Kelly Brogan, a psychiatrist, argues that New York’s urban stress contrasts with healthier environments like Seattle, exposing flaws in conventional mental health care—subjective 10-minute diagnoses, industry-driven polypharmacy (e.g., Abilify, Paxil), and ignored lifestyle factors like diet, trauma, or belief systems. Her DAISY method critiques hormonal birth control’s risks, including nutrient depletion and potential aggression, citing cases like Andreas Lubitz’s Germanwings crash and Chris Cornell’s death linked to benzodiazepines. Brogan’s drug-free protocol—coffee enemas, red meat, gluten/dairy elimination—reverses psychosis in patients like Allie, challenging pharmaceutical reliance despite evidence of suppressed alternatives (e.g., GreenMedInfo’s PubMed-backed natural treatments) and industry bias, including FDA-funded studies and media censorship. Ultimately, she frames mental health as a terrain of empowerment, not suppression. [Automatically generated summary]
I mean, there's this term actually in the medical literature, believe it or not, called paleodeficit disorder.
And it just refers to like how far have you strayed from the path in your lifestyle?
Like basic stuff, green space, movement, you know, sleep.
And I would imagine that if you have more of those components intact, you're probably a bit more okay than if you're living, you know, in, you know, midtown Manhattan.
See, I'm like a big, big winter complainer, and I have been my whole life.
So I complain 10 months of the year of what it's like to live...
In the Northeast.
But recently I've been playing around with the idea that there's actually something cool about, like, you know, sort of cyclical living.
It's almost just, like, if you embrace it, then there's something, just like everything's dead and miserable for a period of time, and then it blooms, and then you get to experience, like, this rebirth, and then it, you know, flourishes, and then it dies again.
But there's another perspective on that actually being I don't know.
Like if you work with it.
It's sort of like a woman who's on birth control has no idea that there's any point to, you know, a cycle of energy over the course of the month, right?
And she sort of thinks that's annoying.
But there's a way you can wrap your mind around it where you work with it.
I'm 39. I was on birth control for 12 years, so I never knew what it meant to have, like, a menstrual cycle until very recently, because then I had two kids, breastfeeding.
So a couple decades into my life, I'm just figuring this out.
But you have, like, totally different kinds of energy over the course of the month.
And you have to know how to work with that.
So there's a kind of energy that, you know, you want to go out and socialize or you want to stay in and work or you want to sleep more or less.
And if you don't know how to ride that, then you could be sort of taken off guard by it.
But if you know how to work with it, it's so much more powerful than just having this like artificial hijacking of your endocrine system.
But I have thought about birth control before, about how crazy it is that you give a woman a hormone that convinces her body that she's perpetually pregnant.
And that a giant percentage of women are on it for convenience.
I mean, when I... I've always been a feminist, right?
So even when I was...
Younger and very much asleep, I identified as a feminist.
And I was one of those people who thought that birth control was like a female entitlement.
Like, how dare you not make this free and widely available?
But as I began to research more about it and more about how it's in many ways like the ultimate You know, not to sound too inflammatory, but the ultimate tool for oppression of, you know, the modern woman.
Now I find it incredible that we, you know, that we're still taking it because it seems like a good idea, right?
Who wants to deal with your annoying menstrual cycle?
Who wants to get pregnant?
Who wants to have endometriosis or polycystic ovary?
You know, who wants to have acne or like hair growing in weird places?
magic pill illusion.
There's no free lunch.
There's never going to be something that just fixes it for you and you just waltz off into the sunset.
There's always a cost and the cost is so much more vast, like ranging from literally death all the way to just like subtle alterations in your personality and like the fear moans you secrete, you know, and there was just a million women's study in Scandinavia that and there was just a million women's study in Scandinavia that showed about the vast increase in antidepressant prescribing for teenagers who are prescribed birth So, So it's the beginning of sort of, it's like a gateway drug sometimes for psych meds too.
I heard, I had a friend who, one of his good friends, his daughter died from some complications with taking birth control pills and smoking cigarettes.
And you don't even have to have that additional risk factor, you know, because birth control, whether it's the pill or something called the NuvaRing, by itself has that.
You know, I'm contacted often by parents of girls who have died from pulmonary embolism who've now become like activists in this realm.
That's so interesting because most people when they think about the birth control pill they think about it as something that liberated women because they can control whether or not they got pregnant and they were allowed for the first time to have careers and do whatever they wanted to because they didn't have to worry about being trapped.
But that's the biological free lunch thing, right?
Exactly.
Isn't there also a lot of issues?
Chris Ryan was on here, Dr. Chris Ryan, the author of Sex at Dawn.
He was on here and he was talking about how women can, like if you smell the clothes of other men, you can literally tell the men that you are attracted to, you would be biologically compatible with those men.
And that when they did these same studies on women who were on the birth control pill, they couldn't smell the difference.
Well, essentially, the premise of pharmaceutical medicine is that you can just pull one little thread of the spider web and leave the rest of it intact.
Everything else is going to be fine.
We're only working on this one area.
So with birth control, for example, the idea is we're just, you know...
Taking over the management of your sex hormones, but the rest of your body is going to be totally unaffected.
And, of course, as we learn more about how all of these systems are totally and inextricably interconnected, we have a better understanding of how, you know, when you interfere with sex hormones, you also potentially have other effects, including raising things called binding you also potentially have other effects, including raising things called binding globulins, including inflammatory You're depleting a number of nutrients.
And we're having, you know, it's possible that we haven't even begun to look through the keyhole of the effects on brain and, you know, sort of neuropeptides in these arenas where we don't have any idea what hormonal secretion is about.
We just have to defer to the probability that our bodies are more complex than we've expected.
Right?
Like, begun to understand.
So your biology is meant to guide you.
It's meant to empower you.
And it's meant to, you know, create a sense of vitality if you can inhabit your body and be in a truce with it.
That's part of the problem with the mindset of birth control is, I'm just going to, you know, take this over.
I'm going to manage this.
And so who knows?
Maybe even it's a top-down, like, mindset thing that begins to sort of divorce you from...
Your sensibilities.
We don't really know, is the point.
That's going to be a common answer, I think, I have to give you, is that we don't really know.
But it does make sense that the subtle nature of your biology that involves sort of guiding your human interactions, and particularly sex-related interactions, is going to be derailed.
I mean, low libido is one of, ironically, the most common things.
Disclosed side effects of birth control.
So you're taking it so that you can have unprotected sex.
We don't feel like having sex ultimately anyway.
So it's not even really that well thought out, I think, by most of us.
I mean, if you're a woman and you want to have control of whether or not you get pregnant, there's not a whole lot of options other than weird ones like IUDs, which seem real weird.
Yeah, I mean, some of my patients use what's called a copper IUD. You know, it's funny because I had one put in and two and a half, it cost like $700, and two and a half weeks later I had it taken out because I just felt weird about having like a pharmaceutical metal in my hand.
But I use something called a DAISY, which is like this highly calibrated thermometer.
And you track your, you know, because you have six fertile days a month.
This isn't, you know, like some major sacrifice you have to make in order to learn how your cycle works.
And then you get the benefits of being In your hormonal milieu.
It's not that complicated.
But there's a learning curve.
It requires learning how to be a woman.
And also sharing the onus.
Because with all of these side effects we've been talking about, there was a male birth control study that was just terminated because of how many side effects the men didn't want to deal with.
So there's such a sociocultural double standard around this.
But if we're talking about six days a month, How about we collaborate and try and figure something out?
You know, that doesn't involve a risk of death, perhaps.
I mean, my interest in it really came from looking at the psychiatric side effects because I'm very interested in medications that have potential, you know, gateway effects around psychiatric meds that we aren't informing women of before, you know, they start the prescription.
So, you know, whether it's like acid blocking medications, you know, or antibiotics, You know, birth control vaccines, these things have known psychobiological effects.
If you don't know that, then you'll never connect the dots.
And then you end up in the polypharmacy realm where you're taking multiple meds without ever knowing where the dominoes started to fall.
Yeah, I remember there was a commercial that they used to have, I don't know if they still air it, but it was for a psychiatric medication that you take who's an antidepressant when you are depressed from antidepressants.
Like, say if they put you on some Zoloft or something like that, not to pick on Zoloft, but then they say, well, this is not really totally doing it for you.
We're thinking about stacking Abilify in with the Zoloft, and I think that just might be the ticket to your happiness.
I mean, you have your personal favorite medications that you feel comfortable prescribing, so you're more likely to prescribe them.
But then also, and this is also, you know, in the literature itself, if a patient comes in asking for a particular medication, then you, 49%, I think it was like of prescriptions that are written, are written because of specific patient requests.
When I watch those commercials and those beautiful piano music playing and there's cartoon flowers that are smiling at everybody, I'm like, what are they selling me?
It feels really good because you're making like 20 grand a year working your ass off.
And so when someone takes you to a fancy restaurant with your friends, but you could convince yourself that it's not actually going to, you know, that you're an intellectual and you're going to make your own decisions.
But All of the data suggests otherwise, that you are unduly influenced by that kind of courtship behavior.
And it's true.
So we have this sort of collusion on the part of the doctor and the patients to support industry interests over any sort of...
I don't know, shred of a scientific or evidence-based process for really diagnosing someone.
