidentified
Well, and in the neighborhood where they have zero mass on a craft, it could affect the neighborhood, including the time that the man talked about distortion.
Not only is that true, sir, but scientists are unable to explain why.
unidentified
Well, and my question is, is it feasible that as these particles go through the imperfect vacuum of space, that would drag on them.
But what if as it proceeds around the back of the planet or the space platform, that there's enough turbulence to annihilate antimatter or some phenomena of dark matter?
I think scientists now believe, theoretical physicists believe that dark matter is what is propelling objects away from each other.
There's nothing else obvious.
Otherwise, physics laws say that no matter how small it might be, the drag or friction of anything in its path would tend to slowly slow an object like that down, not cause it to go faster.
unidentified
And the next time we have a vehicle that we want to send out of the solar system, we ought to send it 180 degrees in the opposite direction and see if it does the same thing.
There is something out there that is pushing on these objects, pushing hard enough to get them going faster, not slower, but faster, away from us.
As all objects are slowly moving away from us, modern theoretical physicists believe firmly that ultimately our fate is to be alone.
That other star systems, other planetary bodies are all moving away from us, so that the end, if Earth should and man should be so lucky to live that long, the end would be a lonely, dark, cold existence.
Man would go out of his house, if it could happen, should he live that long, and there would be nothing in the night sky save perhaps our own moon, and by then it may have moved far enough away, too.
Well, I wasn't talking exactly, or earlier, I wasn't talking about this, but I found out something about you guys were talking about the Verochip earlier?
And I found out that there was an emperor of Rome named Nero, and a lot of people think that that was like the beast back then when they were talking about Revelations.
And it's just funny how it sounds exactly like the same thing of Vero meaning Nero for buying and selling stuff.
But one thing, I kind of summed it up at the beginning of the program.
There's so much going on right now that points to a profound shift of some kind going on right before our very eyes if we just take the time to look at it.
You know, people don't look at what the South and the North Pole looked like 40 years ago and now.
They don't take the time to recognize the weather that's changing.
They're like the little boiling frogs, you know, getting hotter and hotter.
And rarely do we take a moment out to look at what's going on around us, but the change is happening now.
Of course, it's entirely possible that the Mayans understood the cycles better than we do today.
You know, I believe that I see a cycle or a change of a cycle right now going on right now.
But the Mayans may have known and may have seen and may have had access to history that goes far back beyond what we really understand, other than soil samples and ice cores and that sort of thing, and understood cycles that we don't yet understand.
And that's why a lot of people do pay attention to the Mayan calendar and believe it does portend something.
unidentified
I think it does kind of talk a lot because I listen to your show quite frequently since some graveyard shift.
And it's just kind of weird that all the correlating facts with all the different subjects kind of come together into one point.
As you know, we have a collection of many extremely credible stories.
As a child, she would dissect snakes, collect buckets full of lizards to study.
It's no wonder then that her college studies focused on biology and physical anthropology, which in turn led to her study of medicine.
A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University, she earned her BA in anthropology, then went on to receive her M.D. from the University of California, San Francisco.
She completed her internal medicine residency in Honolulu, Hawaii, rough duty there, where she worked as a physician.
Tess is the author of eight, count them now, eight bestsellers, and in her free time, what free time, she continues to compile a weird biological facts file viewable on her webpage.
We have a link up to that right now, www.tessgerritson.com.
And appropriately, the background to all her material appears to be black.
Yeah, because you don't need to know a lot of English to know that when Frankenstein's coming after you, it's a bad thing.
So I spent most of my childhood cowering in movie theaters and screaming as a five-year-old.
So I think that from an early age, I was very aware of the dark side and aware that when you opened up a room to a locked door to a room, that there was something bad behind that door.
I think that if I had been allowed to do my own thing, I might have actually gone into journalism because I'm just curious about things, especially strange things.
Is there you must have some insight then into the Chinese way of looking at things.
I mean, the way we look at the paranormal, for example, or what we think of as a paranormal or the strange stuff you talk about versus the way the Chinese culture does.
I've never had anybody explain that to me.
Do they believe as we believe or profoundly differently?
You know, I don't know enough about it because I was raised so thoroughly in Western medicine, you know, in the belief that things can be proven, that there are double-blind studies that can show whether something works or not.
I think that probably there are fewer physicians who believe in God than the general population.
I mean, when you look at the poll numbers for Americans in particular, they say about 90 to 95 percent believe in a supreme being, whether it's God or some other form.
But physicians, I suspect, will be like scientists, and that'll be a little bit lower.
To answer your question, because I have actually answered this question before on your show, and I always get into trouble, but I'll do it again.
Which is, I consider myself an agnostic simply because I feel that I like to see evidence of things.
And faith is one of those things that requires no evidence.
Well, for example, a patient is being operated on and they're in anesthesia, you know, deep into anesthesia, really out, out, out, as far as the surgeon is concerned.
