Yvette d’Entremont debunks chiropractic’s pseudoscientific roots, tracing them to Daniel David Palmer’s unverified claims—like "fixing" hearing via spinal cracks—and his séance-based theories, while exposing how 50% of practitioners blend unproven wellness advice with adjustments. She contrasts it with evidence-backed nootropics like Onnit’s AlphaBrain but slams supplement scams, including Gwyneth Paltrow’s "body vibes" stickers. Back pain myths persist despite risks like Vioxx-induced strokes, and she advocates for osteopaths over chiropractors, citing ethical lapses in the field. Ultimately, desperation fuels misinformation, demanding rigorous skepticism in health choices. [Automatically generated summary]
And we got to talking and I said, look, that guy's got to do something about it right away because the more time you spend with an atrophied arm, the longer it takes to rehabilitate that.
So then I Google chiropractic and then I start reading.
And I spend hours and hours reading about the history of, I'm going to say this in big air quotes, chiropractic medicine.
And I go, holy fucking shit, not only do I not feel bad now, now I'm angry.
Don't feel bad at all.
And this is to all you people, and I've got a ton of messages from chiropractors that I'm sure are nice folks, and that are really upset because they like this podcast, and they're like, you know, you're shitting on my business, and you're saying...
You have to understand, I'm sure a lot of you mean well, I'm sure a lot of you do well, I'm sure a lot of you try really hard to help your patients, and I'm sure a lot of you incorporate a lot of other stuff, like massage and cold laser and real science into your therapies, but the origin, the original guy who created chiropractic medicine was a complete, total bullshit artist.
This article that we wrote, we sent this through...
I mean, normally my articles, I go through at least, you know, two editors, give or take.
This one we put through, I believe...
We had three editors, a fact checker, and our lawyer to make sure that we were bulletproof on it because we wanted to make sure that we didn't say anything that could get us sued, basically.
And a lot of the information from this came directly from his book, from his own book.
So we weren't taking anything out of context.
One of the quotes on how chiropractic started came directly from the book.
And he, after cracking a half-deaf person's or a deaf person's spine, depending on their That was what Jamie just had pulled up in that article.
There are studies that show people who go to a massage therapist or a massage practitioner Tend to get more relief than people who go to a chiropractor.
So please, go to a massage therapist.
Go to a physical therapist.
Those are your science-based practitioners.
Chiropractic, it started out of bullshit and it stayed directly in bullshit.
Here's the thing, there's no reason that anybody would have, from this guy, from this one original guy who created it, this guy who's a magnetic healer, who came up with this, somehow or another it slipped through the cracks.
I mean, that's what this is.
I mean, they're running around calling themselves doctors.
So this guy said to me, one of these guys who got angry at me, I've gotten at least two dozen, maybe, angry messages from chiropractors.
But one of them, the guy said, does a podiatrist go to medical school?
Well, they go to podiatry school.
Not only that, they have a medical residency that they have to do for three years.
They actually go to a hospital.
They have to work in a hospital.
Podiatry is like an actual science of studying the foot.
Now, one of the biggest chiropractic schools in the country is Palmer Chiropractic College, and it's named for D.D. Palmer, the guy who launched this bevy of bullshit on us.
Yeah, it's because they can charge parents, that's why.
The other thing they say is, well, from doing that, you because...
Hmm, this infuriates me so much.
They say, from manipulating the spine, because the spine has, you know, within those bones, they have the spinal column, and the nerves control everything in the body.
And so from stimulating the nerves, you can give the infant all the immunity it needs to not need their vaccinations.
I understand this is not all chiropractors, but the American Chiropractic Association, this is fairly well cited within the article, the American Chiropractic Association, they are generally anti-drug.
They want to use the least amount of medical interventions possible.
And chiropractors are not, in most states in this country, they are not cleared...
To either prescribe or give vaccinations.
So if you can manage to get a family to come into you for pretty much all of their medical needs, that increases your bottom line and it stops, you know, and you can just say, we can do everything for you.
And I mean, there's one state in this country, I believe it was Wisconsin, where they were trying to get chiropractors to be able to give pre-sports physicals.
And in some cases, the pre-sports physical is the only time all year when a student will see a doctor.
So this is infuriating.
So whenever a doctor...
And I mean, this is...
You can look at the ACA's website.
I put a couple links to it in the article where they say they're...
They're not very pro-vaccine.
I mean, their language on it is under the condition of freedom of choice, medical choice.
And it's like, they don't say straight out, vaccines don't work, they're bad for you.
But they're kind of, they're wishy-washy on it.
And they're not, they don't say vaccines work and you should get them.
But a couple of chiropractors will try to say, we don't need vaccines.
We can increase your immune system.
We can increase your immunity by, you know, pressing on the spot.
Like how how did this guy who's a magnetic healer who had no background in medicine come up with this System and then have it spread all over the world.