No, in fact, most sort of turncoat doctors like me will tell you that we have one hour of nutrition education in all of our medical school and residency training.
Because I guess the kind of science that I bring to the table, which is not my own, I don't have any original ideas, but I am really good, I think, at curating information and collecting it and synthesizing and presenting it, right?
So what I have to shine a light on is very inconvenient science for industry interests, but also for conventional practice, because, you know, I don't prescribe medication anymore under any circumstances ever.
But I do have an entire practice devoted to taking people off of medication.
So I have sort of my thing, and it's a lot based on lifestyle change, as you mentioned, right?
If you don't have your methodology as an alternative to prescribing, And you're going to acknowledge what a lot of the science says that condemns the pharmaceutical approach.
What are you going to do instead?
You just invested $200,000 of debt, blood, sweat, and tears, indentured servitude for like a decade of your training.
You're just going to give that up?
So it's a lot to expect the average psychiatrist to acknowledge anything beyond what's called consensus medicine.
It's called that because it doesn't even have a connection to the evidence.
It's not evidence-based.
It's just they all agree on it, and they're just going to keep doing it, you know?
So this consensus medicine, like in psychiatry, there's kind of like this understanding that you don't criticize the system that everybody's operating under.
Like, I read more science than probably all my conventional colleagues put together because I have a lot of incentive to do so because I'm practicing outside of the...
You know, the gold standard, so to speak.
So when you're in the fold, why would you bother reading science?
Who cares?
You just do what you were taught to do.
Don't question it, you know?
So it's, you know, the reason that lifestyle is not presented as a relevant factor in conventional medicine is because it flies in the face of the whole model, right?
Like the model is still a gene-based model.
It's still, you were born with it.
You know, it's like coddling the victim.
There's nothing you can do about it.
So, you know, you better just be a good boy and take your medication.
It's the only thing you can do because diet doesn't matter.
You know, whether you're, you know, huffing fumes through your window doesn't matter.
Whether you're eating six cans of tuna a day and mercury poisoning yourself doesn't.
None of that matters really.
Maybe it's like of minor interest, but the real problem is your inborn genetic chemical imbalance, right?
So if that is the premise, and it's not just in psychiatry, it's in all of medicine, is gene-based determinism frees pharma to offer the only solution.
And it actually validates people on some level as the victim, right?
Even though there's science that supports that having a healthy, nutrient-dense diet allows your body to produce all the healthy hormones and chemicals and neurotransmitters and then along with exercise, which also increases Simple stuff, yeah.
Haven't there been studies also that show that exercise, regular aerobic exercise in particular, it does as much to treat depression as SSRIs?
I've talked to a lot of smart people that believe that.
I have a friend, she's a scientist.
She's very smart.
She's on antidepressants.
And if you talk to her, she will argue to the death.
These are critical for her life and that she needs them and she has some sort of a brain imbalance and it's no different than having some other organ in your body that doesn't function properly and you need medication for that.
Well, it's just whenever something makes someone uncomfortable with their choices, they immediately want to turn someone else into an aggressor or someone who's victimizing them.
This woman that I'm friends with, it's unfortunate because I feel like if she exercised, at least she would know.
She doesn't exercise.
So if you don't exercise, you don't really know if that would help.
Well, these conversations are happening now more and more with people where they're starting to look at, like, what is it in my life that's causing me stress?
What is it in my life that is depleting my sleep patterns or my health?
Have I ever gotten my blood test done and find out where my nutrient levels are?
Needs are very different biologically people like people are gonna respond differently to drugs people are gonna respond differently to food It's just we come from different parts of the world and some people need different stuff And this is being called like n of one medicine and meaning like meaning the number of people in a study So like the phrase is n of one medicine because we're beginning to understand exactly what you're saying Which is yeah, it's you this is your thing.
This is your journey.
This is very specific to you, right?
So like You know, your depression, let's say, could be because you have a B12 deficiency.
It could be because you have low thyroid function.
It could be because you're taking birth control.
It could be because, you know, your dog died.
It could be because you have a shitty job that you hate.
It could be because your marriage has to go.
And it could be because you're ready for some psychospiritual emergence, you know?
You are the only one who really knows and who really can figure it out.
But we, on the conventional side of things, seek to depersonalize it.
So it's not you.
It has nothing to do with you.
It's just a chemical process that's unfolding and you need this one size fits all intervention.
It's really coming down to like almost religious level belief systems.
Like either you believe, right, which I used to, P.S. Either you believe that we're sort of machines, right?
Like as Alan Watts would say, we're like flesh robots on a dead rock floating in the middle of nowhere.
So everything is purposeless and random and it's just bad luck and bad genes and You know, it's like the other shoe could fall at any moment and life is just a hustle and you're just trying to survive.
And you got to avail yourself of real medicine, which is pharmaceutical medicine.
It's the only legit option.
And you just got to do it.
And you know what?
You want some credit for even having the courage to actually take the steps to take your meds, right?
So that's one mindset.
And then the other, which is, I believe, growing, is Is that we have no idea what we're doing scientifically, and we're just looking through the keyhole.
And science is a process.
It's not like a destination where the science is settled, my favorite phrase.
So, you know, the body itself has this, you know, chiropractors call it vitalism, like has this innate wisdom, and it doesn't Make mistakes.
Like, it doesn't mess up.
Every single thing your body is doing is in wise response to a perceived, you know, stimulus, right?
But, right, so if I have an ache or a pain, or my hair is falling out, or I have a tumor growing out of the side of my body, My first response, it's possible, could be curiosity.
It could be, what is this about?
Where am I off?
Because in indigenous cultures, for example, illness is not something that your body is doing.
It's the manifestation of things out of balance with you and your soul, with you and the relationships in your life, with you and nature, and maybe the collective itself.
So it's this expression, it's this physical manifestation of something much deeper that has roots.
And until you understand what those roots are for you, you won't resolve it.
You know, the sort of like congenital question, like if you're just like born without a leg, I mean, you could take it to the extent where you say, okay, so what drove the birth defect, whether it was some sort of, you know, okay, so let's back up a second, because epigenetics, right, is the word du jour for beyond or above, actually, technically.
Right?
So the genes are interesting, but perhaps as insignificant as like 1% of what makes us sick, right?
Or well.
We never study what makes us well.
It's like a total black box.
But epigenetics is like how does the environment impact our genes, right?
So you could argue that a lot of congenital...
You know, sort of malformations and things like that, because this was an area of study for me when I was prescribing to pregnant women, which, believe it or not, was my specialty, prescribing psychiatric meds to pregnant women, that it is in response to that exposure.
And it's the body's method of adapting to an exposure.
I mean, to me, there are no errors because the body is responding to a perceived stimulus.
Now, if you throw a lot of toxicity, you know, in the way of your body, there may be a limit to which it can or will accommodate, right?
Because, like, something confusing for me was at one point I was reflecting on the fact that, you know, we've had all of these environmental exposures for, like, about 100, 150 years, like, since the industrial...
Revolution, right?
So we live totally different lives now with all these toxic exposures that we sit all day and we don't sleep and we have Monsanto and all the rest.
Pretty much for the past 100 years or so.
We can adapt.
My body is adapting within the hours that we're hanging out.
Why would it not have adapted over the past 100 years?
And like a paleo argument is like we've evolved the same way for 95% of our evolution and now we just haven't taken enough time.
To evolve, to catch up with today's modern influences, right?
But I actually think we're not meant to accommodate this.
And we will self-extinguish, like, if we don't course-correct, which I have faith we will do.
But we're not meant to adapt to this kind of lifestyle.
Like, I think even though we could biologically adapt, I think we won't because there is like a cosmic intelligence that is holding us accountable to a certain level of respect.
For this human organism, a certain level of respect for the privilege of being alive, you know?
And the way we're living today, just like trashing ourselves and trashing this planet, is a violation.
So, I don't know.
It's like a subtle point, but I think the point is we're not going to adapt.
So don't wait for it, you know?
And we're just going to get sicker and sicker and sicker and die.
And perhaps that is the most intelligent response.
Yeah, it seems like the sacrifice for productivity, the daily sacrifice for productivity that comes at the expense of health and happiness is the norm.
That's what a lot of people deal with.
They deal with having bills, as you were pointing out about exorbitant medical bills.
So many people that are in the medical industry start their practice or start practicing being a doctor, a professional doctor, with a quarter-million-dollar debt.
Which is crazy.
It's so much money.
It's so crazy.
What a terrible idea.
What's almost mandatory for any civilization?
Well, you need healthcare, for sure.
You need to be able to take care of people.
I got an idea.
Let's take those people that you need to make these critical decisions to save your life and let's fuck them over.
Let's saddle those people up with crazy debt and leave them trapped in a world of stress.
I got an even better idea.
When they're going through their residency, let's not let them sleep.
Is it a conspiracy or is it people just taking advantage of this need and being greedy and just charging exorbitant amounts of money and having the whole thing subsidized by the government so they could be expensive and then the whole thing is crazy and also here's the big one that a lot of people maybe if you're a kid you're not aware of this Your student loans haunt you till you're dead.
You cannot get out of those fuckers.
You could buy a Ferrari.
You could be stupid and buy a Ferrari and go, God damn it, I can't afford this car.
And you go bankrupt.
And they will allow you to go bankrupt.