And some surgeons just absolutely believe there's no way in hell that this guy or gal lying on the table with me opening them up is hearing or understanding anything I'm saying.
Some of the more spiritual surgeons are careful what they say during surgery because they know or think or believe or have faith that the patient can in some way understand at some subconscious level what's being said.
I mean, if the guy above says, man, this guy, look at that bleeder, he's not going to make it.
Well, the worst stories I've heard have to do with kind of crooked anesthesiologists who are stealing drugs or stealing pain medications.
There was one case of a gas man, as we call them, who would put them under lightly, and then he would paralyze them, which is normal.
You know, you get a form of curare to keep your muscles totally relaxed so that when the surgeon opens you up, you want your muscles you can, you know, they don't want them too tight.
And these patients would wake up and they'd be paralyzed, and there was no way they could say or do anything to tell anybody they were in pain.
So they would lie on that table and endure surgical procedures, you know, cutting everything else you can imagine, and would feel the whole thing.
That, to me, is probably the most nightmarish thing I can imagine.
Yeah, I didn't wake up during a surgery, but oh, when I was in the Air Force, I had a little thing in my left shoulder that wasn't so little, kind of a big bump.
You know, it was a possible tumor, and they took me in and said, you know, we'll just open this up and pop it right out.
We'll do it with xylocane, and you won't feel a thing.
It'd be easy.
Well, I was four hours on the operating table.
It went deep into my chest, and they started the xylocane, and they told me that they couldn't put me under general because they were already deep into my chest, and they were giving me all the xylocane they could.
I bet I had 30 something or others.
And they said they couldn't put me under general, much as they would have liked to.
And believe me, doctor, I felt every snip, clip, and cut.
Oh, again, it's such a terrible crime to imagine that a doctor would put a patient through that.
Now, I mean, it doesn't, if you are a good anesthesiologist, it should not happen, even inadvertently, because you're supposed to be monitoring blood pressure and pulse rate, and those things go up in pain.
And when you see that happen on the monitor, you maybe would think you'd dial up that anesthesia a little bit higher.
They just gave me that BS story, and I have no idea some captain.
And then to top the whole damn thing off, I worked in the hospital.
And so when the report came back from Lackland Air Force Base, you know, the test on this stuff they took out of me, it came back and it was completely benign.
But the doctor took me in there and told me I had six months.
And then he cracked up and actually fell on the floor.
We were pretty close.
We all knew each other in the hospital, but I didn't think it was funny at all.
And then there is even a case of an anesthesiologist who tried to hide it by giving his patient a beta blocker, which suppresses the ability of your heart to speed up so that nobody else in the room knew that the patient was awake because they could not see the monitor and did not realize that the pulse should have been higher.
But the patient's normal reaction to pain was muted because the anesthesia did that too.
You know, right now I'm doing crime thrillers, but a lot of the fiction that I write about, I base it on true crime, things that have actually happened.
I would love to put out a, you know, just tell your audience if they have any personal weird crime stories, let me know because I collect these things.
And by the way, while I'm on the radio with you, I just want to say hi to the Coast Riders.
Say hello, and especially particularly to Tim, who has been corresponding with me.
Yes, in other words, I just have always wondered how many people died due to the stupid mistake of some doctor or some surgeon, and it, you know, it doesn't.
Well, Seth, when you go into the military, you go through basic training, which basically strips away your personality and makes you subservient and makes you obey orders.
And I think that as a doctor, when you go through medical school and then you're an intern, it's kind of the same psychological thing, isn't it?
I think a lot of doctors feel that there but for the grace of God go I. Everybody makes mistakes.
They all realize that.
And maybe if they see a colleague make a mistake once, they're not going to say anything.
But you know what?
I think that most doctors, I think that was the exception that I was talking about, that hospital in Texas.
Most doctors, if they see somebody who is incompetent, who is doing bad things, who's losing patients, they are going to say something quietly to the hospital.
And the hospital is going to quietly withdraw their privileges.
Here in the state of Maine, my husband actually is the president now of the Maine Medical Association.
And he is constantly doing reviews, quality assurance reviews.
Whenever there is a complaint, they have a panel that includes not only doctors, but also laypeople, attorneys, and they decide whether the doctor did something wrong.
And they're not at all shy about removing somebody's license.
How does one, in so many cases, discern between a bad decision and incompetence?
In other words, a lot of times, given a set of, I don't know, the patient presents with this and that, they simply make a wrong diagnosis and give the patient the wrong thing and the patient dies.
And I think that what doctors do when they're on these evaluation boards is they look at what the original doctor was presented with, what was the evidence, and they think to themselves, could I have made this mistake?
Or knowing what I know, would it have been clear what should have been done?
And, you know, it's really a matter of judgment of the particular panel that has been chosen to evaluate that case.
And, you know, it's the same thing with airplane mechanics or lawyers or anything else.
You see something, you think that's really stupid.
Yeah, well, as I say, the difference between an honest mistake and just a misdiagnosis and issuing the wrong medicine and actual incompetence, that would be one hard line to try and discern.