It's such a good story Isn't it people love a story that says that you can heal them without without taking dangerous drugs and at the time Forget about dangerous drugs I mean, even just...
Because we only found out 50 years after this that frontal lobotomies were a bad fucking idea.
And that thalidomide was going to kill babies.
So we were really fucking bad at medicine when this came up.
And we're way better at it now, but we still don't have the answers to everything.
And that's kind of...
I don't want to say a failure of the medical system, but it's just a sign of where we are now.
So think about the number of people who have sent us anecdotes saying, you know, I was in miserable pain and my chiropractor was the only thing that worked.
And it's like maybe you needed to get to physical therapy for longer term pain.
But these people that are still going to their chiros...
It means they're still in pain and they should go to a physical therapist for, you know, a couple months of therapy that will eventually strengthen their backs and take care of those issues and, you know, get a massage.
But they're going to their chiro because medical has not said, you know, we don't have a tricorder that can scan you, show the exact thing and say, here's the exact medicine, drug and thing that will fix you.
It's kind of, and I hate to use this term, but it's out of the failures of the medical system that something like this So we're not perfect at medicine yet, and that's why alternative medicine swoops in with bullshit.
There was some lobbying, and I don't think I put this into the article, but there was a lot of lobbying from chiropractors in, I believe, the 70s that pushed the American Medical Association and the insurance companies as a whole to kind of accept them as being medically...
A part of the system.
And that's part of why more and more insurance companies now will cover them and accept them.
And even though a lot of doctors won't refer you, they'll kind of be like, well, you can look into Cairo.
There's still, from a lot of doctors, pushback.
But there's a little bit more coverage now, and it's because of a lot of lobbying in the 70s.
Now, if chiropractors do have a center or a treatment center or whatever it is, and they have a bunch of different methods that they employ, this is not saying that those other methods might not give you some relief.
Correct.
But the actual cracking of the necks and the cracking of the back, there's virtually no evidence that that heals anything or stops or promotes your immune system functioning better or anything like that.
Like, the big thing is that, I mean, if they were just claiming we can reduce your back pain, if that was the only thing they claimed, I probably wouldn't have written the article, you know?
But what they're claiming is that they can fix all of your health by realigning these vertebral subluxations, which have never been proven to exist.
I don't think realigning is the right word, but they're moving around your back in a way that it kind of naturally moves.
Because you can kind of move and twist and your back will pop.
They're doing some manipulation of things that kind of naturally happen to a spine with, you know, with a tiny little bit, I mean, tiny bit of degeneration with age.
I think, like, I'm not exactly the right expert to explain this type of thing.
An osteopath would be a better person to explain this because there are people who are a little better at spinal manipulation than a chiropractor, which is a DO, an osteopath.
So in this country, we have MDs and DOs, and they both can practice medicine.
What is DO? Doctor of osteopathy.
I believe that's the correct term.
And my doctor is actually...
My primary care is an osteopath.
And he's given me a spinal manipulation once when my back was killing me.
And we had no idea what it was.
And it turned out I had a broken rib.
Which was not a good time to do a spinal manipulation.
You've got a rib broken right on your spine.
But it was like he...
The difference is an osteopath never claims that they're cracking your back.
Yeah, and I think it's funny the things that chiropractors add into it, because one of the things that I went into in this article, because we really like diving deep on some of the things that we investigate, and I'll admit I'm biased when I go in, because I go after a lot of Kind of some of the naturally things.
The problem with this whole clinic thing, though, is that they don't have to have any sort of background in kinesiology or in physical therapy or in any of these things.
And so they incorporate all these other modalities, all these other methods of healing you.
But they don't have to have a background and education in those things.
There is one thing I've heard of, and this is why I'd say don't go to a chiropractor because you don't know what you're going to walk into.
But I have heard a couple of times, this being the case, where a chiropractor, at first, they go to school for physical therapy.
And then they find they can't open their own clinic, even if they've got like an MBA and a physical therapy background.
They're like, how do I open my own clinic?
And they realize if they just go to school for chiropractic, they can do the physical therapy work they want to and offer a spinal manipulation on the side.
They do learn some anatomy, but it's like they also learn some, you know, bullshit along with it.
So I'm like, I wonder, and I mean, this isn't, I get it, this isn't all chiropractors, obviously, but like, I know, and it's hard to figure out which one you're going to walk into that's going to be a bullshit artist and not.
So like, I did want, like, this wasn't a point I was going to bring up in an article that was going to have a specific point of view, but like, I know there are some out there that say, I want to give people physical therapy.
I want to strengthen up their spine.
I want to get them out of here in less pain so that if they injure themselves again, they know they can come back to me and trust me with their spine and also give them some relief while we're fixing them.
So, you know, this is a thing that happens, but I don't think it's all the time.
I mean, it's clearly not all the time.
