Many of us came to yoga and wellness spaces to heal or flee from the alienation of modernity. We wanted something untouched by our cities and factories and labs; something that reminded us of a world we never really knew. “Nature” was in such short supply that we had to invent it to colonize it anew, in exotic lands and mystical beasts: the deer whose antler gave longevity, the cow whose milk strengthened our family bonds. How many of us knew that our fetish for the “natural” could lead towards a consumerist cul-de-sac or fascist ideology?In this episode we contemplate the meaning, practice, delusions, and hypocrisies of the “natural.” Derek talks to “Sea of Shadows” director Richard Ladkani about how the hunt for Traditional Chinese Medicine remedies has devastated the ecology of Baja California. Julian thinks about the disenchantment of the lab coat and how it drives so many to the warm regard of the “natural healer.”To find out more about how some practitioners of complementary medicine are attempting to bridge the evidence and ideological gap with conventional care, Matthew interviews Naturopathic Doctor Juniper Martin and fourth-year student Adriana Berusch Gerardino about their efforts with the Naturopathic Alliance to dispel COVID misinformation and to challenge racism in their profession.Show NotesGina Carano fired by Lucasfilm (and publicist and agent) for antisemitic Q-Trump social activityRFK finally gets deleted by IGTurn Off Your Mind, Relax—and Float Right-Wing?Chairman Mao Invented Traditional Chinese MedicineQAA shines on with Episode 128Dale Beran’s extraordinary book It Came from Something AwfulDecoding the Gurus launches the GurometerShouting out to Katya Weiss-Anderson of Kumbaya ConfessionalChinese gov and state media boost TCM COVID treatments at home and abroadArticle: Acupuncture Doesn’t WorkDr. Lad’s kindly but rather banal Ayurveda advice re: COVID (August)
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Unexpected, but that's the nature of Clubhouse, so we're going to be at it again this Sunday at 1pm Pacific, talking about some of the topics from this week's episode.
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Natural Hopes, Natural Fallacies.
Many of us came to yoga and wellness spaces to heal or flee from the alienation of modernity.
We wanted something untouched by our cities and factories and labs.
Something that reminded us of a world we never really knew.
Nature was in such short supply that we had to invent it, to colonize it anew in exotic lands and mystical beasts.
The deer whose antler gave longevity, the cow whose milk strengthened our family bonds.
How many of us knew that our fetish for the natural could lead toward a consumerist cul-de-sac of fascist ideology?
In this episode, We contemplate the meaning, practice, delusions, and hypocrisies of the natural.
Derek talks to Sea of Shadows director Richard Latcani about how the hunt for traditional Chinese medicine remedies has devastated the ecology of Baja, California.
I'm thinking about the disenchantment of the lab coat and how it drives so many to the warm regard of the natural healer.
This week, The Jab looks at the data on how the vaccines are faring against those scary new COVID variants.
To find out more about how some practitioners of complementary medicine are attempting to bridge the evidence and ideological gap with conventional care, Matthew interviews naturopathic doctor Juniper Martin and fourth-year student Adriana Beirusch-Gerardino about their efforts with the Naturopathic Alliance to dispel COVID misinformation and to challenge racism in their profession.
This is the Conspirituality Ticker, a weekly bullet point rundown on the ongoing pandemic of messianic influencers who spread medical misinformation and sell disaster spirituality.
So breaking news from late last night, it took less than an hour for Lucasfilm to fire Gina Carano after her latest social media barrage.
The former MMA fighter and breakout star of Disney's hit series The Mandalorian topped off months of QAnon-tinged conspiratorial posts with a post that compared being a Trump supporter to being a Jew during the Holocaust.
So trigger warning here for anti-Semitic false equivalency.
Carano wrote, Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers, but by their neighbors, even by children.
Because history is edited, most people today don't realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews.
How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Carano had also been slated to headline her own Mandalorian spinoff series, but Lucasfilm ditched those plans quietly in November in light of her anti-masking and electoral fraud social media posts.
Clearly, it seems Carano missed the memo that Lucas and the whole Star Wars mythos is Antifa.
I think she would have made a great Captain Phasma, but she wasn't cast as a fashy stormtrooper.
The bounty hunters in Star Wars are mostly anarcho-libertarians.
It certainly provoked an interesting conversation here at home with the eight-year-old who loves the Cara Dune character, but has felt creeped out by her anti-masking and QAnon BS.
Well, breaking news from just yesterday, Robert F. Kennedy's IG page has been deplatformed here.
He had almost 800,000 followers on Instagram and the App took it down for repeatedly sharing false vaccine claims.
Now his Facebook page is still up.
He still has 300,000 followers there.
It's not clear why it's still up or whether it'll come down as well.
But this is a really big story for vaccine communications.
I think anecdotally we can, the three of us, agree that RFK's influence over the yoga wellness world has been enormous and we've mentioned him a lot on the podcast.
There's just lots of yoga people and alt-health people loving this defender of Camelot with the piercing blue eyes.
Now the report comes a day after CNN Business reported that Instagram continues to prominently feature anti-vaxxer accounts in search results and while also Facebook groups rail against vaccines remain easy to find.
I was so happy to see that CNN report because finally some of the larger news organizations are understanding what's at stake and specifically how they drill down onto the monetization of the anti-vax groups.
I've seen a lot of chatter on social media over the last day since this happened, especially this morning.
Jules Evans and I have been going back and forth, for example, about this and the ideas behind it.
And it is a complicated topic.
I think deplatforming always is, especially in these regards.
But one thing I want to point out is that RFK Jr.
is likely monetizing this in some capacity.
I don't see why else he would spend so much time and attention on it, but that being said, he has been willfully spreading misinformation, and you can say disinformation, about mercury levels, the dangers of ethyl mercury versus methyl mercury, and what's actually in vaccines for years.
So, when this From my perspective, when this deplatforming issue comes up and we're like, well, he's just taking a side or choosing to not take the mainstream narrative, I'm like, no, he's actually
Putting forward disinformation on a regular basis, and if we're going to look at that when we look in other industries or when it comes to racism or xenophobia and disinformation spreading, we have to do it in our medical discourse as well because it's not doing anybody any good if you're confusing people about the types and levels of mercury that are going into vaccines.
And most vaccines don't have any mercury to begin with, but that's one of his biggest lines that gets people.
Yeah, I would actually say it's the most clean-cut kind of version of how we think about this topic, right?
Because we're talking about very dangerous medical misinformation or disinformation, right?
Where we can look at the science, we can have an objective evaluation of what is being said, I sometimes think that the the point of view and I understand it I have some sympathies with it to a certain extent that says well you shouldn't silence everyone you should let people have their say and then the best ideas will win etc.
I was thinking about this that it's it's kind of like the argument in this case that we should just Go for herd immunity, you know?
So, just let the virulent misinformation and disinformation just do what it does and, you know, the strongest will survive.
And the problem is, when you're dealing with such well-crafted propaganda, it's very, very confusing to people who are not informed of the facts and are not scientifically literate.
Oh wow, so your argument's actually just sinking in.
You're saying that the sort of survival of the fittest with regard to, you know, the evidence that gains prominence or the discourse that gains prominence in the public sphere is just the wrong way to think of things.
There can't be social Darwinism with regard to the reality of, you know, medical facts.
Agreed.
Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying.
I feel like the people who think that this is a free speech argument, because I will say that it is not, the people who think it's a free speech argument want to say, just let everyone say whatever they want and the best ideas will win.
In cases like these, I think objective facts and evidence actually are the final arbiter.
I also think we have to look at the balance between what we know of ourselves psychologically and biologically, and what these mediums that we're communicating on are doing to us.
A few years ago, I interviewed Dan Carlin of Hardcore History, and it was a great interview, but there was one point that I keep remembering when I asked him.
Think 100 years from now when historians look back at this time, how are they going to decide what is true?
And he pointed to ancient times and he says, well, we've always had that problem.
And people look and they find the best evidence and then they make the cases from that.
And I just feel as though there's just too much information right now to sort through and maybe we'll have some sort of
AI and data analytics to use our spreadsheets to make that, you know, we can adjust in that way in some capacity, but I still feel like it's going to be a very hard process of being historian 100 years from now and understanding what is true, which speaks to your point, Julian, of just the willful misinformation, which is disinformation that's spreading.
Well, also to speak to a very common theme throughout all of our work on the podcast, the transgressive, the emotionally provocative, the person who positions themselves as the Cassandra who is going to somehow reveal the deepest secrets of the society.
It's incredibly persuasive and inflammatory and engaging in social media.
And as Imran Ahmed said back on episode 10, you know, nobody retweets the NHS.
And that's really stuck with me, is that public health communications is boring in comparison to what RFK is able to do with his platforms.
That's right.
So that's the other piece, which is that on these platforms, this kind of misinformation spreads really, really effectively.
And I think to extend the metaphor around how, you know, we don't want to go for herd immunity against misinformation, because that doesn't work, containing it Does work.
Even though, yeah, it's going to go underground, it's going to be edgy, it will be in unregulated spaces on these other new platforms that are emerging.
That's, I think, not exposing people to it on Facebook and Instagram and YouTube is a good thing.
It's a way of containing the infection.
Yeah, that's Ahmed's argument, actually, and then he has the receipts to show it, that when Ike is taken down from YouTube, his audience gets taken out by 70% or something like that, and it's very, very difficult for him to build it back on BitChute when he doesn't have access to the same tools that we do.
I also would argue that we have a former president who's experiencing that problem right now because he no longer can just yell at his screen and everyone has to talk about it, which has been a wonderful silence for this past month or so.
In many ways, we're still in a 60s hangover when it comes to psychedelics.
The tethering of LSD and magic mushrooms to free-loving hippies wasn't even true then.
The John Birch Society was in full force, and many more Americans took tranquilizers than acid.
Yet we seem committed to the idea that psychedelics and progressives go hand in hand.
As psychedelics pioneer Stanislav Grof said, there are non-specific amplifiers.
Julie and I have talked about that on previous episodes.
So, chant right-wing talking points during an ayahuasca ceremony and they're going to be as equally influential as any spirit-loving messages you could receive.
And that's the take of an excellent essay on Symposia by Brian Pace, who teaches psychedelic studies at The Ohio State University.
Sounds like a great job!
He notes that two of the rioters at the Capitol were psychedelics enthusiasts, and one was in possession of 40,000 doses of LSD at home.
He then points out the tangled web of funding pouring into psychedelics research right now.
Trump-supporting billionaire Peter Thiel has pumped $12 million in ATAI Life Sciences, which is a biotech company that also features a Trump-supporting founder.
Meanwhile, Rebecca Mercer, proud owner of six adjoining apartments in Trump Tower and the prior funder, and potentially still could be, I don't know, Steve Bannon, among others, she's pledged $1 million to MAPS, which is one of the leading organizations for psychedelic studies since 1984 when Rick Doblin founded it.
And Pace's piece reminded me of the Koch brothers whose philanthropy in the arts gave them something to point to whenever they were criticized for their billions gained in oils and chemicals and for funding the Tea Party.
As Pace writes, a common misunderstanding about the social impact of investment and philanthropy holds that all money is good money as long as it's going toward good work.
First, this assumption ignores the real tax and brand benefits gained by philanthropic funders, who can point to the good works they support whenever critics enumerate their dirty deeds.