It might be, but I think that if it happens more than once, then every doctor is on alert and they know.
You know, I had surgery recently, and before I chose my surgeon, what we would do is we would go around to our doctors we knew and said, if your wife needed this operation, which doctor would you send her to?
I wonder if it ever happens to a coroner, you know, a scalpel in hand, ready to begin the autopsy, and the eyes blink, and oh, my God, that could kill a coroner.
In the 1980s in New York, there was a man who was about to be autopsied.
And the doctor had the scalpel in hand and was about to make the cut, and the so-called dead man woke up and grabbed the doctor, and it was the pathologist who keeled over dead of a heart attack.
I understand that the man who was supposed to be autopsied survived that.
So it does happen, especially, I mean, I think it probably happened quite a bit that people were buried alive in the days prior to embalming.
Well, in the case of the girl in the bathtub, she had taken an overdose of medications that probably depressed her respiration so that you could not see them very well.
And whoever was listening to her heart, who knows what happened.
I don't know how they could have missed it.
But it does happen.
And I can tell you as a doctor that it's not that out of the question, that if you are in a very noisy room, if you have a lot of relatives who are crying around you, that maybe you don't hear the heart as well as you should.
Or you don't watch long enough to see whether there are any respirations.
Speaking of that, when somebody codes, that is to say, I guess when they code, their heart stops, they stop breathing, they are more or less dead, right?
Well, that begs the question then, and I will ask it, and that is, when we die, are you confident and comfortable that that's it?
That there is no thinking process that's continuing after apparent declared biological death.
I don't want to know when I'm being carried away in the bag, when I'm going into the ice chest.
I don't want to know about that stuff.
And I'm depending on the fact that we're gone, we're out, we're not, somehow the brain is not limping along at some percentage of saved up oxygen and still going.
Well, you know, let me, you bring that up, and this is one of, this is a nightmare that was actually awakened by my mother years ago.
There are people who believe that after you die, you should wait three days for cremation.
Yes.
And I think that that, of course, is one of the scariest ideas is that maybe the brain, there's still something left in the brain when they put you into the crematorium.
But I personally don't think that once you have gone without oxygen for that long, that there's much left.
I don't think you're going to think you're going to be aware of that.
And I mean, the cases of people who have sort of near-death experiences, who are coded but still feel they can hear things and see white lights and see the hallucinations that aren't unusual for near-death experiences, that's still brain function.
I mean, it just means that some neurons are firing and maybe you're awakening memories in the brain, but it just means that you are still conscious on some level even though you're undergoing CPR.
Is that NDE, according to what you believe, scientifically occurring either just as they're going down or just as they're coming back up, but not in that bottomless pit we call death?
There is a theory that it's all related to a lack of oxygen, that it's a hypoxic brain that comes up with what seems to be very consistent sorts of things, seeing lights, seeing a bright light, seeing people who you love who have died or passed on.
I also interview all these folks who study this at the top of their game, and they swear, how could any rational person listen to story after story after story and not at least have some doubt about what may be over there on the other side or not?
Again, there are, and I would love to see a ghost.
I have been looking for a ghost all my life.
And as a child, I always wanted to see one.
I'm sorry I never did, because I think that were I to see a ghost, were I to be convinced of that, it would be a great deal of comfort to me that there is evidence of life after death.
Again, I've interviewed people who are paying substantial amounts of money to have either their head or whole body frozen upon their death to be brought back millennia in the future when whatever it is that killed them can be corrected.
I would say that they have a great deal of faith in technology.
But knowing the practical aspects of keeping a body frozen for that long in terms of how many companies go out of business, I think they're probably wasting their money.
I mean, just think about how here you have a giant freezer with 500 heads waiting to be awakened at some later century.
I think that there probably is, assuming you did not let the brain cells die.
It has to be, and then this is part of, I think, their protocol, is that they undergo cryogenics while they are still on life support before the brain actually goes.
Once your brain is dead, there's no way to revive it.
If I could wake up 100 years from now and everybody I loved would still be here, that would be different.
But I think that to wake up in a future when your children are gone, your spouse is gone, everybody you care about is gone, I'm not sure that's worth coming back to.
No, I think once, unless you're going to count Jesus and Lazarus, but I just don't think that anybody really has felt that it was possible.
And now, the recently dead, they have done.
I mean, this is really the whole basis for resuscitation, where we come up with the science of resuscitation.
You know, way back in the 1500s, really, midwives were already using mouth-to-mouth on newborns.
Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation goes back quite a ways, probably, you know, even before the 1500s.
And I think what everybody got interested in was in the 1700s when galvanism came into play.
This was something started off by Luigi Galvani, who found out that you could apply electrical currents to a frog's leg and make it twitch, and it look like it was alive.
And so people thought, oh, well, if you can make a frog's leg come back with electricity, maybe you can make the whole body come back.
They sure do, and that's what got everybody very excited because and you know Benjamin Franklin actually was one of the early proponents of using electricity to wake people up again.