So, you know, you're going to have some really moral people in every field and you're going to have some really fucked up ones in every field.
Like we were one of the things we touched on in the article were these very social media savvy people.
And this is something that drives me fucking crazy.
You have to hunt and peck through their websites to find that they say that they're a chiropractor.
They just say doctor everywhere.
And they're giving recipe ideas.
And they're talking about the adrenal glands.
And the adrenal glands, they're not anywhere near close to the spine.
So essentially someone's putting up a health website and they're claiming to be a doctor and they're offering all this advice on diet and all these different things.
But when you get to what is their degree in, it's not a real doctor, it's a chiropractor.
If you take these stickers, and if they're made with the right material, you just stick them on your body in the right places, and they, in quotes, rebalance the energy frequency in our bodies.
They're made out of NASA spacesuit material.
unidentified
NASA said it was a load of BS. But hold on a second.
It says, Gwyneth Paltrow's goop website, a lifestyle business, lifestyle, which sells all things Gwyneth, advertised these stickers are using NASA spacesuit material, which presumably was the source of their magic-hewing properties.
Look, this is a very controversial subject, right?
Like anything that's not regulated by the FDA, like I'm a part of, in the interest of full disclosure, part of the company Onnit, which is we sell supplements.
But the supplements that we sell, we control Everything that we sell, so we make sure that we do testing on it, the supplements that we sell like this shit, AlphaBrain, did two double-blind placebo-controlled studies at Boston Center for Memory that showed increase in verbal memory, increase in a bunch of different things.
They're essentially the building blocks for human neurotransmitters, which your body uses, the nutrients your body uses to make human neurotransmitters.
There's nothing woo-woo about it, nothing crazy, it's all backed by science.
But when we started putting them out, there was a lot of people that were claiming bullshit, you're selling snake oil.
So we had to control these studies and we had to, you know, We pay for them at the Boston Center for Memory.
We also had to make sure that we put a full 100% money-back guarantee on any of the supplements where you don't have to return them, just say they didn't work for you.
We're trying to make it as clean as possible.
This is stuff that I use.
I find benefit in it.
Let's see what people think about it, and let's make sure that we have studies.
But these things are, like, you know, it's really weird.
Like, I'm not a big fan of the government stepping in and, you know, regulating everything, because I know there's a lot of supplements that actually do work, and for them to get passed by the FDA, you have to go through these exhaustive tests.
I think there should be some sort of an independent company that works in a very scientific way where you can hire them to test your stuff and run these tests.
You can show, there's got to be some way to show that there's no collusion, that there's no bribery, that, you know, everything's above board.
Are you looking for B12? I want to make sure I'm getting B12. The other question is, how much of a vitamin do you need?
And I think that people buy vitamins indiscriminately because we really don't...
The average person doesn't need to take a multivitamin in the day if they're eating a healthy diet because you get pretty much what you need on a daily basis.
If you're not somebody with an absorption issue, if you're not somebody with any dietary issues, you're generally getting what you need out of your diet.
I've found out deficiencies in niacin, deficiencies in vitamin D... No, I've been before, but that was right when I was diagnosed with celiac disease, so I was deficient on a few things.
Your body converts everything in some way, shape, or form into usable fuel, and the usable fuel is eventually glucose or NADPH. Everything in your body gets converted to sugar when you use it for fuel.
But avoiding gluten and switching over to, say, all rice, that's not going to change all that much in your body in terms of the biochemical mischief, unless you have a gluten allergy.
Well, here's at this point, and this is why I always say at this point in our scientific knowledge, because scientific knowledge can evolve and we can learn new things.
You know, at one point, the thing that started off the whole gluten trend was a kind of poorly designed study where they had a small sample size of people and they designed it just to test, you know, gluten versus a diet without gluten.
And they came to the conclusion that about 20% of people, just based on this very small study, had a bad reaction to gluten.
That's pretty high.
I came in saying they had stomach problems.
Now, they looked at it and said, afterwards, the scientists all sat back and said, why were only about 1% of people having celiac disease and then all of a sudden 20% of people are running around like gluten's making their dick fly off?
There's something up here.
So they made a better-designed study, and they took out common...
They did, you know, kind of double-blind, did a better-designed study to say, we're going to take out all these other causes of gastrointestinal distress, and we're going to try to make this double-blind.
And they figured out it was the FODMAPs.
There were these short-chain oligosaccharides that can pull water into the gut and cause some gastrointestinal distress.
And it was really closer to between, like, 1% and about 5% of people that were having any issues with gluten.
That higher percent of people, that 2 to 5, here's the question.
Now, they're still trying to figure out why some people seem to have an issue with gluten.
Now, I could be wrong.
This is just off the top of my head.
It's what I remember from the study, but I've had to cite it a few times, so I think my knowledge is accurate.
Feel free to fact check me out at home.