Second, since funders spread cash to many docile pots, they can saturate the discourse with a curated set of ideas which serve those who paid for them.
There was one aspect of Pace's reporting that I got caught up on.
The link between the secret government plot in the 50s and 60s known as MKUltra, in which unsuspecting prisoners, prostitutes, and homeless were experimented on with numerous substances, including LSD, and institutions like Johns Hopkins and Stanford.
And I wondered if he was implying that funding from a half century ago was tainting modern research.
So I reached out to him on Twitter, and he graciously replied.
So I'm going to read the reply.
I don't think it's a problem so much as it is a conversation we aren't having.
It's not like, for example, Yale having a college named after a supporter of slavery and we just pressure the traditionalists into changing the name.
To wit, Matt Johnson of Johns Hopkins is openly voicing concerns that clinicians might turn into crypto-gurus, imposing their cosmologies on patients and explicitly invoking the likes of Charles Manson to point to how bad things can get, so it's worth a serious inventory of how vulnerable patients might be to structural, institutional
We do that most comprehensively by placing psychedelics and institutions in their proper historical context, which is why Qbark and Gitmo come up in the piece, and why we regularly bring up Peter Thiel's surveillance capitalist firm Palantir at Symposia.
I think a big lesson from the past is that we shouldn't set people up to become gatekeepers of the ineffable.
Any more than we allow anyone to become the master of another person's universe.
That's a great Twitter exchange.
My gosh, your DMs are awesome.
He was very gracious and reached out.
It was interesting because someone tagged me on his piece and you had shared it Matthew and then he started following me and then I was like, wait, that's...
Okay, great.
So we started a conversation.
But anyway, this is a difficult situation given that psychedelics research is in need of funding, but mental health treatments are certainly one domain that should remain free of political influence.
So I want to open up this question and hear your guys' thoughts on this topic.
I am so confused, to be honest.
Me too.
And, I mean, my first generalized thought is that, obviously, late capitalism is just a cooptation machine, and its success seems to depend on just swallowing up anything that would challenge it as some kind of new commodity.
So, I just think, I always think of Kurt Cobain screaming his way out of Seattle in the early 90s with, here we are now, entertain us, and how, like, How soon after that do dirty sweaters and unwashed hair become, like, you know, fashion symbols?
And I imagine it was really hard for him to bear, but, you know, I don't know.
On one hand, Thiel and Mercer investing in this stuff It's what investors do.
you know, cashing in on something that is new.
It's what investors do.
And it seems that $12 million and $1 million are a chump change.
But what, you know, are we seeing a rise in interest amongst the right-wing investor class and this stuff?
Because are they going, are they trying to get woke themselves?
Are they trying to open their third eyes?
Are they going on medicine journeys?
Because that's part of the story of everybody who's gathering in Austin, right?
Totally.
That's the Burning Man story and I understand too that I've never been but I've heard from friends who have gone that Burning Man has just been sort of taken over by tech bros who want to get spiritual and they bring their air-conditioned yurts to the playa and stuff.
I don't know.
Is it that the investor class wants to wake up out of the dream and do what?
What do they want to do?
Speaking of Burning Man, just from my own experiences from 2008 to 2012, the amount of alcohol that was in the latter one and the amount...
In 2008, you could walk into any tent you wanted, any camp.
There was no, you just walked anywhere and people were there with food or drugs or music or whatever.
In 2012, it was like a club and it was a lot different.
So that, you know, Burning Man, you know, there was many great things about it, but it's a completely changed institution at this point.
So I can't speak directly to that because I'm kind of tapped out of that culture at this point.
No, I don't know how many right-wingers are investing in this, but my biggest concern about this from a mental health treatment standpoint is that psychedelics are not something you take regularly.
So, how are they going to monetize this in a way that you can monetize, say, antidepressants?
That you have to take every day.
It's impossible.
So one pivot they're doing, and you can see this is a big thing out of Silicon Valley, is promoting microdosing for productivity enhancement because that's one way that you can keep people taking them regularly.
But when you're talking about MindMed, who has now created an analog of EvoGain that is non-psychedelic and could treat addiction, you're not talking about years of taking these drugs.
So, how are they putting this much money in and how are they going to monetize it?
They're going to want a return and then some, and so that's going to take psychedelics into a very frustrating and confusing place that can be very damaging.
You know, I'm such a neophyte to all of this.
I hadn't even clued into that, that if we're talking about regulating cannabis, we're talking about, you know, pretty regular usage and sort of, you know, ongoing dosing.
But yeah, I can totally see your point that turning psychedelic medicines into sort of ongoing treatment chemistries is just weird.
I continue to do psychedelics and once or twice a year I have my experiences and that's enough.
It does what I want and I enjoy it but I'm somebody who has 27 coming up years experience with these things and I would not ever do them more than that so I don't really understand how they're going to monetize this.
And Peter, yes, because Peter Thiel can't make money from you, you know, doing two trips a year.
No.
Yeah, 20 bucks a year.
Right.
A little more than that, but yeah.
Well, you're doing the good stuff.
I mean, it's so weird, right?
Because we have this touchy-feely kind of sense, whether it's like healing trauma or it's like going deep into some kind of experience of the sacred that usually has countercultural overtones.
It's hard to understand.
It's actually hard not to be really suspicious in a mildly paranoid way about these kinds of Billionaire conservatives getting all up on that market.
It's very strange.
But you know, it's related philosophically to something that I worry about when friends and colleagues of mine, especially in the yoga space, rely on this kind of essentialist revelatory argument for how particular spiritual traditions or experiences, so in this case it would be psychedelic experiences, but it could also be yoga, meditation, what have you, Inevitably implies or will in some transformational way lead to progressive political values.
Right.
That always seems misguided to me.
Well, totally wrong.
It doesn't work.
It's not predictive at all.
As we've talked about with the Nazis, right?
Right, right.
Yeah.
And I'm curious, Derek, you know, in terms of your long association with psychedelics over the last few decades in terms of the history, And this is probably true of yoga as well.
I wonder if it becomes inevitable that over time, these practices, as they move to being more mainstreamed, sort of reveal to us that like, actually all the counterculture values that you thought were, you know, completely married to the experiences that the practices would deliver are perhaps non-specific after all.
And anyone with any ideology can justify it through the experience.
I think that's already proven out.
I think you're not paying attention if you haven't noticed that.
But then again, these substances are so new to so many people, so there is going to be a learning curve in that way.
And again, I think a big part of it was the branding of the 60s, the way that Jefferson Airplane and the covers of Woodstock and all of that were happening.
It implied some sort of unifying force, which was very much a part of it for a certain part of the culture.
And that's important.
But I also want to point out that I don't romanticize the past, which is also happening, this idea that you can only do it in a specific way.
I am very much a fan of the research because if we can get people off of some of these antidepressants, if we can find ways to treat addiction through these substances, this is the work that was going on throughout the 50s.
There was over a thousand studies on LSD in the 1950s.
And it was showing very good effect for a number of psychological conditions, so that is good.
I want to be clear on that.
There's just going to be the creation of new rituals because there's always the creation of new rituals.
I just hope that we can have some sort of unifying effect behind them and that we don't get lost so much in what Matthew said, late-stage capitalism.
I hope that doesn't become the only driving force.
It's going to be a driving force, period.
There's no way you're putting this kind of money in.
And it doesn't influence it in some way, but I hope that it also creates room for enough rituals that people can find value and we can also get some of the people off some of the pharmaceuticals that they've been on for too long.
There's also this collapsing together of the categories of spiritual or contemplative experience and the category of optimization that I find just so tragic, where it's like if
There is an investor class or a tech pro class that is playing around with psychedelics or making it a feature of their culture and microdosing is becoming kind of like a dietary thing where People are able to sort of improve their work time performance.
I'm like, where is the pathway?
It's not as though I'm a transcendentalist at all, but where is the space for the ritual experience that is apart from your working life or apart from the development of a product?
That's apart from your startup or something like that, because, I mean, it's just, all of that shit falls away.
And my understanding, like, you guys are the guys who do this stuff, so I don't really know, but my understanding is that the whole point is to see a different type and experience a different type of reality.
And to have access to it.
That's part of it, but what they've done more than anything from me is just bring up my own shit.
It's just, I'm lying there and yeah, there are fractals on the ceiling and yeah, my body feels like it's floating, but I'm going through my emotions and my problems in my life and I'm thinking about them.
That is predominantly what's happening during the psychedelic ritual.
Yeah, but that exists in a kind of space that I think Matthew was saying we would like to imagine is somehow set apart from concerns with career ambitions and being a good company man.
Agreed!
Well, because I think I've even heard people in contemporary plant medicine culture talk about that dredging of the unconscious as being essential for forward movement.
That itself becomes part of the workshop circuit, that you're going to delve into your deep unconscious so that you can optimize the rest of your life.
Manifest your reality.
Right, instead of just doing it for its own sake, which would be the project of being human.
Also, think of it this way.
The way that cryptocurrency was imagined and the way that it's playing out are very different.
Break up the other system.
Right now, it's just become a part of it with all the investor speculation around cryptocurrency.
And I would argue the same thing has happened in psychedelics, where we're trying to imagine what it's for, but we're stuck in a psychiatric model that It intentionally sometimes creates disorders in order to find applications for the drugs.
You only need to read the five editions of the DSM to understand how this has happened over the course of a half a century.
The evolution.
So, you're constantly, oh, this must be a new disorder we've discovered.
And guess what?
Oh, this treats it.
Here we go, we can use this.
And that model is being applied in the workshops that you're talking about, Matthew.
You're exactly right, because You know what?
Some people have experienced trauma, but some people, they're just okay.
And they might have bad days and they have good days, but they're getting by and they feel good about their life.
But then you go to this workshop and you're hearing, we're going to get you past your blockages.
And then you say, oh, I must have blockages.
And it's setting up that same sort of model that we've seen in psychiatry for too long.
Yeah, and what we're talking about has applications in terms of how mindfulness has been marketed as well, right?
Let's all do mindfulness so that we can be more productive at work.
Totally.
The thing that comes up for me, though, that's inescapable, especially when you bring up the spectra of MKUltra, is what ulterior motives might some of these investors have in terms of how they use these substances?
Is it all for some sort of therapeutic aim, or is there some Our weekly segment on the crucial COVID vaccine and the misinformation conspiritualists love to spread about it.
The dominant news on the vaccine front focuses on the very scary new COVID variants that have emerged in the UK and South Africa and are now spreading.
So far, the South African variant is the really worrying one, given that the AstraZeneca vaccine appears to be largely ineffective against it.
The data so far, though, is from two very small studies, so more clarity will emerge as the science continues.
In a controversial move, South Africa's Minister of Health announced a halt to the rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine for this reason.
Critics say this could be a reckless choice, given that the low-performing effectiveness data we have so far is only in relation to mild and moderate infection.
The vaccine may still provide protection from severe illness.
We'll find that out.
Now, for our anti-vaccine conspiracists, or even those who are hesitant and wanting to just ask nuanced questions, here's something to consider.
Notice how these types of real-time developments are openly reported in the mainstream media.
Millions of doses might end up getting dumped as scientists and public health officials struggle to keep up with the twists and turns of this battle.
They are also openly reporting and not covering up the studies that show vaccine failure.
The truth is, we don't have cognitive closure or the oft-caricatured, arrogant scientific certainty on any of this.
There's no monolithic message that whitewashes complexities or problems around the topic.