He was a brilliant man.
He said, well, why not?
So, you know, the interest in electrical re-stimulation of the heart has been around for quite some time.
Oh, you know, in medicine, you see strange things.
And you're always dealing with people who are dying, have died, are about to die.
And I worked in a hospital in Hawaii.
You know, Hawaii is kind of a very spiritual place.
People seem in tune with the afterlife and ghosts and things because there are just a lot of people there who believe in this stuff.
I worked in a hospital that had, it was a Catholic hospital.
And one of the nurses there was also a nun.
And it was very creepy.
Every so often, she would walk into somebody's room and bless them and walk out.
And I asked somebody, how come she did it with that patient?
They said, when she gives that blessing, she knows they're going to die.
This woman, this nurse knew.
And I'm not talking she was an angel of death.
It's just that she had this ability to know somebody was going to come in and was not going to make it.
And she would make sure they got their blessing ahead of time.
Now, part of it is that, yeah, you see somebody and you think, yeah, they're pretty sick.
Of course they're going to die.
But she did it a couple times to people who are perfectly healthy.
She just had this sense.
I asked her once, and she said, I can smell it.
I can smell when somebody's going to die.
Wow.
And she couldn't explain.
She just says they smell like death.
There was a room on one particular ward in that same hospital.
They tried never to put patients in that room.
That room pretty much stayed empty until they got loaded to the gills and they had to put people in there.
And the reason was the room was haunted, according to the nurses.
Again and again, they would have patients who were in that room who would wake up, would call, you know, ring the call button and say, who is that person standing over my bed?
And the person that they would see would be a man in a hospital gown.
That was a ghost.
And I never saw the ghost.
I kept going in there looking for the ghost and never saw it.
I mean, there may be a volunteer who comes in, and it's just hard to know why this particular thing happens.
It may be that a lot of patients wake up with hallucinations of seeing something in the room because they're in an unfamiliar room, and the nurses just happen to remember that it was this particular room that happened more than once, and it became legend, and it became embellished over the years.
Well, you know, again, there could be a logical explanation for that as well.
Is it that she is just a very, very good clinician and that she has an instinct?
There is something that she is picking up on.
Maybe she is able to see that they're a little paler than usual or there is something about them that looks preterminal.
And the other thing that's interesting is that people who have cancer do give off a certain odor.
This is what I've heard that doctors, that dogs are actually used sometimes because they're such acute senses of scent that they can, and I don't know what the scientific investigation on this is, but I have heard stories that sometimes dogs can detect when somebody is suffering from cancer.
Certainly, it has been proven that dogs know when their owners are coming home.
They did this experiment that ran on one of the prime-time news shows where they kept cameras on dogs.
Then they'd have the owner start home at an unusual time of day, and inevitably and every time the dog would know the owner's on the way and start rushing the door and getting agitated and waiting for the owner.
knew the owner was on the way.
Well, I don't either, but it may mean that animals do have some senses that go beyond ours, it would seem.
Well, okay, but dogs, domesticated dogs are used to paying much more attention to people, to people's moods, to much And the one experiment that I remember was they placed a piece of meat in a way it was very difficult for the dog to get at.
And they put a wolf in there, and the wolf just kept trying and trying and trying to get this meat and couldn't get it.
The dog would try a little bit, realize it couldn't get it, and would look at the person, kept looking at the person like, are you going to help me out here?
So, I mean, that was really the difference is wolves are just not used to checking in on people.
So I think that there is a very strong bond, and it is bizarre.
I mean, I don't own a dog myself due to allergies, but I have seen them do extraordinary things and seem to be extraordinarily sensitive to human needs.
And, you know, we all know about seizure dogs, right?
You've heard about dogs who, people who have epilepsy.
They have special dogs who are able to sense before the person has a seizure and give the person a warning.
And what this does is it Allows the patient to get to a safe place, to turn off the engine, to pull off to the side, because they know a seizure is coming.
That something, well, whether it was he was having a stroke or there was a noise in the audience or something that made the tiger concerned about the trainer.
It is death from a bacterial infection sometime between birth and 10 days postpartum.
It's the death of the mother.
And it's a fever that's caused by a variety of bacterial species, but they infect the genital tract, usually the uterus, and the infection spreads throughout their body and they die really of sepsis.
Now, today we treat it with antibiotics, but in those days they did not.
And what was frightening about it was that it happened in hospitals.
If you gave birth to a baby out in the street, you didn't get it.
You went to a hospital, you got it.
And it got to be so bad that I found statistics for late 1700s, one hospital in France, no woman survived childbirth that whole year.
But it brings to mind what the medical conditions were in those periods.
What was happening was, of course, it was being spread by the doctors and the nurses.
That's what was happening.
There were no gloves there.
So they would examine a woman who is in labor.
They would go on to the next bed, examine the woman in labor without having washed their hands clean.
And they were really sort of like death's agents.
And 10 to 20% of women were dying after coming into hospitals.