But the thing with those extra percent, they're trying to figure out why they might have an issue with gluten.
Because they, you know, like wheat is, you know, you think of it as a carb heavy thing, right?
And gluten is a protein.
So that other few percentage of people, they're trying to figure out why the gluten does it, because gluten is in a few other things.
It's in barley, rye, and rye.
So what they figured out is that, or this is the going theory right now, gluten can cause a small reaction in the stomach where you produce this protein called zonulin that can cause an increase in inflammation.
This seems to be, and this is what I, this has only been one study that I've read on it.
It seems to be relatively new.
They're still looking into it.
So there's a chance that people might be in the two to five percent that can't handle it because of that.
It could be another component of the wheat, barley, rye that's causing it.
But gluten in and of itself, it's not, you know, it's unless you are one of those people that has an actual reaction to it, perfectly fine.
It was, God, I need to find this article, but it was, they could do this and they were tracking how registered dietitians versus, you know, the average Joe would, you know, could count, because they were, you know, count down how many calories you had in a day.
A registered dietitian who, you know, really well trained on dietetic type stuff versus average person counting their calories.
The dietitian was off by about 200 calories.
Average person was off by about 500. About what they were guessing?
If you're trying to lose weight, and you're the average person, and you're off by 500 calories, and you're supposed to, in the course of a week, to lose one pound, you're supposed to have a 500-calorie caloric deficit.
There's your deficit.
It's not there anymore.
So people are really bad at tracking their calories, and they're really bad at knowing what a portion size is.
So one of the best ways I've seen from the personal trainers that I confer with is Is weighing out your food.
These are the people I consult with for my writing.
They were like, yeah, that looks all right.
You're not anything crazy.
Because of my height and weight that I started with, at first he had me at 1,800.
I'm like, I'm not quite losing here.
He's like, let's go down another couple hundred.
It's, you know, and the way they started out with is always, you know, your weight times 10 and then they bust up the, you know, carbs, proteins, fats from there.
And, you know, if you need to adjust, go from, you know, go from there.
And it's like I started with lifting because I, you know, because I've screwed up my joints so badly from the amount of running I've done that I'm like, all right, I will try weightlifting.
And it's been kind of fun.
I've enjoyed, I've enjoyed learning how to deadlift.
I think this goes back to what we were talking about when it comes to people that have back issues.
One of the things that has been super beneficial for me is exercising my back and yoga and doing a bunch of different things.
Stretching.
And making sure that my core and my spine are very strong.
And that's something that kind of gets ignored by a lot of people that have back issues.
It's like one of the reasons why you probably have a back issue, whether it's a herniated disc or a bulging disc, is that Your back is not strong enough to sustain whatever load you're putting on it, whatever exercise you're doing, whatever movement you're doing that's causing it to pop out of place.
The issue is most likely that you are not strong enough.
And a lot of that comes from a sedentary lifestyle, comes from sitting at a desk all the time, comes from poor posture.
There's a variety of different factors that are not addressed by chiropractors or by other people.
And if they are addressed by a chiropractor, well, that's one good thing that they're telling you.
I mean, it still doesn't take away from where this whole thing started from.
Yeah, I mean, like, the biggest issue I have is that I have a—and I mean, it's not a bad enough case of scoliosis where I need surgery or a back brace.
It's just enough to be inconvenient.
So it's like I'm—my big thing I'm doing is, all right, if I can lift and keep my back strong, it will stop me from having surgery eventually.
And back surgery is just almost never a good thing to hear because they're always— Like, when you fix something surgically, there are just almost always complications, especially with your back.
So I'm like, if I can keep rods out of my back, I'll be very happy.
Yeah, that's what I'd probably end up with, because, like, middle of my back, it just kind of goes...
And I'm like, this is not something I... I've been told, it's funny, I love yoga, and I've been told it's not good for people with Ehlers-Danlos, so I'm like, I don't...
And it's like, that's like, but there are still some yoga moves I do just at the end of my workouts because they feel great to stretch out my back, and they feel like they strengthen my core quite a bit.
Well, I mean, there's a bunch of stretches, but obviously there's a bunch of things that do stretch your body out, but there's a bunch of things that are just strengthening exercises.
No, it's like, here's the thing, you have a really good point, and this is just what I've been told from a doctor who, in all honesty, I don't know how well he knows Ehlers-Danlos because it's a rare disorder.
I think the reason is because they know how flexible I started at, so they think I'm going to pull something out more because of how much I'll push the condition that's already there.
If you're bored, go for 10 minutes and read up on Billy DeMoss.
He's fun.
And it's funny because I'll get into that in a minute.
I learned a lot doing this because I didn't realize that D.D. Palmer, the guy who invented it, He got most of his information from doing seances with a dead doctor.
That blew my mind.
I'm like, I know it's late and I'm a little high right now, but I had to have hallucinated that.