What we do know is that without an effective vaccine, things only get much, much worse.
And with one or more, we have some chance of beating this pandemic.
In potential good news, according to Vaccine Education Center Director Paul Offit, the new Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which is 85% effective against the original virus, appears to be around 57% effective against the South African variant.
Despite this new one-dose, refrigerator-stable vaccine being less effective against the South African strain, so far it seems to nonetheless give good protection against severe disease, with only mild and moderate symptoms in the group who still got sick.
The same is true of the Novavax, Moderna, and Pfizer vaccines.
They protect against severe illness, even in cases where infection still occurs.
Offit says that variants are inevitable, but the real question is going to be whether or not the variants are able to fully overcome the acquired immunity that vaccines or infection provide.
A red line would be crossed if we start to see significant numbers of those who have received a vaccine or who have recovered from previous infection ending up needing to be hospitalized with a new infection.
So far, that red line has not been crossed, so Paul Offit remains optimistic.
Meanwhile, AstraZeneca, and we would imagine everyone else in the marketplace, is working on modifying their vaccine to include protection against the South African variant.
One of the biggest criticisms I've received over my years of science writing is that I'm supporting a flawed model, otherwise known as Western medicine.
And indeed, it is.
Our current science is not perfect.
But what usually follows that criticism is that there are ancient, natural healing remedies that we should be relying on.
And that's equally problematic.
Many people romanticize the past, this notion that the secrets to optimal health and longevity rely on so-called natural medicines.
It was this psychological quirk that Chairman Mao exploited when he boosted, you can even say created, the concept of traditional Chinese medicine in the 1950s.
For this segment, I'm going to focus on one particularly insidious TCM cure that's collapsing an entire ecosystem in Baja, California.
But let me provide a little context first.
The romanticized version of TCM is that it's an ancient system that has made a giant impact in the West, particularly in naturopathy and acupuncture, along with practices like cupping, gua sha, and herbal treatments.
But just as the asanas you're doing in your local studio, or more likely on Zoom right now, whose postures are not thousands of years old, but really just over a hundred, TCM was first introduced as a concept in the English language, not Mandarin, and the larger framework was a nationalist plot by Chairman Mao in the 1950s.
I want to thank Alan Levinowitz for this part of the reporting, whose article is linked to in the show notes.
So, yes, medicine is ancient in China, just like it is around the world.
There was not a comprehensive system, however.
The Compendium of Materia Medica was written in the 16th century.
The author is said to have read 800 textbooks in compiling his massive work, so he's really the first to systematize a wide variety of practices, just as the Hippocratic Corpus systematized Greek medicine roughly 2300 years ago.
Mao's desire to unify Chinese medicine with Western medicine pushed TCM to the forefront.
That doesn't mean he was a fan.
In fact, he once said, even though I believe we should promote Chinese medicine, personally, I do not believe in it.
I don't take Chinese medicine.
So he didn't see it as a method of healing, but a political opportunity.
In 1952, the president of the Chinese Medical Association followed this up when saying, this one medicine will possess a basis in modern natural sciences, will have absorbed the ancient and the new, the Chinese and the foreign, all medical achievements and will be China's the Chinese and the foreign, all medical achievements and will be China's And so traditional Chinese medicine,
I understand that America is going through an identity crisis right now, and that in fact much of that self-reflection is healthy in terms of grappling with racism, misogyny, and xenophobia.
But we have to criticize dangerous systems.
And given issues in online security, human cloning, and AI in China right now, let's remember this country's government has been a propaganda machine for many decades.
Now does this mean that no TCM treatments work?
Of course not.
But it's filled with pseudoscience and, as I'll get to shortly, these unproven and at times dangerous concoctions are affecting numerous ecosystems across the planet.
Why would people in America fall for a medical ideology that believes that bear testicles and tiger penises are potent aphrodisiacs and crocodile meat improves memory, or that those illegally traded cobras being served improves your eyesight?
Levinowitz explains, The reason so many people take Chinese medicine seriously, at least in part, is that it was reinvented by one of the most powerful propaganda machines of all time and then consciously marketed to a West disillusioned by its own spiritual traditions.
And he's right.
We're suffering from severe distrust of our institutions right now.
In many cases, deservedly so.
But when you turn to another untrustworthy institution for an answer, you're ultimately going to be disappointed.
For example, in the fall, I was on Parler to track some of the figures we cover on this podcast.
Now that the app is hosted on Russian servers, I have no intention of providing them with my information.
Russia isn't exactly a haven for free speech, and you have to wonder why this particular hosting company was so willing to take on such a toxic media if it didn't have a stake in what's being shared, or of sharing messages they want Americans to hear.
Nations don't just collapse unless there's both internal and external pressure.
Ecosystems also just don't collapse, and I don't think humans realize our role in the many environments we're destroying right now.
A recent review in the journal Science found that humans are devastating ocean ecosystems at an alarming rate.
And the culprit?
Anthropogenic noise.
Are ocean trawlers, the practice of dynamite fishing recreational speedboats, and so much more decimating entire populations of sharks, whales, fish, plankton, coral reefs, all because we're just too damn noisy?
Speaking of noise, Chairman Mao was an expert.
In the push for Chinese expansion, he never worried about environmental impact.
Think about this the next time you purchase a natural remedy marketing under this propaganda regime.
The global population of tigers has been reduced by 95% due to illegal trading, much of it going into, you guessed it, traditional Chinese medicine.
Environmental impact is what inspired this segment.
It's very hard to listen to wellness influencers discussing their organic diets and holistic lifestyle when actual consideration of the environment means abandoning traditional Chinese medicine.
Not the parts that don't work, but all of it.
I came to this realization when watching the National Geographic documentary, Sea of Shadows, in 2019.
The director, Richard Lacani, decided to use his filmmaking skills for environmental justice after following Jane Goodall around the world, which resulted in the film, Jane's Journey.
She inspired Richard to look at the environment and its interconnected systems in a different light.
He has since dedicated his career to making movies with a purpose.
Richard's next film brought him to Africa, where he went undercover to track the illegal poaching of elephants.
Middle-class Chinese prize ivory as a status symbol, and bandits were more than happy to supply it.
Thanks to his film, The Ivory Game, the poachers were sentenced to 12 years in prison, and the Chinese government began enforcing laws against the trade of ivory.
That film was produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, who then called Richard to document the Totoaba trade in the Sea of Cortez.
This region, which connects Baja California with mainland Mexico, is being overrun by the Mexican cartels and Chinese mafia, who are working together to kill Totoaba for their bladders, which in TCM is believed to cure arthritis, a completely unproven claim.
The Sea of Cortez is the only place in the world the Totoaba live, and their population is being decimated by Mexican fishermen working for the cartels and the mafia.
Even worse, vaquitas, the world's smallest whales, are also being destroyed.
At the time of filming, there were maybe 40 left in the wild.
I had the chance to talk to Richard shortly after the film came out, and I asked him if the entire ecosystem will become infertile if this trade continues.
Well, absolutely.
If the vaquita goes extinct, which we're trying everything, you know, in our power with the impact of film and so forth for that not to happen, but if it happens, It will mean that the cartel is going to completely take over the area because the attention, the focus, the spotlight that it has right now because of the Vaquita, because it is such a symbolic animal and it's been, you know, highly exposed now what's going on and the Mexicans are aware of this.
If the Vaquita goes extinct, what will happen is the NGOs will be removed from the area.
They will just move on to a new war somewhere, some conflict, maybe in Peru or South Africa or who knows.
They are going to pull out, you know, the Mexican Navy, the warships, because they will be like, well, it's too late now.
They, you know, it went extinct.
And what will happen is the cartel is going to 100% take over the Sea of Cortez.
All the fishermen are going to be pressured to go out for the Totoaba.
And you have seen how they do it.
They drop thousands of gill nets.
Walls of death, kill everything just to get to that one last and final Totoaba, you know, and they will kill everything in its path.
All the whales, the sharks, the dolphins, the turtles, everything will disappear just because they're going for that Totoaba.
And until that last Totoaba is dead and they sold it to the Chinese, that war will continue and it will completely destroy Again, remember, this is all thanks to lucrative smuggling due to traditional Chinese medicine.
I then asked Richard if he conducted any research on this area of medicine in China.
We did a lot of research and we even filmed in China for a month.
The reason we didn't include that in the film was because We realized that there was no demand for us in like there we didn't have an ask of the Chinese government because it was already illegal to trade totoaba and the we did find out everyone we talked to every scientist we talked to said to us it's not proven western science right there's they couldn't find any proof that it has any medicinal power at all
But three, we realized that it would need a whole generation for a campaign to change the minds of the Chinese.
And the Vaquita maybe has 12 months left.
It will never be solved in China.
There is nothing we can do in China that will stop this trade in time, because this is driven by the Chinese mafia and the cartels.
They're pushing it out.
They are going to always push out the message that, yes, it works.
Chinese traditional medicine is the only medicine that works, and of course this is highly prized, valuable medicine.
And it will take like a decade or two decades to actually maybe have an impact and change the minds of the Chinese people.
Now, I can't recommend this film enough, but seeing the violence around this trade, the real human cost, is an eye-opener.
In one harrowing scene, Richard and his team were being fired up by the Mexican cartel for filming their activities, which he described to me in detail.
We were running, we were hiding behind cars and everything.
So I knew what was happening, but it was, you know, there was fear, but there was also control in the way of like, okay, now stay focused.
Watch those rocks coming.
It got even more and more like what scared me the most was that when shots started to appear, like we were hearing gunfire, I was like, oh, shit.
I don't know who's shooting at who because we weren't able to see.
Is it the cartel now opening fire on us?
Is it the Navy shooting at them or in the air?
And the one moment that I thought, okay, now we are really in the shit is when I heard bullets ricocheting off walls around us.
Because that meant that they are firing, not in the air, but actually at us.
Just got worse for us after that.
I mean, there's stuff that is, you know, not in the film when we got threatened by the cartel right after because they then, they had exposed our identities.
I mean, we were, they had seen us, photographed us, then they followed us home.
And then we got direct threats from Oscar Parra singling us out.
And actually, he requested a meeting with me, um, that the following night.
And I had to come alone and it was, I was like, why?
And he's like, well, he wants to talk to you and you can talk to him as well.
And I was just like, no, I don't, I don't think so.
And you know, they sent guys to our house and it was very, very threatening.
And that's when we knew we had to get out of there.
I mean, that was like three weeks after he had shot that soldier in the street.
So we knew he was a brutal murderer.
Fishermen who resisted the demands of the mob either went broke or, as happened while making this film, were killed.
Also people half a world away could pay exorbitant prices for a medicine that isn't actually a medicine.
Elephants, bears, tigers, oh my, and those aren't the only animals suffering population collapse for pseudoscience.
Every ecosystem is a delicate balance of forces.
When you destroy one animal, others suffer or overpopulate and thrive until, as humans are showing right now, they destroy everything around them.
While I'm all for alleviating human suffering, we don't seem particularly adept at recognizing our environmental impact.
The cognitive dissonance between what we think we are and what we really are?
It can be, and often is, murderous.
And unfortunately, pseudoscience is the primary language of conspiritualists, a sort of Esperanto for wellness influencers and their downlines.
Traditional Chinese medicine is thriving during this pandemic.
And wouldn't you know it, China's state-controlled media, run by President Xi, is continuing what Mao started 70 years ago.