But it's the conditions of the hospitals that reawaken this sense of, oh my God, we've gone a long way.
They would put women in hospital beds with the sheets that had not been changed since the previous people had died.
So you'd be lying in a bed that's soaked with blood, dried blood, or all the secretions of childbirth.
They would put four patients to a bed.
They would die so quickly, they didn't have enough coffins.
They were throwing several people into coffins at a time.
There was a description in Hungary of a hospital where the women's lying-in area was in a ward, and on one end they could look out the window and see the cemetery, and on the other end of the ward, they saw the dissecting room where all the autopsies were being done.
And you'd think that they would stay at home, but there were just large numbers of people who went into the hospitals essentially knowing that they were going to die because they were giving birth to a baby.
And this is an example of how medicine sometimes has a total blind eye to the obvious.
You would think so.
The question was, why were these women dying?
They didn't really have a good sense of what infection was caused by.
One of the ridiculous, ridiculous ideas was that, well, these women were dying because their modesty had been violated by being examined by male doctors.
But the other thing that happened was they were noticing that actually women were dying at a faster rate if they were examined by doctors as opposed to midwives.
The wards in which the midwives are taking care of these people were not dying as quick.
Yeah, and to think about just how many bacteria they were carrying on their hands coming from the autopsy room.
The really sad part was the one man who really made a difference was a doctor named Dr. Ludwig Semmelweis.
He was from Hungary, and he noticed that the midwives seemed to have a better rate of survival than the men, than the doctors, and he began to wonder why.
And didn't care about the so-called atmospheric conditions or noxious air idea that was killing women.
He thought maybe it has something to do with the fact the doctors were spending all this time in the autopsy room.
It also impressed him that one of his friends punctured a finger while he was taking care of a woman, and that friend died of essentially sepsis.
And he thought, there's an infection going on.
There's some kind of a bug that's being passed around.
So all he did was tell everybody, wash your hands.
He made everybody in this one hospital wash their hands, and the mortality rate dropped to one-tenth of what it used to be.
And you'd think that was enough evidence to make doctors change their practice?
He was so devastated by the attacks, by the loss of his reputation, that he ended up in an institution where, ironically enough, I think he cut himself and he died of sepsis, the very disease that he had been studying all those years.
While we're on the category of things being passed like this, you know, I've been watching the headlines, doctor, for some time now about the possibility of a tiny little genetic change in this horrifying bird flu and the possibility of it being even some stories beginning to suggest they're seeing human-to-human transfer of this bird flu with a mortality rate through the roof.
I mean, some incredible figure like 55% of the people who get it die, is what that means, folks.
And I'm watching these stories very carefully, and they're kind of eerie, doctor, because the stories sort of are saying it's not a matter of when or if, but rather when.
I mean, and we already part of the problem, of course, is that where its cradle is in Asia is because there's so much contact between people and birds.
They live with their chickens and their ducks and their geese.
And this is sort of like the perfect stew to get this virus to mutate.
It doesn't take very much.
It just takes one person being infected with the avian flu at the same time they are infected with a more common person-to-person flu.
When you do an interview like this, there are a number of suggested, scripted interview questions that you can ask a guest.
But some of the more interesting ones come not from there, but sort of just the thread of the conversation.
And in this case, we've really stumbled into one here.
When you hear a doctor, like Dr. Gerritson, respond to a question about this, you know, possible bird flu thing by saying, I've got a family plan, you don't have to read between the lines there.
You know, obviously, she takes this very, very seriously, as do I. And so therefore, I'm most interested in what your family plan would be, Doctor.
We have a son in college right now, and we had told him that as soon as he gets the word from us, and we're watching, we watch the WHO bulletins, we watch what's happening in Asia, we are waiting to see human-to-human transmittal.
And we told him that as soon as he hears from us, he has to leave school immediately.
And this could potentially spread so quickly that I'm with you.
I've figured that the first time I see a legitimate human-to-human transmission, really...
And I don't know how you're going to discern when you get the one that is true, because by then, by the time they really cop to it, it could be way too late.
But before it actually gets on a plane and hops here, it'll probably spread within local villages.
And that should give us enough of a chance to know.
I mean, I've seen that the computer-generated model of how long it would take to get to the United States.
It's going to spread locally first.
And so we're probably going to have days, weeks to know ahead of time when to be cautious because those local villagers are not going to be getting on planes.
It's going to be health care workers or tourists who are going to bring it home.
If you're young and healthy, it can turn your own immune system against you.
And that's the scary part about it.
I mean, if you're older, it probably will kill you in the way that flus have killed in the past, which is turn into a bacterial pneumonia or just kill you from a viral pneumonia.
But what was frightening about the flu in 1918, which, by the way, started off as a bird flu then as well, it actually causes us to have what they call a cytokine storm.
It makes our immune system turn against our own lungs and destroys lungs.
And the descriptions from 1918 of the soldiers who died, the American soldiers who died, was that they would feel a little bit ill, and then a day later, two days later, they were coughing up blood and dead.