When they go to actual, you were telling me this before the show and I stopped you.
I said, let's talk about this during the show.
When you said you've talked to chiropractors that were in the middle of chiropractic school and they read about this stuff and they were like, what in the fuck?
It's sort of like that, did you ever see Going Clear, that Scientology documentary?
Yeah, but like when Haggis gets to a certain stage of the Scientology where they give him the written notes by L. Ron Hubbard and he's like, what in the fuck?
Do you guys believe in the vertebral subluxation theory?
And they're like, no, subluxations don't exist.
If you want to do this ethically, just take people in who have injuries, try to do some physical therapy, get them stronger, and get them out in as few sessions as you can.
Yeah, and it's funny because I'll occasionally pass by a chiropractic clinic where I see them saying back injuries, work injuries, sports, physical therapy, and I'm like, okay, if I ever wanted to go to a chiropractor because I'd lost my mind and couldn't find a physical therapist, that's the type I would go to.
But if you ever see them advertising magic crystals and aura healing, fucking run!
Run!
There are a few of them out there.
And I looked at one of the guy's websites who emailed me and there was an FAQ. It's like, do you have to keep coming back forever?
No, we try to get you out in as few sessions as possible.
And you did have some people that you talked to that were chiropractors that were in the middle of it and they realized it was bullshit and they had to stay.
I think they hear it from a bunch of people who they think are experts, like they're teachers, and they're going, no, this is accepted, so we're going to take it.
It's like, you know what, if you, like, if I saw people in science, like, because I promote a lot of things that, you know, we might disagree on, but, you know, I promote a lot of ideas in science that I've seen the evidence for, and I've seen a lot of it.
Do you want to hear it from me and then from Google to see if I'm accurate?
All right, so organic food works by certain farming or agricultural standards, and they can use certain pesticides.
In most cases, these pesticides are derived from natural sources.
Not always, but most of the time.
And some of these pesticides include pesticides like rotenone and the pyrethrums.
And also, if you're familiar with BT corn, the BT toxin is also used in organic farming.
Because it's a naturally occurring toxin, it can be used and sprayed topically on organic produce.
So a lot of these, the things that we think of as just conventional farming practices, definitely use in organic farming.
It doesn't make it any better or worse.
It just, in a lot of cases, it's a little more expensive, partially because of the certification process and partially because it uses older farming techniques that need, you know, a little more land, that type of stuff.
It also uses till farming practices that, you know, digs up the ground a bit more and can release a little more CO2. So in general, I tend to, oh, here we go.
ingredients are grown without the use of pesticides.
Synthetic fertilizer, excuse me, hold on.
Sewage, sludge, genetically modified organisms, or ionizing radiation.
Animals that produce meat, poultry, eggs, and dairy products do not take antibiotics or growth hormones.
- Hold on. - The US-- Sorry.
The USDA National Organic Program defines organic as follows.
Organic food is produced by farmers who emphasize the use of renewable resources and the conservation of soil and water to enhance environmental quality for future generations.
Organic meat, poultry, and eggs and dairy products are made from animals that are given no antibiotics or growth hormones.
Organic food is produced without using most conventional pesticides.
Here we go.
Fertilizers made with synthetic ingredients or sewage sludge bioengineering or ionizing radiation.
Before a product can be labeled organic, a government-approved certifier inspects the farm where the food is grown to make sure the farmer is following all the rules necessary to meet USDA organic standards.
Now, the one thing on there that I'll disagree with with their first paragraph, as they say, without the use of pesticides, in the second paragraph, it says organic food is produced without using most conventional pesticides.
There is a little bit of truth that sells the lie, is what I will give this.
Because, you know, I used to work with bulk quantities of pesticides at my last lab, and that was kind of what sealed the deal for me, that these, when they're in your food, are not going to hurt you.
Because the amount of testing we had to go through and the amount of regulation, I think regulation in this case is a good thing, because it will stop a bad pesticide from making it to market.
And I want that regulation there.
Because I eat the food too.
I don't want anyone's child to ever get hurt from something that me or another, like I don't work there anymore, but you know, that I had any work in getting on the market.
But this toxicity issue when it comes to Roundup or when it comes to any sort of pesticide, when you're talking about herbicides, herbicides are what kills the plants, right?
Roundup is controversial, and I think the reason that it became controversial is because people heard, all right, you have to genetically modify the plant so that the Roundup doesn't kill the plant, and it's this whole thing just to make money for Monsanto, and how dare you make money!
And I think that was why people got...
It's a newer technology and it kind of made people a little aware of farming for the first time.
I go to farming conferences a lot of times to talk about how to communicate agriculture and I'll sit down and ask farmers, What do you plant?
Why are you planting it?
What do you think of GMOs?
Do you use Roundup?
And do you buy from people other than...
Do you buy from Monsanto?
And do you buy from people other than Monsanto?