The dissemination of misinformation and pseudoscience for profit and power.
And it seems that the conspiritualists who spend so much time railing against the Seeker Cabal of Big Pharma and their insidious vaccines don't even realize they're being played.
The exact criticism they level against the sheeple who are just trying to survive a confusing time by following public health guidelines.
But let's be honest.
It was never about the environment.
And it's definitely never been about science.
If it was, then TCM advocates would recognize that if acupuncture has healing properties, it's thanks to the adenosine rushing to the area of insults in the body, not vital energies that are being balanced to supposedly alleviate COVID.
And that's okay.
That's what science does.
It looks for evidence.
If down the road we discover that TCM really does treat a dangerous virus, let's use it.
But right now, there's no sign of such a thing.
Yet still, people in Canada are paying $50 a box for unproven treatments.
That's nothing compared to what the vaquitas and totoabas and tigers and elephants and bears and ants, yeah, they're in there too, what they have endured in our quest for optimal health.
We want eternal youth and perpetual virility, and the price is their lives.
I get it.
You put on your oxygen mask first.
But when you suck all the oxygen out of the world, pretty soon you're going to find your own supply dwindling as well.
Such an eye-opening segment, Derek.
Thank you.
The thing that stuck with me is this organized crime angle, because it was so chilling.
And you were talking about how it intersects with the environmental and extinction concerns that I think were the main focus.
Wow.
Did you know about that intersection when you got into this topic?
I knew about it from Africa.
The elephant trade, which Richard also has worked on, is specific to ivory, so it's not traditional Chinese medicine.
That's actually a status symbol, because as there is a bigger middle class in China, they want to show that they're now earning more money, and ivory is one way that you do that.
But I did know about it from what I mentioned about Tiger penises, for example.
Yeah.
So, there is poaching of all of these animals, a lot for virility and sexual dysfunction or sexual enhancement.
But the Baja California and the Totoaba story, I was pitched that for Big Think and that's how I got into him.
The audio is from my old podcast, and I had no idea about any of that.
Wow, and was he saying, if I heard him correctly, that lobbying the Chinese government on this topic really makes no difference until the demand from the West is less of an incentive for these people who are making so much money?
Well, not exactly because remember I said about the Chinese government actually came out against Ivory because of his film and because of the pressure of that film.
Gotcha.
I think what he was saying more had to do with consumer demand is still going to be high.
It actually just fits back to what we were talking about earlier about deplatforming.
If you're not cutting it off at the source, if those... I think it's something like they get something like $80,000 a bladder from the Totoaba, whereas the fishermen are making dollars, so the chain that that goes through is crazy.
Until that is cut off, as long as the supply is coming in, there's going to be demand in China, so you have to cut off the supply.
So in this particular instance, that was why he was like, you know what, it just didn't make sense to focus on traditional Chinese medicine in that regard, because the demand is going to be there as long as the bladders are being sent in.
I've got kind of like a stepping back a little bit question that's a little bit more general, which is what do we know about evidence-based testing of TCM treatments?
Are they in the realm of homeopathy?
Are they better?
What's going on in that world?
Specific.
I'll speak the one I most know about is acupuncture.
As I mentioned with adenosine, that seems to be the number one mechanism for why acupuncture could work.
Basically, you're puncturing your body and you have a chemical that's going to try to calm the inflammation.
So, you're just making your body's immune system do what it does.
There has also been shown pretty strong evidence for something called electrical acupuncture, which could work, but then you're actually electrifying the needles.
Right.
So, you're adding an element.
You're no longer talking about meridian.
I mean, you could think you're talking about meridians, but you're actually adding another layer of potential insult or healing, however you want to think of it, to the body.
There have been positive acupuncture results before.
Most of them that I've read are in acupuncture journals.
And so, it's very difficult to wade through this.
And I also personally believe, having had probably about 30 acupuncture sessions in my life, The ritual of going into an office, listening to music, the lights are low, lying there and just breathing consciously for half an hour, it has parasympathetic nervous system effects.
And I don't see why people get so offended when you point out that that could be one of the reasons that it actually has efficacy, not the meridians.
Did you find too that there were, because I've had a couple of very interesting acupuncture and acupressure, shiatsu type treatments in my life.
And did you find too that there was some sort of, I don't know, meaning to the placement of the needle with regard to, I don't know, a bodily experience or a memory or something like that?
Only once when I got a needle stuck into my neck and it had a muscular effect where my muscle shook for five minutes and then released.
And that was very intense.
But that is the only needle I ever remember really feeling ever.
I guess what I'm asking is, did you associate that with a neck injury or with somebody grabbing you by the neck when you were six or something like that?
No.
Do you know what I mean?
No.
Yes, I know.
Mind-body somatic healing moment, yeah.
Because I'll tell you, I had, okay, so the most, the weirdest acupuncture experience I had, it was with electrified needles, but it was within the context of the second cult that I was living in, in Wisconsin.
There was an older guy there who had actually been at Rajneeshpuram, he was you know, very kindly.
I don't know why he was still a devotee.
I don't know why he was still wrapped up in, uh, in, in, in cultic groups, but he was, and that's, I guess that's just what he did with his life.
Uh, and he had some kind of training in acupuncture.
And I remember that I had gone through some terrible emotional experience where I had wept and wept and wept for a whole day And then the day after I was supposed to sing in this band that I was in and I had no voice.
And so I went to the guy and I said, what's, you know, can you help me?
And he laid me down on his table and it was kind of like a special thing to be in his room and, you know, he was in his 70s, you know, and he just seemed to be this very wise and caring and loving man.
And he put a needle right into, you know, the nape of my neck, which was a little bit shocking.
And within, I don't know, two or three minutes or something like that, my voice had returned from Like a frog squeak to completely, you know, as it was.
And it was very impressive.
And so that stuck with me for a long time.
But I guess what you're saying is that, you know, the notion that he found a magic spot that was determined through, you know, medieval intuition is, you know, that's a little bit sus.
When you say nape of your neck, you're talking about your throat, actually, aren't you?
Yes, I am.
You mean sort of like in the tender part of the throat, right above the breastbone.
Yes, exactly.
Right above the notch of the collarbones.
I wanted to say this, which is that, I mean, we're going to talk about this more in a little bit, but the ritual, the nervous system downregulation, the sense of being cared for, I think all these things are really significant, really valuable, really beautiful.
People who practice Chinese medicine a lot of people are providing a wonderful service for people in terms of that ritual experience and I believe that that can be healing.
In terms of the scientific data on the efficacy of acupuncture there are two things that only two things that it shows real positive data for and that is pain, joint pain or other kinds of pain syndromes, and vomiting after, I forget if it's after surgery, after childbirth or something, something to do with vomiting.
And the interesting thing about that data is that in both cases, the effects of acupuncture were the same regardless which points you used.
So it didn't matter what the points were.
There's something perhaps to what Derek is saying that the puncturing of the skin and the ritualized experience creates some sort of effect that then helps resolve the symptoms.
And here's the really interesting part.
It was the same even if you used sham acupuncture needles that didn't even penetrate the skin.
What would a sham needle be?
It doesn't penetrate the skin.
So it's a placebo needle or something like that?
You think it's penetrating?
Yes, like a stage dagger.
As you're pushing it in, the needle actually retracts.
Right?
So this is really tough to deal with.
And this is the place where I think we potentially get into trouble because we're going to have a lot of people who listen are like, no, I love acupuncture or I am an acupuncturist.
And it's, it's, it's just so, when you look at the scientific data, because what you're saying, because, because what you're saying, Julie, yeah, what you're saying, Julie, I am saying that.
I am saying that.
And so you have this elaborate body of information that you study, and this whole model of the human body, and how it works, and how you diagnose, and what the meridians and the pulse is, and where you should put the needles and specific points, and it appears, based on all the best science we have so far, that all of that is inconsequential.
I wonder if the training in all of the points in the meridians is actually the nurturing of the care practice though, right?
If you pay that much attention to the way in which meridians and points on a theoretical body would then map onto your individual client and then you spend a long time trying to figure out, okay, where is that exact place on this person's body?
That is a very intimate moment, right?
Where the person is trying to find something specific for you.
Well, I did want to add that just as Derek suggested, we found an article in Nature that shows the CCP actually pushing TCM treatments internationally as COVID treatments.
So we'll post that, it's from Nature, and just quoting from the article it says that In China, senior government officials and the state media are pushing a range of traditional Chinese medicine as being effective at alleviating COVID-19 symptoms and reducing deaths from the disease.
However, there are no rigorous trial data to demonstrate that the remedies work.
Although the efficacy of some TCM remedies for COVID-19 is being tested, some researchers say the trials have not been rigorously designed and are unlikely to produce reliable results.
Government officials and TCM practitioners deem the remedies safe because some have been used for thousands of years, but significant side effects have been reported.
We are dealing with a serious infection which requires effective treatments.
For TCM there is no good evidence and therefore its use is not just unjustified but dangerous, says Edzard Ernst, a UK-based retired researcher into complementary medicines.
One question came up when you were going over that Matthew that I think about because the segment on Richard the Kaniya had posted on YouTube because some stuff we pre-record here for sake of time and some people pushed back as expectedly.
One thing I've noticed is that a lot of so-called Western doctors that I've interfaced with or interviewed or talked to, they tend to be more honest about, yes, this could work, it might not, and we just don't know and we're doing our best with it.
But over and over again, I'm running into people in these holistic spaces who, if you criticize what they believe in, you're just a shill, or you're wrong, or you don't know what you're talking about.
And the level of aggression that comes when you do something, if you like acupuncture, great!
And it helps you, great!
As Julian said, there's nothing wrong with that.
But I'm wondering why Some people, I don't want to say all because it's not, but a good amount of people just, when we present an article like sham needles are as effective as regular needles or electrical needles are far more effective than regular needles, why can't you just own up to the evidence?
Well, I think this is the difficult place that our whole podcast, in a way, focuses on how these things intersect, which is that if you hold certain beliefs based on identifying with them, or based on powerful experiences that you've had, or anecdotes that you've heard from other people, and the evidence then doesn't support those beliefs,
I think, especially when we're talking about medicine, it's very easy to lean in the direction of the conspiracy theory, that the truth is being suppressed, the evidence is being manipulated, it's all about Big Pharma trying to shut down this beautiful, meaningful thing that I'm invested in, and so then you, if you start bringing evidence up into that particular conversation, become an avatar for that Big Pharma conspiracy.
I think, Derek, to your point about, like, why is the pushback so outraged, I, the first thing that I think about is that, I mean, I personally, I,
There's something in me that understands it and I chalk that up to perhaps being still closer to my religious upbringing and my heritage and knowing that that wasn't really a part of your life and you identify as an atheist.
I think what you're doing when you say, you know, the sham needle is just as good as the real needle and there aren't really points is you are assaulting something that has many, many different vectors of meaning for a person, including spiritual and religious meanings.
And so it's not really about, you know, it's like you're using science to debunk somebody's relationship with spirituality.
And I think that's a really hard place to be.
And yet here we are, because, you know, we're in an industry and part of a demographic that has unfortunately found itself at the crossroads of, you know, public health and alternative health.
And that's exactly where these questions play out.
Yeah, and so it seems like the crisis we're going through now in some ways might represent an opportunity to have these conversations.
better, you know, to start making these distinctions and, and, uh, yeah, yeah.