And that was not necessarily the virus itself.
It was actually the virus causing the body to come up with a very strong immune response.
This is so frightening, the prospect of this is so frightening, that if we became aware that a certain province in China had, or the Chinese government became aware that a certain province in China had indeed all the worst fears had come true.
It had mutated, it was spreading from human to human, and it was 70% fatal.
It was killing everything it came in contact with and fast.
And this is all very conceivably possible.
Do you think the Chinese government or whatever government would be in question here would consider the possibility of sanitizing the entire area where it's occurring with something like a nuclear weapon?
And he suggests that it is far more widespread than you can possibly believe, that many people walking down the street that you meet every single day and go by you on the street have made silent deals with the devil.
But, you know, if you're going to believe in God, you're going to have to believe in, if you're going to believe in the light, you're going to have to believe in the dark, right?
No, I think I'm looking at it just from a curiosity, from a scholarly point of view, just because, you know, if you're interested in good, you also have to be interested in evil and how it has been viewed through the years.
And frankly, the biblical view or the ecclesiastical view of Satan has, he's gotten a bad rap in some ways.
I think that you go back to what is the meaning of Lucifer?
I think it's a very controversial topic, and it fascinates me.
I don't believe he exists, but I like to look into what people have considered to be satanic, or where is the background of Lucifer.
But when we're talking about evil, I think of evil as being something completely different.
To me, evil is causing human misery.
That's what evil is.
Whether you want to say it's caused by Satan or whether it's caused by people being bad.
As far as your friend, my own feeling is that we carry evil within ourselves.
That people are capable of worse things than we could ever, ever imagine.
You know, because I write crime thrillers now, I encounter people sometimes who really kind of freak me out.
I was on a book tour once, and this was for the book The Surgeon, which is about a serial killer who does what Jack the Ripper once did.
He cuts women open and removes their sexual organs and gets a great deal of pleasure out of this particular practice of his.
So I'm sitting there signing books, and a very ordinary, nice-looking man comes up and bends over, and he whispers in my ear, he says, thank you for writing this book.
And I said, why?
And he said, you allowed me to indulge in my fantasies.
and I thought, how many people are walking the streets with these fantasies?
Now, I'm not saying that he did anything wrong, but my feeling is that there are a lot of people who have...
Yes, who think about these things, who enjoy these things, who maybe love to fantasize about these, but never actually act on their impulses.
So luckily, most human beings are able to put a clamp down on the inappropriate things they know they could do.
What is scary, though, is when you get into a situation such as after the bird flew, or when civilization breaks down, or when there are no police forces, and then these crazy people, not necessarily crazy people, but evil people, feel free to do what they want to do.
There are some really kind of disturbing cases of families who do stuff together.
And I think we talked about this once before.
There was a case in Oregon of a young man who called up the police and said, you know, my dad raped my girlfriend.
And by the way, I think my dad is capable of some worse things.
And they dug up the father's backyard and found some dead girls.
Apparently, he had been a serial killer.
He'd been killing girls in the neighborhood.
Yes, and so this came out in the news.
And then what followed up was interesting was that this serial killer's father was in jail at that moment for having killed girls and burying them in exactly the same way.
So here you are, this young man.
Your father's a serial killer.
Your grandfather is a serial killer.
It's got to make you wonder about whether or not there's any genetic stuff going on.
Well, you know, there are cases of people who there is a Dutch family who apparently, every male in that family had been in prison, and it appeared to be a genetic defect.
I mean, you know, you mentioned about killing the women in that certain horrible way and then burying the bodies of grandfather and father and son.
I mean, just that much alone, it would seem the odds against that, they could probably do that, work that up in a computer someplace and find the odds, but they'd be so astronomical that you would have to do that.
You know, I have to tell you, Art, even though Gravity was probably my favorite book of all, it sold the fewest copies.
And I've learned that lesson in publishing, that if you write a book that is very technical, very scientific, it's kind of difficult for a lot of the general public to understand.
And I have a lot of, especially female readers, who told me that there was too much technical stuff in there.
I hope to go one of these days, but if you go down one of these highways, there is actually a Kansas historical marker on the highway showing where the Bloody Benders lived.
And if you were a traveler going down this inn, there was nothing, no place else to stay, and they would kind of wave you in and say, oh, why don't you spend the night here because you've got a long travel distance to travel.
And they would talk to him, and they would place him with his back to a curtain.
And the daughter was the one, apparently, who did the killing.
She would come up behind him and smack him over the head with a hammer, and they would finish him off, and they would just open a trapdoor and roll him into the cellar where he was left to rot.
So there were a number of bodies that were found in the cellar when this was all done.
unidentified
The interesting thing about the whole Bloody Bender family...
If you were to raise a child, if you were to raise a child saying that this is a normal way to live your life, to kill other people, maybe they would grow up feeling that way.