That can happen.
You can have a business, make terrible decisions, lose all your money, go bankrupt, and literally be absolved of your debt.
When you find out what the student loan industry is in this country and how much money children go...
You're a fucking child when you're You're 18 years old, right?
So you make some ridiculous decision to go to some school and you get some grant or you get some sort of scholarship and then the rest of it you're going to get loans or whatever the hell your situation is.
And then you get out of four years and then you go and do your masters, you go and do some graduate work.
Oh, you're fucked!
You're fucked!
You're so broke!
And then if you get out, what are the odds you even get a job in your field?
You have to scramble to try to make some money, and then you have this never-ending pool of debt that you have to suck a little bit out of every month.
I think that free education, I mean, if it would be possible, if it is possible to do it without ruining the educational system, if it's not already ruined, if it is possible to do that, it would be like one of the best things we could ever do for young people.
Just keep them from being saddled down with some bullshit that you have to keep with you for the rest of your life.
That's a really important point because if you sort of look across dimensions culturally, they're all geared towards supporting a certain kind of mindset and mentality, which is productivity-oriented, which is...
You know, capitalism and consumer supportive in terms of that, you know, sort of financial apparatus.
And so the things and elements, you know, like Graham Hancock has talked about this, you know, the elements that are convenient to that paradigm, including psychiatric meds and even alcohol on some level, like these more sort of suppressive, consciousness suppressive tools.
Are sanctioned, right?
But the things that would encourage risk-taking, encourage creative expression, encourage, you know, sort of consciousness expansion are, you know, demonized or, you know, rendered illegal because they're inconvenient to the paradigm.
I guess, but honestly, I think it's a victim of circumstance more than anything.
I believe that when the Psychedelic Act of 1970 was put into play, it was clearly put into play because they were trying to arrest people that were in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement.
That's been proven.
It's been proven that there was a collusion and that what they were trying to do...
Was make it so that they could go after these people in the civil rights movement, go after these people that were in the anti-war movement, and they would catch them for drugs and arrest them, and they would cripple these movements.
And this is all documented real clear by the Nixon administration.
The reason why they passed That sweeping psychedelics act of 1970, which covered a lot of stuff that's not even psychoactive.
They didn't even know what they were doing.
And they missed some of the big ones.
They missed like 5-methoxy-DMT, which is one of the most potent psychedelic drugs known to man.
Just a few years ago, you used to be able to buy that shit online from chemical companies.
They would give you like a jug of it.
They could get a whole city high for a month.
And you could go buy it with a credit card.
Not that I know of anybody who did it.
And I certainly didn't.
And I definitely still don't have any of it.
But if I did, it's not even illegal.
That's what's crazy.
It's like they made stuff that was a normal part of human use for thousands and thousands of years.
They made it highly illegal.
And they did it at a time when they were trying to...
Break down these people that were trying to change society, right?
So that was 1970. But along the way, I think what's really happened is it became a matter of financial risk.
Like, marijuana's a big one.
Like, financial risk of the pharmaceutical drug companies if they found out that there's so many different things that marijuana could help.
Whether it is people's appetite or certain arthritic conditions or you can go down the list.
Kids with epilepsy.
It's a huge factor on children with autism, especially edible marijuana.
All these different things that it treats.
If that was made legal and people started turning to that and exercising a holistic approach, it would cost the pharmaceutical companies literally billions of dollars a year.
So I think that's the big conspiracy.
I think it's not really a paradigm, consciousness sort of a thing as much as it's a financial thing.
The same reason why, also involved in trying to keep these drugs illegal, you have prison guard unions because they want to keep their money coming in.
You have police unions.
I mean, there's a lot of that where you find lobbying by these unlikely groups and you're like, I don't understand.
And then you go, oh, they just want to make more money.
They're more than willing to lock people up.
They're more than willing to demonize helpful things that grow naturally and have virtually no negative effects in terms of your health.
Also, which is not as common in men, but probably because nobody's looking for it.
Yeah, so I was diagnosed with that, and I just had this intuitive sense that I wasn't going to go to a conventional doctor, even though I had never, ever...
I've done anything but dismiss alternative medicine.
I was hardcore into the pharmaceutical model, very into science from that perspective.
But I knew that all they had to offer was Synthroid, and I had enough patients that never felt well on it.
I took that stuff for a while, and then I switched to Armour Thyroid.
And that's one reason why I got pissed at Dr. Drew.
When Dr. Drew was giving that...
When he was talking about Hillary Clinton and all of her health issues, and he was going over her prescription, he was mocking the fact that she was on Armour Thyroid.
He was saying that that's old.
That's an old way of treating him.
I'm like, he doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about.
He's absolutely wrong, because I went through a bunch of different stuff, and then when I took Armour Thyroid, all of the symptoms went away.
I think it was more about what I took out at that point than what I put in.
But when I saw the change on paper, I was like, this is not even supposed to be possible.
This is literally not even we're not even taught that this is possible, let alone that it is anything, you know, that putting autoimmune conditions into remission has anything to do with diet.
And so I was really indignant.
And I've always been a science nut.
I've always spent Saturday, you know, like a good four hours every Saturday on PubMed.
Of course, I'm looking at different stuff over time.
But I went to PubMed and I was like, what else didn't I learn?
And I was like on an obsessive rampage for like a good couple of years.
And that's when I just turned over every stone, like everything, every sacred cow, whether all these meds we were talking about, like, you know, statins or acid blockers or antibiotics.
Then I got on to psych meds and then I started to look at the science supporting a very different kind of Perspective on, you know, this interconnected model and the gut microbiome and, you know, sort of the impact of belief on our, you know, biology that we can sort of like reprogram our hardware, you know, with our software, which is like we're the only species that can really do that.
I was an atheist my whole, like a belligerent, you know, sort of like Dawkins level atheist my whole life because I was a science worshiper.
And I was like, well, you know, spirituality and religion is for like weak people who like need to believe in some fairy tale to make them feel better about that.
And so, you know, when I had this crisis of faith, so to speak, like, I was lost for a long time because...
Science had sort of, you know, or what I believed had sort of failed me in some ways.
And then I didn't have, I don't know what, the readiness to start meditating or find out what, you know, people were talking about when it came to spirituality.
Although I followed the literature.
So like I read the literature on meditation and epigenetic expression for years and years and years.
It's like you're making a deal to slowly pay to poison yourself.
You're throwing a little bit of money in the pot every month, guaranteeing that 20 years down the line, 30 years down the line, however long it takes, you're going to have some bolt is going to come off the machinery.
And hey, Mike, you got a tumor in your lungs.
This is not good.
We're going to have to cut one of these things out of your chest.
And then we don't want to pretend that everything is okay, so we self-medicate, you know, whether with, you know, drugs or cigarettes or, you know, workaholism or, you know, sex addiction.
We're all sort of in this place not wanting to acknowledge that there's a reason.
You know, like, one of my favorite quotes is this, like, Krishnamurti quote that it's no measure of health to be well adapted to a profoundly sick society.
But his wife, who is married to him, was the one that said that she believed, like when she talked to him on the phone, that he had taken too much of his anti-anxiety medication.
And it'd be one thing to just be like, oh, she's like a grieving widow if there wasn't like a very indicting body of evidence that unequivocally, like literally two new studies just came out this week, that unequivocally, Implicate benzodiazepines in homicide and suicide.
A very important Finnish study demonstrated that benzodiazepines led to a 223% increase risk of committing homicide.
Jesus Christ!
along with antidepressants and actually other psychotropics, including stimulants, all of these medications have been linked to an increase in suicide as well.
So when I hear about a school shooting or I hear about the German Wings plane crash, What's the German Wings?
That guy, Lubig, who took down the German Wings plane, he just suicided with a whole plane of people and crashed the plane.
When I hear about these mass murder, menace to society kind of situations, My first thought is what psych meds were they on?
And my training...
Basically conditioned me to say, oh, well, they're mentally ill, so obviously they're taking psych meds.
That's like saying umbrellas cause the rain, right?
But actually, there's a massive suppressed body of literature that implicates these medications, all of them.
And we know why we think, right?
So we think that it has to do with the way you metabolize, some people metabolize these medications.
So you might be born with a genetic variant in your liver that makes it so that you, by design, metabolize medications differently than someone else, right?
So you can enter into a state of what's called auto-intoxication, right?
More easily than someone else, even sometimes in a couple of doses.
And you develop what's called akathisia-induced impulsivity, which is like, akathisia is like this feeling like you just want to crawl out of your skin, but you seem really chill.
It's like a really creepy horror movie level side effect.
I had known about this paper of which he was one of 10 or 11 subjects by these authors, Lucere and Crotty.
It was from 2011. Older paper.
Where they took all these people who had committed like heinous acts, right?
Like, you know, murdered their therapist or killed their child or themselves jumped in front of a train or whatever.
And they were prescribed antidepressants for totally run-of-the-mill stress, right?
So like work stress or a dog dying, not because they had like severe mental illness and were suicidal, right?
These people were not suicidal.
They were not homicidal.
They were normal citizens.
And they went on to do this crazy thing.
And what they found was when they analyzed each of these, you know, victims, perpetrators, however you want to look at it, they found they all had these liver variants that I'm talking about so that they were basically poisoned by medication.