But it's, it's, it is to your point.
It's, it's very, very difficult for those, I think for those emotional meanings and for those deeper layers of, of identity.
I've had two situations this week where I've asked people questions and they haven't answered them, but then went on to attack other points.
Like, That happened on Twitter and on Facebook around different segments of this podcast.
It's just a mindset that does confuse me.
I am very grateful that I had a modern surgery and chemotherapy to treat my cancer, but if you said to me that Chemotherapy doesn't always work.
I'd be like, yeah, absolutely.
No, it's a guessing game, and we know that.
They're honest about that avenue, and I really hope there are better applications moving forward.
Or, yes, I'm an atheist, but I think that Buddhism explains the worldview of any faith better than any other one, so my practice That's my worldview, is Buddhist, and if you're saying Buddhism is bullshit, I'm not going to get effeminate and say, why do you think that?
Let's talk about it.
And it just, it really frustrates me that people can't be a little more mature in their conversations and not take it so personally, because these are all areas that are right for conversation and exploration, but we just seem to like curl up in a ball and just defend our territory so intently.
It's really frustrating.
We're also defending therapeutic relationships that can often feel like they're religiously intimate.
Sometimes we're defending entire sectors of our heritage.
There's a lot to defend.
Like, I get it.
I get it.
I think too, Matthew, that what you're bringing up is really important, especially in conversation with Derek and I, because neither of us have literalized religious beliefs, and I didn't grow up really with any kind of religion.
I grew up with very sort of, you know, skeptical, intellectual, psychologically minded parents.
I went to a church school, but I kind of thought it was nonsense.
And so I've never really had that deep investment in something that would elicit that kind of response.
And so I sometimes struggle to understand why people would.
I think I was predisposed to be skeptical towards my Catholic education, but that wasn't really an option to take that path, and so what I did was that I tried to be super intelligent in my devotion.
Yeah.
That was my, I don't know, whether it was a default or just, I don't know, chance or something like that.
Does Catholicism afford that?
Like Judaism, I know, does.
By name, I'm Catholic, but I never really got into it.
Does it afford what?
Is there an intellectual tradition?
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely.
In fact, yeah, like I was blown away by...
Well, yeah, and my first big sort of contemporary Catholic crush was Teilhard de Chardin who was an evolutionary biologist who also said, you know, basically that the transubstantiation of the world can be understood in scientific terms and, you know, there was no daylight between his faith and his devotional poetry and his scientific inquiry.
It's funny, Matthew, because you kind of name-checked Ken Wilber on social media this week, and Taylor Desjardins is one of his big heroes as well.
Yeah, well, you know, I deserve Desjardins more than Ken Wilber does.
I agree with you.
I don't know why Wilber's so Catholic, but like, no way, man.
He doesn't go into one of your fucking quadrants.
Forget it.
Someone tweeted at me, like my thoughts on Ken Wilbert.
I'm like, that's the other two guys.
I don't have any thoughts on him.
That's good.
It's good.
You don't have any thoughts.
So in terms of everything we're discussing, I just want to say I feel like medicine is multivalent.
It's only very recently that medicine has been defined by scientific method.
It's rooted in much older and deeper ways of interacting with the mysteries of life and death, illness and healing, ritual and result.
Medicine has also always been profoundly relational and experiential with the healer holding this esteemed and magical position in the collective psyche.
The healer often seen as being possessed of secret knowledge, intuitive gifts, altruistic compassion, spiritual insight, and these things all constellate in the archetype of the healer whether we like it or not.
So I think as part of that we have this long history of seeing sickness and good health as being Indicators of virtue or sin as representing divine reward or punishment and in more modern terms we've seen it perhaps as psyche expressing itself through soma.
You know I'll never forget giving a workshop and at one point this woman who was a psychoanalyst put up her hand and we were talking about mind-body connection kind of stuff and she said well you know actually I've heard that all illness is an expression.
of the psyche.
And so this is, it's a very appealing kind of way of navigating some of these tensions.
And I think often, and I know this has been true for myself, we can see the healer as interpreting in seemingly wise ways that relationship, that metaphorical connection between mind and body or between spirit and flesh in ways that help us to resolve that metaphorical connection between mind and body or between spirit and flesh in ways that help us to resolve And then related to that, the healer has traditionally been thought of as being well-versed in the apothecary of nature, right?
Conversant with perhaps the animistic spirits of the plant world, a kind of elemental magic that can treat and cure.
So, you know, as you guys know, I love to point out that once again, we're in the realm of the mind-body problem.
We're in the realm of consciousness, which is why this is such a big topic in the in the alternative health sphere as well, belief in mind over matter, right?
So we stand at the edge of all of these mysteries, I think, in a primal way when we're sick, when we're afraid of being sick, when we seek optimal health, which is why conspiritualists can manipulate these things so effectively.
And we long to be met by the healer or by the medical system we're interacting with in ways that evoke that archetype.
Of course, some of us long for that more than others.
I just want to say that too often what I see is con-artistry and the wellness subculture is normalized, and at its worst it really exploits this vulnerable longing.
And that of course brings us to science, which we've been talking about already.
I would argue that scientific method is just what human curiosity about the world, about how the world works, it's what it evolves into.
But even science still remains inherently mysterious to most of us, right?
And medical science is miraculous and magical-seeming when it works.
And if doctors are the new shamans, they've been denuded in this antiseptic way of so many of these primal associations.
The quick turnover of the medical visit, the mechanistic relational style can often feel dehumanizing and bleak rather than experientially rich and sacred.
So that makes me wonder if the huge market for alternative medicine and intuitive healers It thrives because it amply compensates for a lack of scientific validity by activating and amplifying these emotive spiritual resonances.
Do you know as you're describing what the function of the healer has been and has transformed into, I'm reminded of this amazing book by Drew Leder called The Absent Body and he reminded me that Descartes
Who takes a beating in contemporary philosophy or and especially amongst those who are sort of holistically minded for apparently separating body and spirit or body and mind and so on.
Lieder just says that Descartes probably is better understood describing a phenomenological experience of separation between what you know of the body and what you don't know of the body.
And he talks about the internal body then as being absent, as almost like a black box that even as you take a swallow of water that, you know, once it gets past a certain point, you can't really locate it anymore.
You know, you don't have, you know, you don't really have interoception.
Your sensations and, you know, your digestive system and your blood, it's just all like... I remember somebody said to me, how do I even know that I have organs?
I haven't seen them, you know?
And so, it's like the pre-modern healer has to become the poet of that internal black box in a very compelling way.
But the funny thing is that when we move into medical discourses and techniques that lay people can't interpret, But we're told that they're evidence-based.
The black box is still there.
We can have the imaging even, we can have the blood work, but we can't read it and so we're still sort of looking at something within ourselves as laypeople that we can't understand and we're depending upon this interpretive presence.
And if they're not up to the task of the pre-modern shaman or the pre-modern healer who is going to invest that interpretation with deep meaning, then yeah, there's going to be a problem.
Yeah.
And really you're extending on what I was saying, right?
About how scientific method is what our curiosity about how the world works evolves into.
And we've always had these intuitive, we've always had an intuitive sense that there were invisible realities that were affecting what was visible to us, right?
That there was something in the black box that was powerful.
And that was of the essence.
What science allowed us to do is to extend our senses in ways where we could actually look at that stuff and interact with it and create an evidence-based sort of model about how all of it works.
But it's still dealing with what for the rest of us in our everyday life is an unseen mysterious reality, which is why in some ways people sometimes talk about doctors as being sort of the new priests of some sort of scientific religion.
To answer your question, dissection is relatively new on cadavers.
It was considered taboo and illegal in many societies, so you couldn't actually do it because it was seen to be an insult to the spirit and what a human is.
Thankfully, some people got us together and realized that we should be doing these things.
It also reminds me of, just Julian talking about the evolution of science, the single blind trial was a great idea, you know, with vitamin C and scurvy and being like, Okay, you guys take citrus and you won't, and we'll see what happens.
But then along the line, someone realized, well, if they know that they're getting what they're getting, that's going to influence the outcome.
Or if the doctor knows, it's going to influence the outcome because they might be able to read it on their face.
So let's create the double blind trial.
And the double blind trial has a replication problem, which we're now understanding.
So there'll be something that comes out of that.
FMRI machines only measure blood flow.
There will be better measurements.
We so often forget that we're living through history right now, and that in 100 years some of our practices will be seen as barbaric, and that's okay, but I do think it's important Christiane Northrup will be vindicated.
But hold on, but hold on!
This is important because if in a thousand years from now, however long you said Derek, we see some of our practices as barbaric, it still remains highly unlikely that we'll go, oh but actually how we did it a thousand years prior to that was the real way of doing it.
That doesn't tend to be how it fucking works!
I know, and that's what's so befuddling about it all, when people are like the shamans, and I'm like, the shamans were taking the psychedelics.
They were just talking to you after the experience.
What kind of healing?
I don't understand the romanticization of the past of healing.
Sure, there were probably some amazing methods, and it tracks back to Matthew's original question that started this.
I'm sure there are Traditional Chinese herbs that do what they say they do.
And you know what?
Let's use them, but at least be honest with the evidence.
That's right.
And the other thing that it makes me wonder about is, you know, if the way that most of us experience medical visits can somehow be reimagined.
And I know some doctors do this, some medical doctors do this, where there's some element of experiential richness, relational kind of empathy, some meaningful sense of entering into an experience where you do have that positive state change.
It's like the phenomenology somehow gets really really lost so that it feels like this very mechanistic experience even though you're being given something that is So powerful, right?
Most of the medicines you're given have such high efficacy.
It seems like it's important culturally and psychologically.
And it points to a book I think I've referenced before by Daniel Offrey called What Doctors Say, What Patients Hear.
And it's about the lack of communications with doctors and patients and the fact that the average patient gets cut off Or that the average patient only talks for 90 seconds during an entire doctor visit.
It's a fantastic book.
I highly recommend it.
But it really started me thinking about the ritual of medicine and how important it is.
I remember when I lived in Brooklyn, I had to switch doctors from the one I had in Manhattan because of my health insurance plan.
I went to this guy.
He was a very old school doctor.
The first visit, he just talked to me for 45 minutes.
And I was like, wait, is this okay?
Because my last doctor I liked a lot, but I never had more than 10 minutes with her.
And then here's a guy just talking to me about my life.
And I felt so comfortable with him.
And I haven't had that experience living in Los Angeles.
I had some good doctors, but nothing like that.
And if we don't understand that, that one-on-one bonding with your care practitioner is part of the healing process, whether you want to be your shaman or your doctor, whatever it is, that's such an important component of all of this.
One idea that I've heard floated, it was actually at a Harriet Hall lecture during the Q&A, is someone said, what do you think about the possibility that doctors might have an assistant, you know, as most doctors do anyway, but that assistants might be prepared to have that relational exchange in a way that feels more humane and meaningful and that contextualizes it in some way that activates
The ritual, because I feel like the ritual is important and there's all these psychological components and they may even have a psychoneuroimmunological effect on the person, speaking of placebo, right?
But how to do that without falling back onto some kind of pseudoscience I think is the important question.
Yeah, there's really no, and that's the hardest thing I think for people to grok is that there is no cure-all.
Like, again, you can look at something extremely powerful like chemotherapy and just shut down your immune system for a little bit of time so that you kill the invading cancer, the cells that need to be killed.