You know, I think that what you need to do is look at serial killers who did not raise their own children and see if their kids ended up bad, despite the fact they had no contact with dear old dad.
And there becomes a test for it, which inevitably there would, because once we've already unraveled the genome, and now we're looking at these smaller pieces, parts, right, within the genome, and eventually perhaps we'll discover it is a genetic thing, and then what?
I mean, you know, Anne Rice used to be concerned about it enough so that, well, she had a very, very strange fan base.
She had, you know, the people who were Satanists and that group.
You know, I think everybody who is a public figure has to be concerned about it.
I know Patricia Cornwell travels with bodyguards, and she packs.
So it's something, and particularly when you get the kind of stories that I sort of dig up out of forensics.
I was told recently that there's a particular prison somewhere where they house people who are getting ready to go out under the witness protection program.
They're just sitting there waiting for their identities to be remade, and so they just sort of sit in this area of the prison.
And I've been told that I'm their favorite author.
Well, I hate to say this, but I watch, for example, Law and Order on TV, and they've done a number of episodes about exactly the kind of author that you are meeting her end in the most disagreeable way she ever wrote about.
That somehow this interest, this association, even though you don't know what's happening, is made and they feel they know you.
And boy, what a scary life to lead.
I mean, you've got to wonder every time you open up some email.
It's an honor to get to talk to you, Art, you and your doctor friend.
My name is Chuck, and I'm calling from Brinixville, Pennsylvania, near Allentown.
And I'm a retired physics teacher and also a radio ham operator.
I understand you're a ham operator, too.
Yes.
The thing I wanted to bring up was your doctor friend there wasn't quite sure about a creator.
And some time ago, I got thinking about Einstein's law, which says that a small amount of mass times the speed of light squared is a tremendous amount of energy.
And of course, 60 years ago, as you know, we took a small amount of energy, or mass rather, converted it to energy, and destroyed two cities in Japan.
So when you realize that light is a big part of this equation, and your radio, which we're not talking on, in your ham radio and my ham radio, is made up of three fields, which you probably know.
They are the electric field, the magnetic field, and a gravitational field.
I mean, science is wonderful, and physics is, we're always learning something, and we are, that's sort of the basis of science, is that we can test, and we make hypotheses, and we try and find the evidence to back that up.
Do you think it's possible that in our lifetimes, or perhaps future generations' lifetimes, science will, in fact, prove a creator, prove a creation force beyond any shadow of a doubt?
Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Dr. Gerritson.
Hi.
unidentified
Hi, Arthur.
Hi, Dr. Gerritson.
The reason I'm calling is when I was working in the medical school at a well-known university in Ohio, there was an incident in which some two policemen, I don't want to knock off policemen, but they're bad apples in every profession.
And evil in a person and racism are a bad combination.
And when they were bringing in an African-American gentleman who they presumed was dead, but wasn't, to the coroner's office, they decided to entertain themselves with his body on the way.
And the results of the injuries that he accrued then caused him to die after he recovered from his presumed death, a different injury.
And the reason I bring this up is sometimes hormones in very trace amounts are taken from bodies during Autopsies and then used by genetic engineering to be amplified in large quantity and then used in therapies.
And the question is, just like some people question the use of Prinkop's book, you know, the dissection book which has paintings of fresh corpses, and this was made by a Nazi doctor in Auschwitz, and this has been covered up for years.
That's how the book was obtained.
And now that we know, people say even though you don't have to do further harm to get more copies of the book, the book should be banned.
And similarly, one could question the use of hormones and therapy unless it is known that these hormones were not obtained from a person who was abused by the police when they were presumed dead because they were African American.
And I brought this up to a doctor once when she wanted to do an operation on me to remove my thyroid because it had a tumor and put me on hormone replacement for the rest of my life.
And I said, where did the original sample come from?
She said, oh, because you don't have to go back to the well.
I think maybe what you're talking about was growth hormone because that was obtained from cadavers.
A great deal of growth hormone was.
And there were actually, I mean, the problem with that was they were able to pass on diseases because they were harvesting it from people who had, say, Croixel-Jakob disease or mad cow disease.
That was being passed on by the use of cadavera growth hormone.
Nowadays, I think most hormones are synthetically produced, so that is not so much a problem anymore.
It doesn't make any sense to me, but I suppose that if you were to somehow transplant somebody's messenger RNA, which is, you know, RNA is where we store our memories, that they might be able to access that.
But I can't think of any good explanation for cellular memory, frankly.
Above all, I consider myself a good citizen, and I certainly would.
You know, in fact, that was one of the first things that I did when I got my first idea for a medical thriller, which was way back, was Harvest.
And I had been talking to a cop who had heard rumors in Russia that there were children being kidnapped from the streets and sent to the Middle East as organ donors.
And the first thing I thought was not, I was going to write a book about it.
It was, oh my gosh, I've got to do something about this.
This has got to be known.
And so I called the press.
I happened to have a friend who, the brother-in-law, was going to Russia to do a story for Newsweek and immediately said, this has got to be uncovered.