And that handful of questions will tell me...
I mean, I wish I had more videos of this, but there's a video at some point on my site with two farmers who buy from Monsanto and buy from other companies.
And one of the reasons I ask that is because there's a rumor on the internet that if you buy from Monsanto, you can only buy from Monsanto.
Just not true.
That every genetically modified crop is made to be Roundup ready.
Again, not true.
That people are dying of cancer from just being a Roundup.
And recently they found that one of the reports that went through the IARC, the The place that declares things cancerous on their group 12A2B cancer classifications, one of the reports was falsified that declared Roundup cancerous.
Falsified by who?
I have to hunt down this report, but the person who was trying to say Roundup is cancerous.
Because of a little bit of suspicion around it, because it's been, people have kicked around that it's causing cancer or, you know, that your spleen to turn radioactive for, you know, forever.
It gets put into the public sphere so much that people start to believe it.
And here's the thing, if I saw firm evidence that Roundup had caused issues, I would say right away, just get rid of it, take it off the market.
And I keep on not seeing firm evidence of it.
There was a study, there's this group, Moms Across America, and I always get my scientific information from mom groups on the internet.
But this group decided to do a breast milk study to see if Roundup accumulated in breast milk.
And the way the study was done was they just had women indiscriminately send in containers of breast milk to them, and they declared the amount of Roundup to be ridiculously high in the breast milk.
And I'm like, do they just tell women to spray pump bottles of I've wound up into these containers and then test it.
But it turned out, and this is just from knowing how analytical techniques work, like I used to design the techniques by which we extracted, you know, target pesticides from a matrix and, you know, analyze them on our big overpriced machinery.
But a woman who is a breast milk researcher out of the University of Washington was like, this doesn't seem right.
So she designed An experiment to test if Roundup was accumulating in breast milk, and she had it verified by an independent lab.
And they tested women specifically who worked in agriculture, and she had their breast milk tested specifically on days where they were spraying Roundup, and there was nothing found.
If you're getting it from people's breast milk, and those people say, there's Roundup in my breast milk, and I've been eating genetically modified crops.
I think that it was not a well-controlled experiment, and it would be interesting to see how the experiment would come out if the person who runs Moms Across America, Zen Honeycutt, would...
How it would look if Zen were to look in on every step of the process with Dr. Shelley McGuire to see that these people ate food that should have been sprayed with Roundup and worked in the field, and then at the end to see if their breast milk came out with nothing in it.
There'd be more likely to be some sort of conspiratorial collusion with people that actually work in farms that use Roundup rather than someone who's just checking their breast milk.
Wouldn't you think that if someone's trying to prove that Roundup isn't showing up in breast milk and you've got a bunch of people that they're living relies on using Roundup, Well, the farm workers themselves, they'd want to be safe, right?
Right, but I found it weird that you feel like there's some sort of conspiracy with these moms that are checking their breast milk, but you don't think there might possibly be some shenanigans involved in the people that actually need Roundup to make a living.
Yeah, it was suspicious, and that's why I was like, that was why I didn't buy it.
The other thing is they used a technique, an analytical technique that was used for water, and that's why I'm like, this is not, like, not all techniques work for all chemical matrices.
So that That's another reason why a different lab was probably better equipped to handle it, one specifically that analyzes breast milk.
The other thing is you know that the other lab kind of had a bias going in because their whole thing is how Roundup is bad.
So a lab that's like, I just want to know if moms are being harmed, if there's something in the breast milk, that seems like a lab that went in Just wanting to know.
The other lab went in saying, I hate Roundup.
So if Roundup had been found in the test that Dr. Maguire's lab had done, I would have happily accepted those results because it almost wouldn't...
It would have surprised me, not in the least, if it had been found.
But I was kind of glad that there was nothing there because it means that, you know, babies aren't getting a concentrated dose of this.
Just because, you know, you don't want, you know, extraneous chemicals going into the food supply.
It is, I'm going to say, it is easy to screw up a study using, if you're not sure the parameters you're supposed to use in an analytical, in a chemical analysis thing, because you can have interfering species that come up with the same peaks at the same time.
So the other thing is, like I said, the biggest thing is we don't know the collection parameters for the one that Mom Across America did.
Yeah, I mean, the other thing is Dr. McGuire was doing it through a university, and she could have been in a lot of trouble if she'd falsified data or done a test that was purposefully misleading.
That might otherwise infest organic crops, especially fruit.
So they put some certain smells to freak bugs out.
Likewise, vaccines for animals are important disease prevention tools against many infectious diseases, blah blah blah, especially since antibiotic therapy is prohibited in livestock.
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Some chiropractors and a lot of people who love chiropractic and are mad at me, because I think people think I'm calling them stupid for using chiropractic, but I'm like, no, you got...
And I mean, it's like I would basically be calling half my fan base stupid if if that were the case.