So you can have that, but in terms of that relationship, If your acupuncturist is a person you just feel comfortable with, that's part of the healing process and I take no issue with that.
Those bonds are important and are lacking overall in our society.
I just signed up for it again.
I had five insurance health plans in 2020 because of my wife losing her job, because of me going off my insurance, because of the state of California, me getting a new job, and every time I had to look for a new doctor.
That is super frustrating!
And that part of the process is always going to be a problem.
Mr. Socialism is going to jump in in Canada.
Yeah, I'm just wondering if we have data on whether that nightmarish turnover has been studied as having an impact on care and care relationships in some way.
I mean, let's say it would be like starting a new therapist every six months or something like that.
I mean, a little bit simpler because you're going to arrive and they're going to read your chart instead of take your life history.
But still, it must be very jarring to just restart that over and over again.
I have a family doctor that I've had for the last eight years, and she has been with my wife's family for 30 years before that, and I walk into her office and it's like being with an aunt.
I mean, she just, I only see her every six months or something like that, but like the relaxation that I have from her knowing, you know, the basic outlines of my life and what I do is just extraordinary.
All of this exploration of meaning and the relationship between metaphor, story, experiential states of being and how we deal with death, illness, and the psychology of healing and medicine is so fascinating.
But I always come back to the problem that metaphors will consistently be taken literally and seem to have the wrong kind of parity with scientific statements unless we make really clear distinctions.
And nowhere is this problem more apparent than when an unevidenced cure, believed in for poetic, magical, or ancient traditional reasons, crosses over into being applied with medical precision and penetration.
So, I have a short story to share that exemplifies this.
I recently talked to someone I've known for over 20 years, who long ago told me a jaw-dropping story about her family's involvement with a man who presented himself as a pioneering doctor of Chinese medicine.
I want to offer as a caveat here that this is just one anecdote and it isn't intended to represent any particular group or method.
Rather, it is a tale of what can go wrong with ill-considered credulity, unqualified claims, and an authoritatively wielded syringe.
This Dr. Ha had apparently become revered in celebrity circles where he made house calls and administered very special treatments.
My friend's father was at the time a very well-respected UCLA history professor and acclaimed author who had worked as an advisor to several presidents.
He heard about this mysterious doctor to the elites and started having him visit their Pacific Palisades address.
At some point, father, mother, and daughter began receiving injections from the good doctor that he claimed variously contained very special formulations of velvet deer antler, angelica ginseng, and papaya extracts.
Things did not go well.
The mother, seeking help for perimenopausal symptoms, went through a time of extreme hormonal imbalance, which cleared up after she discontinued the injections.
But the father fared much worse.
Treatment for his Achilles tendonitis was injected right in between the tendon and the bone, and he ended up with a hole clear through that area of his body because the tissue became necrotic and had to be removed.
The treatment also resulted in pockets of infection throughout that leg.
During the course of his later medical treatment for the damage caused, the possibility of having to amputate his leg was ever present.
Thankfully, that didn't happen.
And the daughter?
She was 18 at the time and had mono.
The injections she was given eventually led to Cushing's Syndrome, symptoms of which included a very swollen moon face, losing 25 pounds in about 6 weeks, losing half her hair, and sleeping roughly 14 hours a night.
She also had chronic recurrent UTI and sinus infections.
When she eventually went in to an endocrinologist, They reviewed her blood work and told her she had zero male or female sex hormones in her blood, saying, we don't know how to treat this because we don't know what he was injecting into you.
It took her a year to fully recover.
Her family sued the doctor and won only a very small settlement because he had all his assets in his parents' names and no insurance.
Word spread that others had also experienced ill effects from his attentions and after some time he disappeared from that swanky Pacific Palisades scene.
Now, I'm not saying this behavior or outcome is characteristic of Chinese medicine or any other alternative modality.
But I am saying that dangerous charlatans can succeed within a subculture all too quick to give trust and money and social capital to anyone who says the right things and plays the part of the magical healer dispensing snake oil, which in this case was snake venom.
The metaphorical resonance here with how susceptible so many in the wellness space have been to poisonous misinformation in the time of COVID might give those of us still committed to the best aspects of our disciplines and practices a lot to chew on in terms of how we move forward.
So the last two weeks were pretty heavy with cult history and Kundalini and Katie Griggs COVID cult jacking.
This week I just needed to get out more, look at the sky more, enjoy outdoor skating more without stressing about who I was going to piss off and why.
So, I also spent more time taking in some really well-done and inspiring content related to our beat, and so my ticker turn this week is going to feature a couple of reviews.
First up, it's hard to overstate how influential QAnon Anonymous has been in not only that QAnon space, but also in the conspirituality space.
The podcast has been wildly successful in terms of reach, and they've won at the Indie Production Contest, too, at $54,000 a month on Patreon, which is excellent.
And I just want to say that before anyone side-eyes that, let's remember that freelancing, which these guys do, is a rollercoaster of mostly bust and boom.
And what I've seen over the past two years is three diversely talented workers creating a jagged symmetry to apply to one of the most vexing, absurd, dangerous, but also unintentionally hilarious phenoms of my lifetime.
So, you know, I've really appreciated how their intersecting skill sets have worked.
You know, Jake's film writing and Julian's Dadaist comedy is just the perfect digestive for Travis's hyper-rational and meticulous reporting.
There's a real gelling of form and content here that expresses the best faces of postmodern analysis, in my view.
But most importantly, I think they've approached or perhaps fell into this topic with a solid education in political analysis, which means they can have longevity.
They're going to be able to add depth to the landscape.
Cast the phenomenon of QAnon sympathetically within the implosions of late capitalism and the opioid crisis, for example, but then also maintain a sober view of the hypocrisies of liberals that are pretending to be progressive when they so often embody the legitimate deep state of surveillance capitalism that QAnon is partly railing against.
So this means that they've also been on high alert for at least a year against excessive analysis or carpetbagger commentaries that fall into what they have pegged as Blue Anon, or the tendency for Democrats or Democrat-leaning thinkers to engage in a more socially acceptable
And what I find important about that ability is that it doesn't narrow their reporting down to heroes and villains, because I think they understand that there's just too many moving parts in this enormous diorama for comic book reasoning to guide their take on QAnon.
And I'd say that just as with conspirituality, you can't understand Christiane Northrup without understanding the demographics, the economies, the networking and ideologies of the New Age, and also how her virtues are inseparable from her delusions.
You also just can't understand QAnon by focusing on Jim Watkins or Ron Watkins, or some very threadbare theory that it's an online cult, or that it's a Russian op, or an augmented reality game that got out of control somehow.
You need a broad lens.
I would say many lenses, in fact.
And you have to be rooted in a political analysis, a political position, so that you know what your biases are.
The podcasters at QAA have done some reckless things that make me clench my teeth a little bit.
In the fall, they drove to Arizona for a QAnon live convention, and they sat in a stuffy room with closed windows filled with anti-maskers.
I really did not want them to get sick, but I also admired the courage.
I've also winced more than a few times at their relentless irony.
I wondered about whether Julian mugging in a selfie with the Q-shaman was a smart choice with regard to pushing back against radicalization.
Steve Hassan, who we had on our podcast for episode 6, openly wondered the same thing and was critical of QAA and criticized them from kind of an old-school anti-cult activism stance.
But I believe that Jake and Julian and Travis are pretty attuned to the power of memeing within Chan culture, and their choice is to fight fire with fire, to neutralize the absurd with absurdity, and to mimic the LARPing so that everyone remembers that QAnon, no matter what violence it inspires, is built on LARPing.
But it's a fine line to walk.
And I've sometimes wondered whether they've been coasting on the absurdity at times, but they always tend to rein it back into sense and empathy.
And they have done so while dealing with a crushing flow of data in a very, very short and punishing timeline.
So, if they each come away from this project with $200,000, I hope they're able to pour it into healthcare, because I can feel the toll it takes on them.
And, you know, as they've navigated what could have been the waterloo of their beat, now that QAnon has gone through its great disappointment, They've shown up with even more gravity and depth.
So I really want to recommend the last few public and Patreon episodes that they've put out, especially the public one.
It's 128.
It's called From Anonymous to QAnon.
It's an instant overview of QAnon as a phenomenon historically classic.
It's co-written with a journalist named Dale Barron who's the author of an amazing book I just started reading called It Came From Something Awful How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office and Barron does this just fantastic job of contextualizing QAnon within the cultural and technological dystopia that emerged So, this is somebody I'd love to interview in fact.
Okay, second shout out, not as long this time, but I would really like to commend Chris Kavanaugh and Matthew Brown on their work with decoding the gurus.
Kavanaugh is a cognitive anthropologist, and he does social psychology as well, and Brown is, I think, a data-driven psychologist, and together they just do a smashing job of examining guru types in the digital sphere.
Some overlap with the influencers that we look at, so, you know, they do amazing stuff on Sears, you know, Jordan Peterson, you know, but they look at Eric Weinstein, but they even look at, you know, people, you know, in, like, counterpoints, like Natalie Wynn, as they take pains to apply analysis across the political spectrum.
Now, they're academics, but they're loose enough with their attitude and their irony to keep things super real, and there's always an even-handed appraisal of how content, personality, and technology intersect in their material.
They take things really slowly, which is a real relief because the figures they study are always running their mouths.
I want to highlight a particular recent episode.
It's a special episode that they put out.
It's called Calibrating the Grommeter.
Which is their kind of tongue-in-cheek phrase for the metrics or the sort of profiling that they're going to use or that they've been developing over a number of episodes to try to figure out what these figures are doing and I'll just run through the list here.
There's 10 qualities, which Chris joked had to be 10 because he didn't want it to be 9.
But they're really informative and they intersect with so much of the work that we do here on conspirituality.
So according to the Gurometer, We're looking for people who show what they've dubbed galaxy brain or the affect that they are able to speak universally or broadly about anything and everything.
And that there's always a sense of, you know, esoteric linkages being made between disciplines and subjects and historical time periods.
So, galaxy brain is a feature of gurus according to the Guramatar.
Cultishness, which I think we've spoken enough about here on Conspirituality that I can pass over straight to an anti-establishmentarianism attitude amongst these influencers, also something that we've spoken about.
And then this is really interesting.
Grievance mongering is an essential feature of guru-ing in this contemporary influencer culture.
Then they have narcissism as the fifth point.
The Cassandra Complex, I'm very glad to hear that they've named this because, you know, this would be taken from the myth about the figure who Suddenly warns everybody about impending disaster, but of course, she is deemed to be mad and then silenced, of course.
So, I think the seventh point is that they're gurus that they study all traffic in revolutionary ideas, but then also scientific hipsterism, quirky, strange, fringe ideas that may or may not have merit to them.
But they are certainly flashy intellectual property.
That goes along with the next category, which is pseudo-profound BS, and then of course conspiracy mongering, and last but not least, grifting.
So I just really appreciate the gurometer and its metrics, and I look forward to seeing how it is applied and developed.
So to conclude episode 38 and to throw some weight behind a more not-all-natural healers position, I've got an interview here that explores what some folks in the naturopathic doctoring world are going through as they navigate this zone of what feels like a culture war between natural and conventional medicine.
Back in November, before the election, so I apologize for not publishing this sooner, but it's been kind of a ride.