But before they were poisoned, they were put into this altered state where they did impulsively violent things.
So this guy basically gets on the stage where I was speaking.
And he talks about how he was prescribed Paxil because he worked, I think, as an accountant.
And he was prescribed it for work-related stress.
It was just taking on too much stress at work, right?
And he remembers feeling like his mind like slip away, like he began.
You entered this realm of like psychosis, essentially.
And he started to develop all of these paranoid beliefs.
But he looked and people told him like, oh, you're getting better.
I'm so glad you're feeling better.
Long story short, he strangled his 11 year old son.
They did, which is rare, actually, believe it or not, because a lot of times these people are jailed.
So it's like, you know...
Punishing the victim, so to speak.
But that's sort of the issue that it's an important issue, right?
Because your friend, right?
Okay, so let's say some people, this is in line with their consciousness to not have any curiosity about why they're having symptoms, not want to see what they can do in terms of optimizing their lifestyle.
It's just like not their deal, right?
So they want to take a medication and they want to suppress their symptoms and just like hope it works out.
That's fine.
I don't care what people do.
This should be a free country, right?
You do what you want to do.
You practice the medicine that makes sense to you.
But the sort of like chink in the armor is perhaps this issue, which is that we don't really have a good way of identifying.
You know, it's Russian roulette.
We don't have a good way of identifying if you're going to be David Carmichael.
So, and it's, you know, it's one thing to kill yourself impulsively, but like, you know, the school shootings, for example, have, without an exception, been committed by people who are kids who are recently medicated.
And when you bring that up, by the way, people call you a gun rights apologist.
Well, you're distorting the issue.
You're turning it to a psych meds issue when it's a gun issue.
If these people don't have guns, they can't commit these crimes.
That, to me, is a very bizarre way of looking at one clear...
But it's what you were talking about before, where psychiatrists aren't talking about this.
This is such a taboo subject that by the time it gets to the average educated and informed person, who for the most part is probably liberal, because we're talking about people that want to get rid of guns, what they're seeing is only the gun.
They're not seeing the mindset behind the ability to do something like that.
Like, literally, apart from functional medicine doctors, perhaps, but for the most part, they're not going to be the ones starting patients on psychiatric meds.
Most psych meds are started by primary care doctors after a 10-minute appointment.
There's a scientific consensus that this issue exists, that with this liver issue, that if you take these medications, it can turn you into this or take you to this psychotic state?
The akathisia is the experience, the symptom, neurologic symptom that's induced by the impaired, it's thought to be impaired metabolism on the liver level of these medications.
So this is not like a theory.
It's not a theory.
It's right.
Yeah.
But there's a lot of stuff like that.
Like there's, you know, in the literature, there's something called antidepressant tachyphylaxis, which is the acknowledgement in the scientific literature that like a good 30 percent of the time they just stop having an effect, like stop working.
Yeah, that's the thing that people that I know that have taken them have said that the doctor will tell you, hey, this is going to work for a little while and then it's not going to work anymore.
Now, you could argue that I have a skewed exposure to the population because I only see the people who've been on 10, 20 years and want to desperately get off and can't, you know.
But I am, again, this public health issue aside, which is that these medications could be inducing impulsive violence at random, and perhaps we should at least be talking about this as a society.
Right?
That issue aside, I'm, you know, a crusader for informed consent.
I believe that you just should know all the options and all of the available science, and then you make your own damn decision, right?
With your free will, you do what's right for you, what matches your level of consciousness, right?
The problem is that most people are not taken off of meds and they are maintained for long term, even though all of the long term science suggests that people do worse long term on all categories of psychiatric meds than if they were never medicated.
And this includes antipsychotics for schizophrenia.
And the person who exposed this and really, you know, sort of blew the whistle on this issue, his book changed my life and made me put down my prescription pad, is Robert Whitaker, who's an investigative journalist, and he wrote a book called Anatomy of an Epidemic.
And I read it, you know, and it came out, and I was ready to read it and receive it because I just had this health experience of my own, right?
So I read it, and basically what he says is, okay, so we have...
with escalating rates of treatment, right?
Like more and more people, you know, 16% of the American population is on these meds, right?
Including a lot of your friends, my friends.
And with more treatment, shouldn't we have less disability, right?
Like shouldn't people be more functional and less sick?
And what we find is that the reverse is true, you know, that we have more disability with more medicating.
So his book goes through all of these studies up, I never heard about one of them in my Ivy League training.
All of these studies that are not industry funded, right?
Because we know that the pharmaceutical industry is four times more likely to publish something when it's positive than when it's not.
And they can publish whatever they want and not publish whatever they don't want, right?
So they are in charge of their own policing, which is the fox guarding the hen house kind of a situation.
So these were all non-industry funded studies.
And the story they tell is quite different than what you might imagine.
The story is similar because if we look at outcomes in the long term, like do you have a job?
Do you have a friend network?
Are you a functional member of society?
If we look at those parameters in the long term, people do worse.
And his argument is that that's why we have more and more of the population literally getting checks from the government because they cannot function in society even though they're medicated to the hilt.
You know, like they're fully treated, so to speak.
And he makes this argument for benzodiazepines, for stimulants.
And if you look into the literature, you understand that all that's happening is you're forcing an adaptation on the part of the body.
This is a chemical.
It is not fixing anything.
And just like alcohol, okay, like some people love alcohol.
For some people, it's very relaxing, right?
Some people hate it and it's terrible and it makes them sick.
So just like any other chemical substance with unpredictably psychoactive effects, it may be adaptive for a given period of time.
But we know through the alcohol analogy that there's no free lunch, right?
So even if it's adaptive in the short term, your body adapts, habituates, you become potentially dependent, although that's a more complex conversation.
You know, what drives that dependency?
The long term is known to us.
The long term picture of chronic use of alcohol for, let's say, social anxiety doesn't look pretty if you want to just stop drinking 15 years down the line after you've been drinking every day.
But we've been told to think of psych meds differently.
And what I'm trying to say is we shouldn't be.
Because they are just chemicals having chemical effects that your body is adapting to.
So obviously that chemical effect is not going to endure, right?
Like it's not going to last.
And then there's going to be a cost.
So one of the major pieces of informed consent I would like to see foregrounded for people is it may be nearly physically impossible for you to come off of this medication Jesus.
We're not taking the glass out.
We're just like putting a Band-Aid on it, giving you a Tylenol and being like, okay, get out of here.
You know, so we're not fixing the problem, so to speak.
So we're masking it.
And there's going to be, you know, sort of, it's going to, it's like a whack-a-mole.
Like, is this going to keep manifesting in other places?
So people are kept on these meds long-term, and then coming off them is...
I've come to the conclusion that they're more habit-forming than any chemicals on the planet.
Crack, OxyContin, nothing.
They do not hold a candle to how hard it can be to come off of psych meds.
I would say yes, although I've seen exceptions to that, too.
You know, I would say that there are certain antidepressants that are notoriously challenging, you know, meds like Paxil or Effexor.
But then Prozac, which is supposed to be like, have this long half-life and be easy to come off of.
I have patients who develop what looks like AIDS. Like, they get so sick in such complicated ways that no one believes them.
And then they think that they're, you know, well, you must have MS or you must have, you know, mono or you must have, you know, some new diagnosis.
And the literature since 2014 has told us, no, this is a withdrawal.
This is a complicated, protracted withdrawal that is worse than any other withdrawal.
Meds out there.
And so if you knew that, you might be like, all right, well, what are my other options?
Do I have other options?
And since I put down my prescription, I have many years now of experience of treating all manner of bipolar disorder, suicidality, psychosis, without medication.
And let me tell you, the outcomes that I get today, I couldn't have I fantasized about when I was prescribing.
I didn't even know that this was possible.
So if you know that these outcomes are possible, then maybe you would consider a lifestyle approach But you have to know it's possible.
Many of my friends are conventional psychiatrists, so I have compassion for people who are in the trenches practicing conventional approaches because I thought I was doing good, you know, when I was prescribing.
I thought I was doing good things for these people.
He rents from my office, you know, with all the Buddhas everywhere.
I mean, he's more conscious about it than that.
Actually, he works in forensics, which means that he works to sort of identify where people in the legal system are being medicated necessarily or unnecessarily.
So I see the sickest people that no one can help because they've gotten to the end of the road.
So they've done electroconvulsive therapy.
They're on six medications.
They've been hospitalized even in state facilities.
They're, you know, at the end of their rope because they're not well.
And even conventional psychiatry has nothing left to offer them.
So I, you know, people think like, oh, I treat the worried well, like some Upper East Side, you know, woman who's having an affair and she's stressed out or They call it the worried well?
The worried well, yeah.
But it's not, you know, it's not true.
Like, my patients are very sick.
And, you know, I have an online version of what I do in the office.
And the outcomes there are even wilder than the ones in my office.
So you can even do this totally on your own.
It's not like some voodoo I'm working on Madison Avenue in New York.
But for example, I've started to video interview these people as social proof.
It's all on my website and you can see what they have to say about it.
That's the point I'm ultimately going to make, is that this process of moving through the fire of your mental illness, which I don't believe in mental illness, but moving through the fire...
I believe that we are, by design as humans, you know, that we feel things intensely.