And I'm not.
And I felt kind of bad because a good friend of mine, like she like after she gave birth, she had like a severe enough injury that she could barely walk and a chiropractor.
Basically from massaging the area, got her up and walking.
And the thing she said to me was, I'm tired of being called a lemming moron.
I'm like, number one, I never insulted people who used chiropractic.
And number two, I definitely didn't use those two words.
And I think people got the impression that I was calling everyone who used chiropractors dumb.
And it's like, that's never the point of my writing.
It's like, you're not the moron for falling for this.
I don't even know if a lot of them are assholes because I don't know if a lot of them have even looked into this.
You know, I've talked to some chiropractors about this stuff that's been going on over the last couple weeks since your article and since I did my podcast since we've talked about it several times.
I just don't think they understand the origins of this.
If you're a kid and you're getting out of high school and you're going into college and you want to get involved in something therapeutic and chiropractic medicine seems like a good thing and you start going to chiropractic school, you might not even know.
And I really do sympathize with a lot of chiropractors who are out there that have emailed me like, hey man, what you're saying could potentially destroy my business.
I understand and I sympathize, but you've got to understand that if I knew about this and I didn't talk about it, that would be more horrible.
I have a responsibility if I find something out like this, like the guy who invented it is a fucking quack and a magnetic healer and you're not really going to medical school, there's a responsibility that you have to say something about that.
And I just think people are thinking about themselves.
They're thinking about, you know, Hey, I've got bills, and hey, I've got this, and I've got a practice, and I've got this.
It's funny because a lot of them, I don't know if this should bug me or not, because you'll see doctor somewhere, and the MDs will say MD really carefully, or pediatrician, although they'll be very careful to say what type of doctor they are.
Now I'm very leery if I just see doctor, because I'm like, what breed of doctor are they?
Do they have a PhD?
Are they a chiropractor?
If I see doctor and then I see some bullshit on their page, I'm like...
What type of doctor are they?
Because everyone wants you to think, or I think people just want you to think that they're a medical doctor.
And that title has a lot of weight, so people will take shit advice if they see DR period in front of the name.
It's hard to find people that are 100%, you know...
Very skeptical and very, you know, or critical thinkers and want to be critical thinkers in every field of their life.
Like, look, I'll be really good and really critical thinking about this, but motherfucker, I have this belief and you can't touch it.
And like, that seems to be the case with a lot of people.
I'm like, I just want evidence about things.
Show me evidence.
And the big thing is show me where the balance of evidence is.
Like, if you give me two articles that say this and then 10,000 that say this, I'm like, I'm over here.
I'm going there.
And I think that's kind of a solid way to evaluate evidence.
Like, if you've got a lot of them that say this and they seem solid and backed by people who know what they're talking about, it just seems to be a good way to evaluate how you're going to...
Well, that's one of the reasons why I don't blame people when they don't get it right, right away.
Because do, and this is something I'll do at some of my talks, I'll say, you know, take out your phones and Google a term that you're not sure about in health or nutrition.
Google GMOs, Google sugar, Google, you know, whatever.
And, you know, tell me what the top 10 search results say.
And, you know, Sometimes, especially with GMOs, for a long time, the top 8 out of 10 search results were like, wow, this is going to make your dick fall off.
And now it's changed a little bit because there's been a huge effort by science writers to get out the word, this isn't going to kill you.
But for a while, how...
So many of the top search results said they were horrible.
How hard should just a soccer mom in Iowa have to hunt to figure out if this is going to kill her kids?
That's why I really don't blame people when they get it wrong at first.
Because there's so much bad information out there that it's easy to get the impression that, like I said, the 10,000 articles say it's bad when it's really just screaming assholes repeating the one article that says it's bad.
So, I mean, and I don't know how many stories there are like that from people saying, you know, we started chiropractic when I was a baby and this was not the way to go for me.
Like, but God, some of the responses to the article.
So there are like the sudden very, you know, kind of violent way that they crack a neck in chiropractic can leave you open to severing an artery in your neck.
Now, it's not often that it happens, but it happens.
And this is one of those things that I have a really big contention with chiropractic with is that they have all these mornings and About how, you know, Western medicine, and it's kind of funny that they call it Western medicine when chiropractic started in the middle of the U.S. It's like, you don't get to claim that you made this in China, for fuck's sakes.
But like, they'll say that Western medicine is so horrible for you, and it has all these potential side effects.
And yeah, it has potential side effects.
But they have potential side effects while they actually cure shit.
You have potential side effects while you're cracking someone's neck.
When you say potential side effects, too, you're talking about 320 million people that are going to the doctor.
If you have 100,000 cases of potential side effects across the board from all causes, that's what they're harping on.
You're harping on the minority of things that happen and go wrong.
And then, you know, obviously, there's some shit like thalidomide and some stuff that people don't use anymore that are horrible and the side effects are...