I sat down with Dr. Juniper Martin, who's a naturopathic doctor in Seattle, and Adriana Baruch-Gerardino, who's a fourth-year naturopathic doctor student in Arizona, and...
To discuss their work with something called the Naturopathic Alliance, which is an organization they helped to found early on during the pandemic to combat some of the disinformation they were horrified to see spreading out through the networks of the naturopathic world.
They also take a really strong stand against strands of libertarianism in naturopathy, which, you know, shows up as a real allergy to looking at social determinants of health.
I wanted to know what they were doing in the face of the influence of people like Christiane Northrup and Zach Bush, who I know from my contacts in Toronto have had a super polarizing impact on the naturopathic community.
In May of last year, the Naturopathic Alliance released their first manifesto-type statement in relation to the pandemic.
Here are the bullets, and I think they're really powerful, so I'm just going to read them.
The Naturopathic Alliance has formed to disseminate quality information amongst the public and our profession.
A summary of our concerns are as follows.
We acknowledge the significant risk to public health and safety posed by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
We support the recommendations of public health experts and physicians to practice physical distancing and wear masks.
We acknowledge the effects on mental health with distancing recommendations.
We acknowledge the financial sacrifices required by stay-at-home measures and their impact on the economy.
We acknowledge that the most vulnerable people before the spread of SARS-CoV-2 are the most vulnerable people to infection and severity of disease.
We honor essential workers who must live in close personal contact and those who lack access to PPE, and we understand they are overrepresented by Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and poor communities.
We are concerned with the ability of social media to amplify the most extreme voices by using truth-teller tactics to gain fringe popularity.
We discourage any regulated healthcare professional from using these tactics when engaging with their patients or the public as members of a healthcare profession.
We feel that critical thinking and the careful evaluation of evidence is of the utmost importance and that together we all have a role to play in reducing the spread of malicious information that undermines the functioning of our society and communities.
We are committed to provide and encourage sensible, accurate public health messaging and be a resource for vetted research while engaging in health promotion to improve patients' resilience to infection.
I think that's a great statement.
I really appreciate the work they do in this very tense time.
Here's my interview with them.
Well, Juniper and Adriana, thank you so much for joining us on Conspirituality Podcast.
And I was wondering if, to begin, you could walk us through the basic details of how a naturopathic doctor in the U.S., and it might be different in Canada, becomes educated and then licensed.
Because I think having that groundwork will really help us understand what you're trying to do with the Alliance and its interaction with current affairs.
So, to become a naturopathic doctor and have that title, you have to attend your regular undergrad education, have a four-year degree.
You do have to do science pre-reqs, as with any medical education.
The schooling itself is a minimum of four years, depending if you add on extra studies in like midwifery, Chinese medicine, things like that.
It can end up being longer than that.
Once you graduate, you have to sit for a board exam.
Again, just like with any medical education, that is ran by a different organization in Canada than it is in the U.S.
You are then board certified.
There are residencies available.
They're not mandatory for everybody.
That is the same for all primary care programs, whether or not it's a naturopathic school or traditional medical school.
The goal for Naturopathic schools to create a primary care provider.
And people then go into specialties, of course, but that is the basis of our education.
And then licensing from there, that proceeds from the board exams and so on?
Right.
And so licensing is where things get complicated.
And it's a good jump off point because it is part of the problems that we face these days.
So licensure, we do not have federal licensure in the United States.
And in Canada, it is different from province to province what the scope of practice is.
So, that gives us a lack of infrastructure because each state is very different.
In the U.S., 22 states are licensed, meaning we have insurance coverage to some degree.
In Oregon, where I practice, we have the exact same scope of practice as an MD.
I can do anything that a regular primary care medical doctor does.
And that varies again from the other 22 states, just slightly.
And then there's all these states where people are unlicensed.
And there are what we call diploma mills, where people who are, does anybody can go and take online courses for a year, and then they can call themselves a naturopath.
They can't call themselves a naturopathic doctor.
Um, but they go about saying they're naturopaths.
They're not schooled in any way.
Like they're dangerous people.
Right.
And the, and the public wouldn't have any real sort of education on, on the difference between those terms.
Okay.
Right.
So it becomes very, very messy, very, very fast.
Right.
Um, we do have a federal organization here in the U S in Canada.
There's also a nationwide organization.
And, you know, they have a huge task in trying to organize all of these disparate states that have different coverage.
So, that is problematic.
Our state orgs tend to do the bulk of the work for us in terms of lobbying and insurance parity, things like that.
Right.
Adriana, did you have anything to add from the perspective of the student?
Like, how is this evolving?
And it seems like if you're heading towards graduation, it's kind of like jumping into a fire a little bit at this point.
Well, with COVID-19, absolutely.
Things are quite different now.
We've just seen opportunities to secure employment change with just As businesses are closing, right?
Medicine is no exception to that.
I will say just a quick clarification with what Juniper was talking about, as far as us taking our licensing exams, We are licensed then.
Board certification is kind of like specialties that people can do.
You can do homeopathy, you could do... Natural childbirth.
Yep, exactly.
There's a few other ones.
There's now going to be psychiatry, so there's a couple specialties that folks can go into to get board certification, but we are licensed in those 22 states, as Juniper mentioned.
Right, now if the ND was able to get board certification in psychiatry, would they be board certified in the same way that a psychiatrist was board certified?
No, there's always different roles as to what medications can be prescribed and things of that nature, but yeah, constantly evolving.
And that again is state dependent in terms of our prescriptive rights.
Right, so a general question and the reason that I think we've come across each other is that I know that just from my colleagues here in the wellness industry in Canada that
What I've called the naturopathic community, which is a vague term and you've clarified that, has been really torn stem to stern by COVID denialism, by conspiratorial thinking, by anti-vax sentiment, and you know all kinds of very difficult stuff.
And I'm wondering whether or not the, I mean you're going to describe what the Naturopathic Alliance is in a moment, but I'm wondering if A fundamental problem is in this lack of consistency in licensing and education, and whether or not the vector for certain forms of medical disinformation is coming out of the unregulated or the unlicensed camp.
There's definitely, in terms of people who come from the diploma mills, absolutely, absolutely there is way more misinformation coming.
From those folks.
100%.
Can we name names?
Like, what would a diploma, like, if there's a diploma mill, like, what would I look for?
The, you know, the organization that was giving the diploma.
Are there famous ones?
I'm trying to remember.
A lot of them have closed.
There was Trinity.
There was Clayton.
I don't know if either of those are illegal.
I think Clayton's a popular one.
Yeah.
But I don't know if they're still in existence in the same capacity, if they're under other names.
I mean, the big thing to look for is, Is this an all-online program?
It used to be like a mail-order kind of program where you would just get papers sent to your house.
Nowadays, things are online, but I mean, it's like practicing medicine.
You have to be in person.
I would imagine, yeah.
Somebody is saying they're a naturopath.
You need to ask what their education is and ask if they're coming from a four-year accredited university.
Right, okay.
Well, yeah, so that leads to, tell me about the Naturopathic Alliance.
Juniper, you sent me over Twitter, I believe.
Look, thanks for the stuff you're doing on your podcast, and look at our statement that's trying to clean up some of the mess within, or that's associated with naturopathic medicine at this point, unfortunately, due to COVID.
What is the Naturopathic Alliance, and how old is it, and what are you trying to do?
So National Pathologic Alliance started on a wonderful text chain.
It's just a bunch of docs and students, because I'm a student, and we were just kind of chatting about what's going on, what are we seeing.
This started pretty early on in COVID and from there it evolved to a Slack channel and we just recognized the void in our medicine.
As a student in particular, I was horrified at just being, you know, Out on shift at private clinics and feeling very exposed, very vulnerable, not having a lot of direction.
And we all came together and just were like, I guess we need to do this because we haven't lived through a pandemic before, recognizing that people just don't really know what to do and felt a real need to organize and put out collective, cohesive, coherent information that was evidence-based.
Well, I mean, you have a very robust statement that Juniper sent, and it's called, we'll link to it in the show notes, but it's called, Taking a Stand, Acknowledging the Harm of Racism and Misinformation During the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Now, you foreground racism at the top there.
Can you say a little bit about that?
I want to backtrack just slightly in that we had an original statement that came out on May 9th, And that and you it's on our website.
It's on the home page.
There's a link to it That statement's actually a little bit more robust in terms that it addresses more misinformation in addition to social determinants of health and how they affect people in the pandemic Um that has a number of signatories.
We have over 200 people who have signed it.
Most of those people are nds There's also some acupuncturists massage therapists nurses mds um and And because we realized back in April, you know, that's when Clandemic came out.
That's when the Bakersfield docs made their statement.
Um, and we started having colleagues share those things.
We were like, ah, like, no, there needs to be a group.
Cause again, our, our national organization is, is kind of a slow moving train right now because they are trying to balance so many different things.
And we really, really felt there needed to be a voice that was clear and saying, This is not okay.
So, jump to the future in this most recent statement that we made about two weeks ago now.
They're popped to the surface of our knowledge.
I don't want to name names.
A website made by a few other naturopathic doctors who are bigger names.
They're influencers, you would say, and this site has Very, very racist leanings.
It actually has a gallery of memes as part of its evidence, which include memes about All Lives Matter.
Oh wow.
Yeah.
So it's flat out politicized?
Oh yes.
And the person who is one of the founders of this site and the lead for it Is somebody who believes that George Floyd's murder was staged?
Um that it's all you know, Bill Gates is evil This is all part of a master plan to take over the world and have totalitarianism and forced vaccination, etc, etc You know the narrative so thankfully, you know this and it's Not a greatly put together site blah blah blah and it isn't getting a lot of traction thankfully But they are asking for signatories, which is interesting Um, and it's interesting to see the people who have signed it And this was kind of a... Because that's all public?
Yeah.
Right.
Now, um, and can I just ask the, the, the, the, the people at the center of it, are they, are they licensed NDs?
Just to go back to our original conversation.
The person at the center of it, trying to decide how much to say, cause I don't necessarily want to name names.
He went to a Canadian school.
But has not maintained licensure.
Okay.
And is someone who believes that the schools are taking away the roots of naturopathic medicine.
It's really It's really kind of nonsense talk.
That is in no way what is happening with the schools.
The thought is that because we are following public health measures, that we're advocating for public health, that we're advocating for evidence-based best medicine, that we are somehow taking away our core philosophy of removing obstacles to cure.
Wow.
And those things are not incompatible, right?
Like, that's just, that's nonsense.
This person is someone who Is obviously a megalomaniac, obviously a narcissist, um, has many, many websites that this person has made advocating all sorts of stuff.
So, but unfortunately is also someone who in certain groups is, has been very respected and has taught at colleges.
Right.
So that is, that's another thing that our group works on.
Um, so, It was startling to see this sort of organized effort to put out the stupid.
And also, of course, the main theme of this website is that they are they are the truth tellers and they're stopping censorship.
They are going to prove, you know, that the rest of us are crazy.
This is a place for freedom of speech, yada, yada, yada.
And for us, knowing that, again, our federal organizations and our state organizations are gonna be slow to move, what we wanna show is that you have to take a stand.
You can't just sit back and watch this happen.
And as a profession, there needs to be accountability.
Accountability is not censorship.
Right.
Now, when we're talking about the signatories to this website, some of them, I would assume, are licensed NDs?
Yes.