And some people have experiences, you know, like in other cultural settings, some of the early experiences as what we would label schizophrenic, you know, there is an elder that is assigned to you to shepherd you through your psychospiritual emergence.
You know, we just don't have a cultural context for anything other than full and total complacency, full and total adaptation to this sick society, right?
Right, but regardless of environmental influences and whatever genetic problems you might have, people can have something really wrong with their mind, right?
So we have turned what might have been a single-episode experience that, when properly supported, totally, completely resolves and you get back to life, which is what used to happen even in the early 1900s.
You know, when we documented the natural history, so to speak, of these illnesses, we would see that they would go away on their own within a year.
So that's what I'm going to tell you about Allie, right?
Okay.
And her video is on my website.
This is all, you know, fully with her consent that I share it.
And she came to me end of her rope.
She came with her husband from Kansas to my office, and she was...
What are her episodes?
Her episodes are three days before her period, for years, she would develop psychotic symptoms, become totally paranoid and delusional, to the extent that at one point she was digging a hole in her face trying to get at a thread she thought was in there.
She attempted to commit suicide multiple times.
She had been on at least seven different psychiatric medications, in and out of hospitals, like a laundry list of diagnoses like this, literally.
Including bipolar disorder with psychotic features, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, you know, all manner of dating back from like eating disorders in her earlier history.
She'd been through the ringer.
Okay.
So she was like a professional psych patient.
And I was the last stop before an inpatient facility, basically, like institutionalization.
Okay.
I told her, this is how it's going to go.
So I have a very heavy hand up front, and I can be a hard ass for sure.
But it's in service of passing the baton to these women, because I don't have long-term patience.
There's an intense window, and then they...
They're done with me, right?
Once they're through the birth canal, so to speak, right?
So what I asked her to do was follow a very strict diet.
So the template for the diet that I recommend is based not only on, like, my personal experience, but also on my work with my mentor, Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez, who was the most badass figure in modern medicine.
He passed suddenly in 2015, but he, for 27 years, treated terminal cancer, metastatic, like no hope cancer, literally, neurodegenerative illnesses, Lyme disease, diabetes, all with 100% holistic approach that was all with 100% holistic approach that was based on three pillars.
Because the caffeine stimulates that nerve bundle.
It's basically like jacking up your liver.
Because we don't know how to detox better than our own body does.
Your liver is charged with that responsibility.
So if you can help your liver do it, it's going to be best.
And this is most relevant in cancer, like radical cancer treatments, because when the tumors are breaking down, you need to flush that waste or you'll die.
Like literally, it's called tumor lysis syndrome.
So, you know, some early pioneers discover that coffee enemas are critical, like literally life or death critical for helping you flush those wastes.
So I learned about them from the master.
And since using them in my practice, completely changed my practice.
So like a med taper that would take two to three years now takes me like six months with a given patient.
So Ali started doing coffee enemas twice a day.
But the dietary template is a little bit...
I wouldn't say it's like totally...
People think healthy, right?
And they think like vegan or they think vegetarian or they think, you know, tons of green juice or whatever.
And I noticed early on that as long as my patients ate a fair amount of red meat, they got better.
And I used to be like an ethical vegetarian when I was eating like cheese doodles and Pepsi, basically.
And so it was very confusing to me that, you know, red meat could be a healthy part of anyone's lifestyle or, you know, anything I could ever wrap my mind around recommending.
But...
Over the past 10 years and now with the understanding of Nick's Metric, you know, where there are some people who do require red meat to balance their nervous system, essentially.
Now, is this an actual requirement, or can this be mitigated through, like, a very smart and conscious vegetarian diet?
Like, if you're really careful about your nutrients and making sure that you get the essential fatty acids, making sure you get the essential amino acids and a really balanced profile of vegetable protein?
Ultimately, my goal in this month is to clear the slate of all the stuff that's yanking on your brain and your immune system and driving inflammation so that you can begin to sense what you need.
Yeah, he was like a dentist in the 1900s who like went around the world with his wife and studied all of these different people who, like indigenous people all over, like Eskimos, like Himalayan, you know.
Folks, Mexican folks and South American, and studied the healthy indigenous populations that were not eating industrialized food, right?
And what he found was they all ate different stuff.
So there isn't like a diet, right?
So how do you know what is your version, right?
So like an Eskimo doesn't eat coconuts and like a Maasai warrior doesn't eat whale blubber.
So like, how do you know...
What's your version?
The truth is only you know.
But our signals are so distorted and suppressed that we can't figure it out.
But if you have someone, I mean, I'm obviously not a vegan, but if you have someone that comes to you that does not want to eat meat, but wants to try this out, and wants to try this out with, I mean, it's really just the science of nutrition.
I mean, you can eat a vegan diet and be healthy, as long as you do it right, can't you?
Well, so his model is that there are different kinds of people and different kinds of people, and I can explain a little more, require, require for their health certain dietary complements and what are called the parasympathetic dominants.
Right.
Which is more like the Eskimos.
Mm-hmm.
Require red meat to be healthy.
You will not only never be fully healthy, but then you're at risk for developing the illnesses that parasympathetic dominance develop, like leukemia, lymphoma, hypothyroidism, chemical sensitivity, chronic fatigue, depression.
Right?
So many, many, many, many, many former vegetarians converted from vegetarianism because they felt depressed.
Right?
So while that's true, on the other side of the spectrum are the sympathetic dominants who don't need to eat red meat.
And who do really well on like a full force like plants, grains, you know, even a high carb diet and they feel well.
And it's when they eat too much red meat, particularly industrial red meat, that they develop solid tumors like, you know, breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, colon cancer.
So essentially, when you're dealing with particularly indigenous populations and people that have a very strong gene pool that comes from one very strong area in the world, like Eskimos or like people that live in the Pacific Northwest or something like that...
Not Pacific North Wales, but you know what I mean, like Alaskan people.
Like there's people that live on like Nunavac and all these different islands that have eaten seal for hundreds and hundreds of years and have very little access to vegetables, right?
And meanwhile they have super low instances of cancer.
So it's just because their bodies have adapted and evolved.
So when it comes to nutrition-based science, there ain't none.
There's just none.
Because the idea of nutrition research is like taking one nutrient out of the context of the person, out of the context of their life, out of the context of their cultural surroundings.
That's how we treat it.
We treat it like a pharmaceutical.
We look at single nutrient out of a whole complement of information.
So we just don't...
I tried.
Learning about nutrition that way.
And I drove myself crazy because I was like, what the hell do I tell my patients to eat?
I can't find any science to support this.
And that's why I looked for outcomes.
So Nick Gonzalez's outcomes are unprecedented in medical history.
Literally, like 34-year terminal pancreatic cancer survivor.
Do you know how long you have to live when you're diagnosed with pancreatic cancer?
Yeah, so his studies, though, and his little tests, although, you know, they're very small, it's just him and his wife, they're really fascinating to see how two people who are in the exact same household, same environment, you know, one's male, one's female, but also just different genetic and backgrounds, and how wildly they vary.
But the truth is, if you actually take this break and detox, so to speak, from all those addictive foods, and you have this shift in your body, you're not going to want it.
I used to eat even through my training when I trained at Bellevue in New York.
And at the gift store, they used to know me, so they'd have Twizzlers and dark chocolate Milky Way waiting for me every day.
Every day!
So I was like an addict, you know, by any definition.
And you can resolve that, you know?
And then you figure out, like, what actually you're meant to eat.
Because Nick always said, you will eat the food that you're meant to eat.
You'll want it.
But you have to sort of get your brain out of the way.
So if you have, you know, all of these nutrition gurus in your head telling you like red meat's going to kill you and give you a heart attack, then you're going to not want it.
But if you can, that's why I demand the openness as a criteria, you know, to participate with me anyway in a clinical setting.
Because then, like, I can't tell you how many of my patients were former vegans and now they're totally thriving.
Okay, so let me finish telling you about Allie, which I didn't finish telling you.
Okay, so that's basically what she did, right?
She was off all meds except for, as needed, Klonopin when she met me.
Because you are initiating yourself into the process of determining what's best for you.
So the whole point of this month, this military month that I impose on people, is that it's like an initiation to your own.
Self.
So the stuff you're doing, whether it's the meditation enemas, detoxing your products and stuff like that, basic functional medicine stuff, or the diet, it's all in your control, which is why you can do this without me, which has been the best evidence I've ever...
I never even dreamed that was totally possible, and now I'm Super pumped about it because the last thing I want it to be is like about, you know, the Kelly Brogan effect or something like that's not at all what I'm interested in.
And it can be challenging for the first week, and then you start to see the dividends.
And you want to just have one month in your adult life where you just see what's up when you control for these variables.
It's worth it.
Right.
Because then you know what the sort of relationships are between you, your personal, you know, biology, and these, you know, elements of your nutrition.
So what's the general reaction when you get someone to get rid of processed sugars, cut out the grains, cut out the nonsense, dairy, and just eat regular healthy food?
But, like, who is it, you know, when you're just eating convenience food?
Like, that's a natural response.
Right.
And then sometimes it's much more radical.
So like in Ali's case, within two cycles, she was completely symptom-free.
So she went from grossly psychotic and suicidal to not only totally symptom-free, but now she's like moved through, is moving through, I would say, a process of awakening.
Like it's a spiritual shift.
Right?