And it turned out that the press was already there looking into the whole allegation.
But that's always my initial feeling, is that if I hear something that outrages me, I'm not going to just write a book about it.
You have to remember that you are in control of your own life, that this is not something that's beyond your control, and that you don't have to do anything bad if you don't want to.
So clearly you're concerned about this.
You've come from a family that has had problems, and I'm not sure what you're talking - I mean which do you torture animals, you set fires.
I mean this is the kind of thing that people have always considered to be dangerous signals.
Well, I think that the real clue to somebody having a tendency to become a serial killer is that they get either immense sexual pleasure out of hurting somebody or they have a great deal of pleasure out of having control over another human being.
A lot of them will actually have a sexual release when they kill somebody.
And that's why it's one of the things that it's hard for them to resist because, well, sex is, I mean, it's part of what we live for, right?
And these people, unfortunately, get their hides out of that.
But if you don't have those particular tendencies and you're concerned about it, it sounds like you really don't have to worry so much as long as you feel you're in control.
East of the Rockies, you're on there with Dr. Gerritson.
Good morning.
unidentified
Yes, Dr. Gerritson, this is Michael in Norfolk, Virginia.
You've been very honest as a doctor and as a woman married to the president of the Maine Medical Association.
You have come forth to this audience and told us that it was professional arrogance, in so many words, that caused the death of many pregnant women because doctors wouldn't wash their hands.
And you've also been honest in saying that your own background is Chinese, and we often hear the question raised, why are so many flus and epidemics given the Asian or China label?
And the answer that has been brought forward by some health professionals is the fact of the common pot that's used in China.
And you alluded to some practices of just being around the birds yourself.
My question actually goes to the real heart of this.
3,500 years ago, Moses taught his people to wash their hands in running water because that was communicated to him by superior beings.
And the logical deduction is that whoever gave them that information, even though 150 years ago our own arrogant physicians were unwilling to do it, 3,500 years ago, whoever these superior beings were that told Moses to wash their hands carefully and gave them other very strict and prescribed laws that make perfect sense to us with today's science,
whoever did that must have understood that washing and running water would carry away the germs.
They knew that there were germs before they had microscopes, thousands of years before that.
To go to the root of the question, you have your own family plan for the avian flu.
Why don't we go more to the root of customs, arrogance, not just in professional arrogance among doctors, but arrogance in communities and traditions, even churches that follow a practice of using a common cup where hundreds or thousands even of strangers will be taking food out of the same cup.
He makes a good point.
Why don't we come to the point of a kind, a family plan for all mankind, a worldwide plan that will make sense, that will strip away the professional arrogance, the pride, the religious and traditional and superstitious pride.
And, you know, the reason that this stuff all rises in Asia is simply that they live with their livestock.
Throughout mankind, the history of mankind, we've lived with our livestock.
And think about in Europe, we've slept with our pigs.
It's interesting how many diseases we actually get from animals.
You know, it's not just bad.
We used to get TB from cows, for instance, tuberculosis from drinking infected milk.
There is some question about whether or not multiple sclerosis comes from the animal world as well.
But on the other hand, too much cleanliness is a bad thing.
There has been some recent one little small piece of research that showed that people who have inflammatory bowel disease may actually be cured by giving them parasites, giving them the larvae of parasites because the parasites hatch in your gut and you get, say, a tapeworm, and that seems to calm down all sorts of colitis, for instance.
Now, where does that come from?
Well, it may be that the human gut has evolved so that we are used to having parasites.
We're supposed to have parasites, but we've become so clean that we've gotten rid of that, and maybe inflammatory bowel disease is a result of too much cleanliness.
Well, we don't have anything else right now, do we?
I mean, there are some antivirals, but the front line is still going to be Tammy Flu until we get the vaccine up and running, and that's going to take a while.
The trouble with Tamiflu is that there is a question of some resistance coming up.
But until we come up with something else, that's all we've got.
And good hand washing and avoiding crowds and wearing masks and gloves.
Believe me, I lived in a sort of a big canyon behind my house, and there were plenty of dead animals to find just lying around on the ground.
The lizards, the thing that I used to do with lizards is these are the kind of lizards, if you agitated them, they would drop their tails just as an escape mechanism, and the tails would continue to wiggle because the muscles were still working.
And this is probably not nice to the lizards, but I would grab a bunch of them and I would put them in a bucket, and then you'd shake the bucket, and their tails would all fall off.
And then you'd let the lizards go, and you'd have this bucket full of tails that would continue to wiggle for several minutes.
And that, to me, was great fun, but I never killed an animal.
But you would, you know, these are evil uses of cloning, the idea that you would grow a parallel human being who is actually a human being with thoughts and feelings to use them as bare parts.
But then, you know what?
I mean, what do we do with human beings who are already alive on this earth?
People are constantly being killed in battles and in political disputes.
So it's not as if evil is an unknown thing.
We've been doing this for centuries, hurting each other.