Okay, so is there a mechanism by which that expression of, you know, a kind of anti-evidence-based medicine and pro-racist position is something that can be held to account?
Is there a complaint process or something?
That's something we are trying to figure out.
And again, what we've heard so far is that you need to Talk to each state that that person is in.
Oh boy.
I know.
Exactly.
So then it becomes like, Oh my gosh.
Right.
It's hard.
And, and I will say, I know, I know MDs who are battling this within their medicine and it's similarly hard.
You know, there's in Portland here, there's a really, really, really popular, uh, integrative pediatric physician who is an MD and has gone off the rails and he has a huge, huge following here in Portland.
And there's been a large group of other MDs like, what do you do?
Like, why isn't this reportable?
Why is this okay?
And it's problematic in medicine across the board.
Like, what do we do with these people who are clearly spreading untruths about COVID?
Adriana, what is it like in the trenches of fourth year?
Like, how is this material and how is this divisiveness impacting your studies and the community that you're connected to?
I mean, I would say that things have really changed in the sense that we're doing so much online learning now that we're no longer all together.
You know, having these discussions in person, which makes a big difference.
Right.
As far as being online and just seeing this as a fourth year student, it's really been illuminating to just be like, whoa, pump the brakes.
These are people that I could get a residency with.
These are people who could be employing me.
And I don't want to put myself into that situation where I would have to be in an abusive, That's not healthy for me.
That's not healthy for my patients.
And that's why I've been so grateful for Naturopathic Alliance because we're putting out this cohesive information where, you know, I have students on my phone all the time being like, thank you.
Thank you.
Because I wasn't getting this from anywhere else.
And they were ready to close the door and bug it.
And they were like, I'm going to leave this field.
I don't want to be in this.
And I was like, you know, I hear you.
Absolutely.
And neither do I. Right.
And for them and perhaps for you, was it sort of another bucket of water bailing into this feeling that Perhaps the discipline doesn't have firm enough guardrails and perhaps it is, I mean, I don't know, maybe this is an assumption on my part.
Would you say that naturopathic medicine is more porous to conspiratorial thinking or to disinformation or to, you know, what we're seeing now?
I will say it's not exclusive to naturopathic medicine.
For sure.
We see across the board in healthcare that we just are not providing adequate education to ensure that medical practitioners are anti-racist, actually.
We see that medicine is highly racist.
Perhaps, you know, Juniper could speak further to, you know, are Indies actually more porous?
We are very individualistic where people kind of do things their own way.
Right.
I can't speak to that entirely.
Maybe you can, Juniper.
You know, this has been written about really extensively already in terms of just the wellness community in general, the type of people wellness attracts.
And, you know, a lot of naturopathic doctors came to the profession because they had a legitimate biff with traditional medicine, right?
Like, there are, you know, we can't say that there's no problems with our medical establishment, especially here in the States, right?
Of course not.
It's this for-profit machine.
It is not patient-centered.
You know, it is definitely, there's some movement to try and change all that.
It's also economically predatory.
And even from the standpoint, I mean, on one hand, there's a robust criticism of naturopathic medicine being boutique-oriented and inaccessible and too expensive and so on.
There's not enough insurance coverage.
But at the same time, it's like, I know a lot of naturopaths Pathic doctors who will also make individual payment agreements and they're able to do that with their clients because if and if they were working out of you know biomedical clinics they wouldn't be able to do that so there can be more of a sort of individual economy that's respectful of people's community needs and so on.
This is a big argument you know I'm in primary care, specifically.
And I, again, I live in a state where we have really, really great parity and I have full scope of practice.
So, but I have a little micro practice.
It is me and my medical assistant and a biller.
And I love that because I do get to choose how much communication I have with my patients, what I want to charge them.
You know, I'm an assigned primary care physician with our state Medicare, our state Medicaid.
I get to treat the poorest of our community and our most vulnerable people, and I love it.
And I get to tell them, like, actually, you know, yes, we can do that pharmaceutical, but look, here's these other things you can do for free at home.
Yeah, right.
And it makes a huge difference and it's so gratifying.
That's why I went into this medicine because to me it's the people's medicine, right?
These easy lifestyle changes, herbs, teas.
Right.
And then your integrity around scope of practice and where you would, I suppose, defend against the charge that, well, actually, you know, it can be dangerous to recommend a home remedy is that you actually have to know the difference between the efficacy of the home remedy versus the pharmaceutical.
And I think there's a lot of people that assume that you don't know that, that you don't actually know the difference between those things.
Exactly.
Right.
Exactly.
I know people are also astounded of like, I have a DEA license.
Like, they don't just pass those out.
Right.
Can you just, can you just give that?
Can you, can DEA, can you, um, can you just define that for a sec?
Here in the States, you have a DEA license and that is a, the DEA is a body that regulates how you are able to prescribe and whether you are able to prescribe scheduled substances.
Drug Enforcement Administration.
Okay, great.
And that it's a license you pay every three years here in the States.
Again, that's dependent on what state you live in.
Not everybody is able to get a DEA license, but we are every single person who graduates from a four-year university is trained And skilled to be able to get a DEA license if they were to live in a state where that was available.
Right.
We do understand the nuances.
Right.
And, you know, here, again, I live in a state where we have a lot of equality and I live in Portland where naturopaths are common and we are part of the medical community.
I have MDs as patients.
I have MDs who refer to me all the time because I have a body of knowledge that they don't have.
And, and we are, we are a part of the community here.
Right.
And, you know, that is possible.
It's not some, some outlier thing.
What, what, what impact, uh, federally and perhaps culture-wise do you see the Naturopathic Alliance having?
Like, um, you know, hearing you speak, Adriana, uh, you said something really compelling that, you know, you, you weren't, you heard from students, fellow students that, that, uh, you, That there's a lot of concern that, oh my gosh, we might be entering into a racist field and do we really want that?
Is there something that your organization can do to propose anti-racism training as being a fundamental part of naturopathic training or something like that?
Do you have big vision that way?
Oh yeah.
I mean, when you look at the Naturopathic Alliance, we are a diverse array of folks, right?
We are Black folks, Latinx folks, differently abled, genderqueer folks.
That was fundamental for our, you know, coming together was we need to be folks from different arrays of life because we don't, first of all, see that in medicine all the time, especially in positions of power.
Naturopathic Alliance is also working to make sure that we have representation at conferences, right?
Who is telling people things and up-to-date information and getting the opportunity to educate, being compensated for it on boards at schools and I mean, we've already started seeing that schools have adopted our COVID-19, what is it, Juniper?
Cindy especially spearheaded, she's our colleague, Cindy Biernik up at the Canadian College, helped spearhead an effort for the colleges to adopt a statement Recognizing social determinants of health as a factor with COVID-19, recognizing that there is systemic racism within the schools that needs to be addressed, just as with all of medicine, we have this.
Is that new for the curricula there and elsewhere?
Will there now be a module called Social Determinants of Health that unrolls in the third year or something?
It's been there, but it's like, how do we make it a priority as opposed to like a piece of something that's in the curriculum?
It's like, no, no, this needs to be in the forefront actually, because we have a lot of work to do still.
Right, right.
You know, one of the things that has been most painful to the naturopathic doctors, and I suppose the naturopaths, to make that distinction again that I've spoken to here in Canada, is just how influential certain key figures have been in The disinformation pandemic.
So, you know, I've spoken to people whose hearts are, like, really broken by looking at materials from Christiane Northrup.
Now, she's not a naturopathic doctor, but she's very inspirational in the sort of alternative health scene.
And there's a lot of other people that we've studied in the podcast that are sort of in that category of, you know, people who have enormous social capital.
And who have, you know, have done a lot of, you know, good or interesting work in the field of questioning, you know, conventional medicine and its biases and its issues and its inequalities.
You know, how, what do you do, what can you do about these very influential figures who are so, you know, impactful in your community?
I mean, I feel like we need a clean house.
I mean, I'm just tired of these folks who, you know, I'm like, who are they?
Are these like white, middle class, upper middle class, cis white folks?
I'm like, who are these?
Why are these people the ones who are continuously having these conversations and having all of this influence?
And like, let's bring in some other people.
I'm excited to see my colleagues, you know, black folks, queer folks, you know, just having space.
In these conversations.
I'm ready to clean up.
I would agree in that our, you know, we amongst us in the Naturopathic Alliance, we have our decompression sessions where we will just be like, Oh my God, what's happening?
Not this person also.
Right, right.
But our focus is really on behavior, and let's not give more, let's not center these people more.
Right.
Like, if they're gonna, they wanna burn themselves down, let them go do it.
Like, we want, and let them create a void, like Adriana said, let's bring in those voices that haven't had a voice yet, and who have been there all along, you know?
One of the reasons that so many of these folks have the platform they do is because they are white, upper-class people.
And they're also charismatic.
And so this is another, this may be the last question that I have, is that when we study people like Dr. Zach Bush, Again, not an ND, but an MD, but I know that his material goes through naturopathic circles.
And the dude basically does evangelical sermons on every podcast that he does, and they're kind of like padded with medical language or pseudo-medical language.
But I'm wondering who from the Naturopathic Alliance is going to be able to present that same kind of fire because one of the things that we are looking at is unfortunately You know, correcting disinformation is a very sort of unattractive and boring enterprise that's very difficult to catch people's attention with.
So I'm just wondering if you've got any fire breathers on your team who, you know, are, I don't know, doing debate prep or something right now.
We are trying to start some lives to get faces out there because we know that is what hooks people, is these live discussions.
And that's one of our goals coming up is how do we incorporate that.
And it is, like you said, it is really, really tricky because a lot of these folks, the reason they're charismatic is because they're narcissists, right?
They know how to work the crowd.
Right.
And so, you know, how do you bring that kind of charisma and fire to something, like you said, that is, like, boring?
Right.
Actually, the truth is, it's really complex.
And we just have to pause, and we have to wait for information to come in, and it's all gonna be fine, but just, like, slow down.
It's like, you know, the boring grandma, you know?
So... So, okay, maybe that's another angle, though, just if we brainstorm this a little bit, is that Christiane Northrup is distinct in this way because her charisma is grand maternal, matriarchally, whatever, and she is a little bit
Boring and chatty and I'm just I'm wondering I'm wondering if if that's if that's an angle to oppose in a way you know that you don't don't don't necessarily need the the the fire and brimstone but rather somebody who's like just a funnier and better version of Christiane Northrup And it's tricky because, you know, she had a platform kind of built in for her because her books were already popular, right?
And so she could kind of start talking and no matter how boring she was, people were going to listen.
So, you know, it becomes tricky.
But you're right in that if we could figure out a way to make that happen, it would be great.
Because that is what people crave.
You know, they love that fire and they love that cult of personality.
Right.
But at the same time, it's hard because you don't want to feed into it also.
Right, exactly, exactly.
Playing with fire, for sure.
Yeah.
Well, is there anything else that you'd like to finish with?
I'm really grateful to have a couple of indies on because, you know, we've been asked by our listeners to make sure that we do that, and I hope that we keep doing that.
So, yeah, anything else that you'd like to say?
I would just say, you know, I encourage people to go to the American Academy of Naturopathic Physicians website.
If they're interested in learning more about our education, they have some great information there.
The Canadian Association of Naturopathic Doctors also has a good website.
Absolutely visit our website.
We have some awesome, awesome content.
I love our two statements that we've made.
The one from May 9th and then the one from this last week.