Because it's like, you know, Gibran says, like, the wound is where the light enters.
And we don't have that consciousness as a society because we think that suffering...
It means that grief, pain, suffering is where you grow.
Like, it's where the real experience of being human and where the real contact with who you are...
So this is true even for something like ayahuasca.
Why would anyone ever do something like that?
But the point is, through that experience of humbling surrender, you meet yourself.
But we don't have a consciousness for that in America.
In fact, crying, like literally tears, is a symptom in the DSM. So it's literally a pathological symptom to cry.
That is the most basic evidence of our humanity, is that we cry.
And if we are living in a culture that says, you're sick when you're crying, stop doing that.
Take this so that you can stop feeling.
We have a bigger problem on our hands, right?
So I know I can't just sit in my Madison Avenue office taking people off of meds and think like, oh, you know, I'm changing the world.
This is a systemic cultural issue that we make no room for things to fall apart.
We make no room.
Do you know that with the DSM-5, so like the latest DSM, they took out something called the bereavement clause from the depression diagnostic category?
And that means that if you meet criteria for depression, which is what you would imagine, you know, well, changes in sleep, changes in appetite, low mood, poor concentration, hopelessness.
If you meet that criteria for two weeks, it doesn't matter if your kid just died or your wife or like your dad died.
And so because they don't get the lows, they don't get to rebound and get the highs.
And then also find themselves, understand themselves, so they can manage how low the lows get through the mind and through your just living in the moment and understanding.
We just baby our way through life because no one is teaching us how to confront our deepest fears, explore the shadow realms, and integrate it into our own power.
We have no understanding of it.
We make fun of that.
We think it's woo-weirdness that other cultures can do in their little tropical islands.
taking people off of psych meds somehow is seeming to serve as like an initiation process for like thousands today.
So interesting, right?
Like that you took it because you thought it was a good idea and it's so challenging to come off it and forces you to confront a lot of elements of your consciousness, live differently.
It forces you to work with your body differently.
It forces you to begin to look at why you went on them in the first place.
And then there's a whole nother layer of just it's being really physically disabling in some cases to come off these meds.
And it really brings you to your knees sometimes.
And so a lot of what I think of myself as doing is just like holding space for that process to happen.
And then once it happens, they move through into this like awakened state.
I mean, I mean, the vast majority of my patients and online course completers go on to become healers.
But you surely must experience a massive blowback from just conventional psychiatric medicine practitioners who are looking at what you're saying and saying, so you're telling someone all they have to do is just stop eating sugar and they won't be psychotic anymore.
I know you're not saying that, but I'm boiling it down to that.
You're saying that you took this woman and you took her off of processed foods, you made her eat healthy vegetables and meat and eggs and healthy fats.
Coconut oil and avocado oil and detox and medication and all the inflammation went away.
The problem of the insulin spikes and all the blood sugar spikes, that goes away and then the body somehow or another comes back to some sort of a baseline.
There are real root drivers, but we don't know what it is for you, right?
Like I said, it could be physiologic, where it's like, you know, there's a similar story about a lifelong vegetarian woman, this is in the published literature, who became psychotically depressed, was admitted for catatonia.
Catatonia is like the worst diagnosis in In psychiatry, right?
She's basically unresponsive.
She was so mentally ill.
They treated her with electroshock therapy because the antipsychotics and antidepressants they used didn't work.
Finally, she gets transferred to an outside hospital because they were like, well, we don't know what to do with this woman.
They check her B12 level and it's like...
You know, tanked.
They give her a couple of B12 injections.
And not only is she better, but she's better than she's been in like 14 years from a couple of B12. So my point is that for her, it was B12. For her, it was wheat.
For someone else, it could be blood sugar instability.
For someone else, thyroid, autoimmune thyroid can make you cry.
Crazy.
Can make you suicidal, according to the literature.
Okay, so they're put in this study, 12-week study, and they get to either stay with their same dose of Prozac that helped them or they get crossed over to the placebo arm, the sugar pill arm.
And they don't know which is going to happen, right?
So what happened, interestingly, in that study is that the time they were crossed over or not, they both, both groups became statistically significantly depressed, right?
So like Mary takes her 40 milligrams on Tuesday, enters the study.
Is still taking her 40 milligrams like next Thursday, but now all of a sudden she's acutely depressed just because of the possibility that she might have gotten the sugar pill.
That's called the nocebo effect.
So the nocebo effect is the impact of fear or negative beliefs that limit your ability to respond to a given intervention.
It's real.
It's more important than anything we're actually doing is what you believe is happening.
And I would equate on some level like psych meds with Krispy Kreme donuts.
So there are some people who are going to say like, wow, that really helped me.
So this guy, Irving Kirsch, right?
He's a psychologist who's like a placebo effect expert, arguably.
What he identified was that when you control for what's called the active placebo effect, which is what happens when you feel the side effects you've been warned about, Of a given medication, and then you feel the medication is working, and then it actually works, right?
So when you control for the active placebo effect by giving people in a trial antidepressant, but then also a medication like atropine, for example, that has very similar side effects, dry mouth, you know, headache, constipation, this kind of thing, there's no difference.
So what he showed is that there is no statistically significant effect of antidepressants above and beyond placebo.
And that the reason that people believe that they're working, and they are, right?
So they believe it and then they do, is because they feel a shift.
They feel a change.
And they've been educated by commercials and their doctor maybe about these side effects.
And then they start to say, oh, my chemical imbalance is being...
There was a study once that was done on a kid who had some horrible wart disease where it was incurable and it was like spreading all over their body and all over their arm.
But this is unharnessed, and this is untrained, and this is very different than what's going on with the mind with meditation, which is harnessed and trained and focused.
So your thought is that this mind factor is not just an inconvenience, it's not just a variable, but maybe one of the most crucial aspects to overall health.
And again, conventional medicine is interested in this to some extent now, noticing that what people believe, like that you'll lose less blood in surgery if you visualize losing less blood in surgery, that that actually happens.
How can you control the physiologic activity of your body?
So they have one group that says, you're going to do a visualization where you just like visualize your body letting go of less blood after the surgery or during the surgery.
So you know where we see this is in cancer diagnosis.
It's called medical hexing, that when you are diagnosed with cancer, the completion of suicide, but also other accidents, and your health basically declines.
Simply because of the diagnosis and that's why it's considered to be it's like bone pointing or something.
It's what we've always known that like someone could put a hex on you and if you know that a hex is on you you're like god damn there's a goddamn hex on me and you start believing it and then it could really cause a huge issue.
And we don't want to think about it that way because we think medicine is science and it's, you know, this, you know, sort of impenetrable, you know, the hallowed halls of truth.
But it's a religion just like anything else.
In fact, Nick Gonzalez, my mentor, said it's the last really unrecognized religion on the planet is medicine.
And, you know, we have special language and we wear costumes and there's initiatory rites.
But it's real in a lot of aspects, like the medicine involved in treating a bacterial infection, antibiotics, the medicine involved in healing a broken arm.
Well, also the denial of the aspects of nutrition.
Denial of the influence of nutrition.
This idea of only concentrating on the medicine and not concentrating on what we know to be viable alternatives and things that can make your body healthier.
There's certain aspects they're looking at, the aspects of medication, and because of all the aforementioned variables like student loans, the consensus of your peers, everybody's in this sort of group together, there's all this unspoken word that you're not going to criticize, the establishment, and you can't really do that because if you do, you're out of a job and all your money that you spend on...
If you forget that, which is easy to do, especially because...
And we think of doctors as priests.
So if you forget that, then you can get into trouble because you take their word for something you perhaps should be doing a broader investigation on.
But if you remember that it's a business and it's very lucrative, successful business, I mean, it's the business model of all time, then you'll look with some circumspection upon their claims and their approach.
But our education as doctors is totally through the lens of pharmaceutical model.
Regulatory agencies, famously, like the FDA, CDC, and industry, it's a revolving door, literally.
And this is totally available information on the Internet.
That they're all the same people.
So we really do have the fox guarding the henhouse, and that's where we get into trouble.
If we don't have transparency around a true regulatory body that is not fiscally invested, we're going to have a problem, especially if we're presenting this as the only legitimate course of action for a sick patient, where you can actually, as a parent, have your children taken away from you if you don't participate in the model.
Yeah, recently it was the number one prescription.
I think it was two years ago.
Synthroid's always up there.
But yeah, it was.
And it's because it's...
There's these trends, I guess, these stylistic trends in prescribing that, of course, have no evidence base.
But in psychiatry, we're really vulnerable to that because there isn't a clear, you know, A to B in terms of presenting symptoms and medication recommendation.
It's sort of a free-for-all.
You know, you can pile on as many or as few as you want.
I think that highlights why that stuff works for people and why a lot of different things work for people.
A lot of different kinds of religions and unfortunately a lot of different cults and a lot of different ideologies and a lot of different mindsets do work for people.
Even fucking CrossFit.
There was a great article that I read about equating CrossFit to the fact that people do not have these religious groups.
So, there are these Canadian studies that basically looked at the addictive model of cocaine, right?
So, like, you put...
We know, right, that if you put a rat in a cage by itself and you give it the choice of water or cocaine, it's going to drink the cocaine until it dies.
Yeah, so then these researchers were basically like, well, hold on a minute.
That's like totally a natural environment for a rat to be in.
So what if we put it in rat heaven where it can have sex with the rats and hang out and have a community and there's things to play with and little wheels and whatever?
Then what happens?
And if you give them cocaine or water, they don't touch the cocaine.
And you can even addict them in isolation and they will voluntarily detox in rat heaven.
And so any time we have the opportunity, whether through AA or CrossFit, to plug into a community, we fix something inside ourselves so we have less of a vulnerability to abuse the effects of a substance like cocaine or alcohol.
I mean, you're kind of in a rat park every day if you're in a cubicle environment, you're in your car in traffic, or you're on the bus and no one's talking to anybody.
And then there's shared suffering that's coming from things like CrossFit, where you have these moments where you're bonding together, almost like you guys are, you know, you're in the trenches, right?
Yoga's really hard, and that's part of what's good about it, is that we need, I think we need hard things.
I think your body, if you're just constantly nerfed, and everything's soft, and everything's a free ride, and there's no ups or downs, and everything's middle, like, what is that?
So, like, when you're having a difficult window in your life, you know, and maybe you know why, like you had a loss, or maybe you don't know why, and things are just off, right?
Like, either you have a consciousness that says, there's something here, you know, there's something to this, there's some meaning to this, I gotta look deeper, I gotta pay attention to things, I gotta rebalance and differ, I gotta up my game, you know, of self-care.
Or you're like, this sucks.
I don't want to feel this way.
And there are thousands of prescribers, like, happy to open their door to you.
The real problem is that there's so many different options other than what's going to make you healthy.
And there's so many different ways to just numb this whole experience.
Just numb it all down.
Like, let's put some ice on it, baby.
You're going to be fine.
Let's numb this whole thing down.
I have been of the opinion, especially over the last few years, I've really focused on this heavily and I've talked about it maybe too much, but I think people need to struggle in order to appreciate how nice things are and also to mitigate the effects of actual bad things that happen to you.
If you can do difficult, hard things on a daily basis, on a regular basis, You know, whatever your schedule allows for, but whether it's martial arts or whether it's yoga or whether it's difficult, struggle.
Physical struggles where you have to test yourself, where you have to pull through, you have to have discipline and resolve, and it's hard to do.
When you get through that, you develop that muscle and that understanding of struggle.
And believe it or not, this is where it's going to seem really weird.
The struggle that you get in a yoga class is so much harder than the struggle that you'll ever experience outside of that.
But the truth is that when you research the interventions, you will find...
So I had a natural birth because the research that I did on the interventions, things like fetal monitoring, episiotomy, even ultrasound, let alone C-section...
You know, antibiotics during delivery, etc.
What I found was that there wasn't science to support them.
And actually, the science suggests that they should be abandoned.
Women have been made to feel afraid of their own bodies.
It's the birth control thing we were talking about earlier.
If you think of your body as a total pain that's dangerous, it's going to fuck up at any given time, and you're going to wish you had listened to your doctor, who's a man and has never had a baby...
You could obviously be led down this path that says, let me manage your body.
And in that mentality, in my opinion, is that you're robbed of this opportunity, like psychedelic level opportunity to have a transformation of your consciousness.
Because it is hard, and it is scary, and it breaks your mind.
My mind broke on that day.
Broke.
And it's never been recovered.
Because it was literally so intense that my mind was telling me, you're gonna die, you're gonna die, you're gonna die, you're gonna die.
So, is there a self-conscious aspect of it where you do recognize that there are certain science-based practitioners that will be, like, rolling their eyes at you?
And I published it, and it was a really weird experience because I was a total newbie.
I'd never written a book before or whatever.
And out the gate, I got this very generous advance from a mainstream publisher, which shocked me.
And then it comes time to publish it, and they can't get me on a single The Today Show, Dr. Oz, 60 Minutes, and they're used to waltzing their authors who they give these large advances to right onto these platforms, mainstream media platforms.
I told them, it is not going to work with me.
You haven't worked with someone like me before.
Trust me, it's not going to work out.
These are all pharma-funded outlets.
Even NPR, PBS, they all are.
So we're going to have to come up with something else and Ultimately, they didn't listen and they started to spaz when I, a month before launch, didn't have a single interview.
They'd never had that happen before.
And so it was cool because alt media, you know, like this, I just called on a bunch of my friends and colleagues and It was like top 20 on Amazon within the first week.
He picked up 3 million Twitter followers in recent days, most of which appear to be recently created Twitter bots.
Screenwriter John Niven pointed out Tuesday morning that Trump's account saw a big spike in followers over the weekend, most of them newly created accounts without photos or tweets.
Says President Trump, like other Twitter users with large following, has a large number of followers that appear to be bots or inauthentic automated user profiles.
What's false, Trump did not receive an influx of five million new Twitter followers in three days.
They use intentionally shitty language so that if you follow them, their poor grammar sort of alerts them to suspicious people so that suspicious people don't interact with them, but dumb people.
So they're a honeypot that creates this environment that stupid people are attracted to because they can't see the grammatical errors because they're dumb.
And so it makes it more effective.
So these Nigerian scammers apparently...
They purposely use bad grammar.
Like, they're more than capable of using good English, but they use this shitty grammar so that the people that they do get are just really dumb.
It would be a big, big deal if we found out that pharmaceutical companies were actively engaging in the use of these bots to attack people like you.
If you had someone like WikiLeaks on your side that dug into this shit and got some whistleblower from the pharmaceutical industry that cares, And release that stuff.
I don't know who made this quote, but it's a wonderful one in this regard that, Before diagnosing yourself with depression, first make sure you're not surrounded by assholes.
They kind of like do the telephone game with quotes and sort of like, this is what people are saying and then they go through all the iterations of how it's been translated out and Well, do you remember that one Greg Giraldo joke that got attributed to me online, and people had photos of me with Greg Giraldo's quote, and something that I never said.
It's absolutely not mine.
I didn't know whose it was, and then someone had to say, it's Greg Giraldo's, and then people say, why are you stealing Greg Giraldo's shit?
I'm like, I'm not making memes!
Like, I'm not doing that.
Somebody else did that.
But I put it on Twitter.
This is not mine.
I think I might have put it on Instagram, too.
A long time ago.
But it was weird.
I kept getting them.
These memes come in waves.
I get ones that I did say.
I get those in waves, too.
I get these pictures of me with weird quotes that I'd said.
That's one of the things that—a good, solid meme— That's one of the things that was so egregious about that fat Jewish guy, is that he was stealing these brilliant ideas, and it made him look brilliant, when really he's just sort of this aggregator of other people's awesome ideas without giving them credit.
And he just got in on this plagiarism loophole, and everybody's like, what— And now he's got this weird thing that he does where he puts up the meme, he writes his own quote, and then just puts the originator's name at the end of it.
He doesn't even say originally created by, he just puts their name.
And that's like attributing credit, some sort of a weird way.
That's weird.
Super slimy.
Like, what's going on now with, like...
And the problem is, like, someone will send you something, and I have a real issue with this.
Like, someone sends me something that's hilarious, and I want to put it on Instagram, but I'm like, I don't know who made it.
Can I just put it up?
Like, what do I do?
Do I say, hey, I don't know who the fuck made this.
Let me know.
And then put it up, and then people go, oh, did you see what Joe Rogan said?
And then they have sponsored Instagram posts and sponsored tweets.
And they make a lot of money.
There's a lot of money to be made.
And people are getting these development deals to do television shows and all sorts of other things based on the content of other people's ideas that they're just aggregating.
It's like if you were doing it with music, like say if you just wanted to take riffs that you thought were really awesome and put them on your music page, people will go, well, fuck you.
You can't do that.
This is my stuff.
I created this.
But that signature, unless you're putting watermarks on everything, that signature is not necessarily available with memes.
And in the realm of independent journalism and media, where some random schmo like me can actually have influence, especially, you know, that I am credentialed in a way that people might pay attention to, then why would they not want to, you know, quiet me?
To show you that, in fact, what you're told is a permanent problem you just have to deal with and live with with pharmaceutical medicine could be completely dissolved is a very threatening concept.
And I'm not the only one.
I mean, many functional medicine doctors and holistic healers are working to create awareness of this possibility.
But regardless, it was pretty weird that, you know, the book made the New York Times list, strangely, and there wasn't a mention of it in mainstream media for a year.
Just waiting, you know, to get my couple million to my kids.
But it's changing.
Like even in the past month or so, there's been like a more of a targeted effort and a couple of Allure and Cosmo and a couple of mainstream outlets have begun to suggest that I am, you know, a dangerous, reckless person who shames women who take meds.
Isn't that funny that like if you give advice that based on actual studies, actual medicine, give advice about, you know, like, hey, maybe it's not a good idea that you take these crazy medications where we don't exactly know why you're taking them.
We don't know exactly if these are the right medications for you.
They're testing them on you literally as you go along that you're shaming.
I'm just saying, here's what the science says that you might not have been told, and here's what's additionally possible you should just at least know, okay?
And here's the social proof.
You know, interviews, I'm publishing four case reports as we speak in the peer-reviewed index medical literature, you know, so this is not like some random blog I wrote, okay?
So just know that that's possible and then make your decision.
And guess what?
If you're on meds and this sounds interesting to you, then I'm showing you there's a path.
I just don't understand why anybody thinks that there's something wrong with learning a style of cooking.
It's like I think you have cultural appropriation if you have a person who's pretending they're from Laos and they start talking with a fake accent and you go, hey man, you're from fucking Cleveland.
You're not even of Laos descent.
Like you do a 23andMe on you and you find out your family's from Finland.
Like, the fuck is wrong with you?
But there are people that do that and that is crazy, right?
But that's just deceptive.
This is not deceptive.
This is someone who likes making burritos.
They're making burritos.
And then these goofy white kids are fucking closing them down.
And that's what it is.
Cultural appropriation heroes just shouting out from the rooftop that you're wrong.
And the trouble is, you know, that the more that we, this infighting is like in some ways a distraction from the greater issues that are like government overreach and these greater issues that are allowed to unfold while we're busy calling each other names.
It's just, I really feel like this goes, I mean, it's a stretch, granted, but I really feel like this goes back to what we're talking about, is that people need difficulty in their life.
They really do.
And that way they don't seek out difficulty that's not real.
I think that's one of the reasons why you're getting a lot of this from these college kids, where their tuition's being paid for, they don't have jobs, they're not competing in the real world, they're just operating on ideologies, and they're being taught by these knuckleheads that are just trying to keep their tenure, and they're trying to spread the same sort of ideology that they had when they were in college, and they never really entered into the workforce in a lot of examples.
A lot of these people went from academia to teaching.
I mean, right in there, just embedded into the system.
And I think a lot of it has to do with the same thing.
I think it's this newfound ability to communicate, which is fantastic, and it's going to have its hiccups, and there's going to be some issues, and there's going to be some real co-opting of the system, like what you're experiencing, with trolls attacking an idea.
But overall, those ideas are spreading in a way that's It's unprecedented and impossible just a few decades ago.
Like, your ideas, spreading the way they have where I hear about them, and now, you know, you and I sit down and talk about this.
Millions of people are going to hear this conversation.
And this is unprecedented.
Like, this has never been available before.
So, all the bad stuff, you've got to take it with all the good stuff.
But that's why it is a cool time because it's sort of like the democratization of information where if you want to learn about other perspectives on anything, you look it up, you know, and then you make your own decisions.
So it is a time where you have the potential to be an individual in ways that we're not honored in a more conformist, you know, controlled media environment.
I mean, the trouble is that many people are still, you know...
I still believe that mainstream media is telling them the truth.
I mean, I think even though the Trump stuff with all this fake news talk is so detrimental, ultimately it is like you're getting people, even if they realize that this guy's a knucklehead and he's wrong about a lot of stuff, they're at least challenging these ideas that these networks are only giving you the news.
I mean, Fox News It is a goddamn sexual assault paradise over there.
I mean, these guys just keep getting kicked out of Fox News over and over again.
There's all these sexual harassment allegations and people are resigning left and right, right?
Well, because of all that stuff, it makes you go, oh...
Oh, these guys are creeps.
Like, there's a lot of creeps even there.
Like when Brian Williams got busted lying.
And you're like, oh, that news guy's just like another asshole.
They just make shit up.
Like, just because he's saying the real news, sometimes, doesn't mean everything he says is true.
And there's no way to filter it.
So everybody has to question things now.
In a way that you never questioned during the Walter Cronkite era.
You know, when people were giving the news back when Ted Koppel was on the air, you weren't, like, is Ted Koppel full of shit?
Yeah, and they just sandwich them in there, whereas you're not going to see those commercials, like, no one's going to read those drug ads on a podcast.
You're not going to say, okay, well, hey, been really nice talking to you, and I want to talk to you folks about Abilify.
Are you, right now, thinking about being suicidal and really want to cement those thoughts?
I want to take Abilify so I can get some of that cash.
There was a drug called Reequip.
And there was a man in Ireland that took this drug and said before the drug, he was a healthy heterosexual, and after he took the drug, he became gay and a gambling addict, and he would engage in risky sex, and he would meet men in chat rooms and have unprotected sex with them.
And then he got off the drug and was like, what did I do?
And he won the equivalent of U.S. somewhere in the neighborhood of $600,000 from GlaxoKlineSmith.
Well, you can now on CNN, they have a ton of those.
On a lot of websites, they have a ton of those.
Yeah, it's pretty fascinating.
And it's like, you know, you won't believe what they look like now.
And you're like, God, what do they look like now?
And then you have to go through, like, fucking 20 pages of what other people that look like shit now to get to this one person that you might not even, they might even be on that, you know?
Yeah, I mean, on Medscape and these, like, seemingly official medical websites, there are pharma ads that appear to be diagnostic quizzes, you know?
So, like, do you have depression?
And then you go take the quiz, and this is known, you know, has been exposed, 100% of people are identified, pretty much no matter what you click, you're identified as being a candidate for antidepressant.
And so the more you sanitize and you use bleach and alcohol and Purell and all that stuff, you're actually distorting things and you're making it more likely for people to develop what are called nosocomial illnesses or infections, which is hospital-induced infections, right?
right?
The hospital is a sick environment, in part because we have a wrong idea about how biological ecosystems work.
There's no bad guys.
Everything works together.
It's like a metaphor for life.
In fact, there aren't really any bad guys.
It's all, you know, sort of part of the polarity of life.
We need bad to know we're good.
Like, it's that ancient philosophy.
So anyway, so we go to India and I bring bentonite clay, I bring colloidal silver, I bring a bunch of- Colloidal silver?
Okay, so like herbal, like botanical, you know, sort of like...
antimicrobials, if you want to call them that, they don't kill stuff.
I think they have like a rebalancing effect.
But they're, you know, for like SIBO, which is small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, it's like a thing people are struggling with that a lot of functional medicine doctors treat.
There is a randomized trial looking at antibiotics versus herbal botanicals, showing herbal botanicals are as effective.
So why would you ever bother with the risks of antibiotics, which are legion?
And even the Indian dude who was sort of like our chaperone in a way, like a friend of the woman who led the trip, was like, oh, we got to bring her to...
And the ritual of these supplements and bentonite clay and whatever could have just been an accessory.
Who knows?
The truth is that if she had taken antibiotics, which she never did, If she had taken them reflexively, she probably would have been sick longer, and she then ultimately, when she got better, would have attributed it to the antibiotics, right?
So she never would have had the opportunity to just see what her body's capable of.
So we make these assumptions about pharmaceuticals in the absence of any baseline evidence, information, or even experience to help us understand what our bodies are capable of.
But what if someone catches one of these antibiotic-resistant, very aggressive strains like MRSA? I mean, you know, so my partner has a website called GreenMedInfo.com, right?
And he catalogs all of the data from PubMed.gov on these natural substances, evidence that shows that something like garlic Because there's a study he put up on MRSA, and I think it was like garlic and maybe honey or something you would laugh at, right?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick went through this, and she talked about it on the podcast.
She had a persistent staph infection that would not go away, and she treated it with garlic in a topical form, and it cured it when nothing else would.
And she had gone through this host of antibiotics that really wrecked her gut biome, and she was...
Really fucked up for like a year because of it.
And she treated it with a topical application of garlic, which is crazy.
So there's a ton of science to support natural medicine.
I don't know who funds these studies.
It's crazy that they're even done because there certainly isn't pharma money behind them.
But they are done.
And if you know about them, it might help you to make an informed decision.
But this is reflexive assumption that, well, pharmaceutical medicine is the only legit choice if it gets bad enough is conditioning.
That's all I'm saying.
It's a conditioned assumption.
And if you have an experience that defies that, then you'll make different decisions for yourself in the future.
But you have to have like that woman will probably make different decisions for herself in the future because now she trusts her body like just a little bit more.
You know, she's that much less afraid of all of the horror stories.
The fear mongering is the greatest marketing device, you know, employed by the industry is scaring you into what if you don't do it?
But aren't there a bunch of people that when they do catch MRSA or something like that and then get devastated, the right move is to get on an IV antibiotic.
Listen, if we only used antibiotics for true life or death emergencies, we would have a very different situation on our hands than what we have now, which is a combination of, you know, devastating our ecosystem, you know, making people gravely ill because they have very serious and totally unpredictable side effects, including long-term neurologic side effects, you know, What's even going on with our livestock?
We are in a mess with our worship of this idea of...
Do you know what antibiotic means?
It means against life.
Literally, there's something wrong-headed about that mentality.
And so it comes back to philosophy.
If you want to believe in war, you want to war against your body, you want to war against and blame all the bad people who do all these bad things, and you want to lock them up in prisons, and you want to hate the...
So your philosophy is improve the health of the gut biome, take in natural antibiotics, things like garlic, things like oregano oil, things that are...
One of the big points that you just made, which is really huge, is that if we only used antibiotics when necessary in life or death situations, we wouldn't have the issues that we have right now with livestock, with people's health.
And people take Z-packs like it's going out of style.
I mean, they take them like they take Tylenol for a headache.
I know so many people that take antibiotics.
They just throw them down.
Oh, I feel so much better.
I took a Z-Pak.
You might feel better because you were going to feel better anyway.
And the Z-Pak, you just threw on top of the mix and decided that that was what was taking you over the top.
A Canadian study just came out that if you take a stimulant, you're 13 times more likely to be prescribed an antipsychotic and four times more likely to be prescribed an antidepressant.