Now, we had one regulator in the U.S. who saw the drug was coming up for approval here, and she said, no, we have to look into this more.
And then they saw the cases in Europe of all these infants that were being born with major side effects.
And she was like, ah, told you.
So that was how they started.
And this is actually what gave us one of the best acts for regulation of For safety and efficacy in the U.S. And basically it said that drugs before they make it to market now have to be proven beyond a certain amount to show that they are both safe and effective.
And it was basically thalidomide that launched that act, which is kind of like we're good at learning from our mistakes.
I say we like I work for it, but no, it's like we're good at learning from our mistakes when we have a fuck-up like that.
So I mean, I don't know what...
And what worries me is that we're going to have...
Eventually, we can very easily have another drug like that, but it will be something that we haven't regulated out of the system yet.
So I don't know what the next thing will be, but it'll be something that we haven't seen yet.
So that's the kind of scary thing.
We already know how to test for...
Things in utero.
We already know to test for things that can cause cancer.
We already know certain types of testing.
But thalidomide, it was so crazy non-toxic, they couldn't get it to kill a rat.
So you know about phase three clinical trials and all that from that.
So when you get to phase 3, generally you're testing between 3 and 10,000 people in the population.
And you've gotten through a few trials.
You know that this is effective for this.
You want to see if people have...
You're testing for allergic reactions and you're testing to see where people are going to have issues with the drug.
So that when you get to market, you know that, you know, these people, like this is the percentage of people that have these side effects as a percentage with these.
If you have these side effects, call your doctor right away, discontinue, that type of stuff.
But that's 3,000 to 10,000 people.
You don't know who you're going to give it to that's on X medication, that has X... Disorder on top of the thing you're treating for that type of stuff or if it could cause someone to die these things can happen and like that's kind of what happened with Vioxx is that you know like they didn't they there were some people in that room who probably Vioxx which just explain causes strokes in some folks yeah it was an anti-arthritis medication yeah and it was I know a guy who got a stroke from that, by the way.
I mean, there were people in that room who probably looked at it and said, all right, so there's this risk factor that causes you to increase your possible risk factor by X percent.
What if somebody has all of these risk factors combined?
Well, you shouldn't approve it because there's a chance if you put somebody on this who has all of these combined, there's a chance that their chances of getting a stroke or having an issue with their heart attack from it is going to be through the roof.
We shouldn't approve it, and it got approved anyway.
It's one of those drugs that shouldn't have been put through.
Yeah, and it's like there is a chance when you put any drug through.
Now, they try to do things to minimize this, but because a Phase III trial only tests in, you know, a certain amount of the population, they try to get a diverse group.
When you get it out, you don't know what the possible effects are going to be on someone else.
So you might see new side effects.
Right.
on because you know you're not prescribing these to healthy people you're prescribing this to a sick person so yeah that that definitely can happen so that's why for a certain amount of time after drugs on the market they do post uh the base though it's kind of phase four clinical trials you're doing uh post-market monitoring so that does go on for a certain amount of time and sometimes drugs are pulled uh based on the amount of side effects the other things and that doesn't happen often um but it can happen based upon you know the amount of uh issues that you see after it
But the problem is when they show these people holding hands and spinning around in a field of wheat and having the greatest time in their life and butterflies are flying around and puppies are magnetically drawn to them.
So if you need urgent care or regular care, like you need to go to the doctor for a checkup, you need your annuals, or you have a fucking heart attack, I would say you're better off living in Canada.
I had a little cousin that was born with basically no chambers in her heart.
Which is horrifying.
You know, it's like they saw it in utero and it was like, okay, we're going to have to give this child an operation like almost immediately when she was born.
And for the next two years out, a surgery almost every, like open heart surgery every year on the dot.
Her father, my cousin's blog that documented it if you want to have a peek.
But it was...
It's a fairly rare condition.
The heart was...
I believe when she was born, like it was a little closer to the center of the chest.
Like it's a...
It was a very...
Like my mom said that, you know, when she held her when she was first born, like the pulsing even felt a little...
Or sounded a little different than a normal infant's heart.
Like it was...
At first they did a surgery that kind of put a band around the heart to give it a little more structure and then they formed more chambers and then when she was three they put in like full chambers and now the only thing she can't do is she can't play contact sports and they paid nothing.
She can't play contact sports because of the possibility of causing...
I'm not sure exactly what it can do, but it can cause a little bit too much trauma to a heart that's already been through a lot of trauma.
But that's the only thing that she's been told not to do.
But he would press the back of your head, like little spots.
And he's like, does this hurt here?
Does this hurt here?
Does this hurt here?
And then he would press harder.
And I go, well, that one was kind of...
It kind of hurts more.
And he's like, well, there could be an issue with, you know, hypothalamus or some shit like that.
I was like, what?
And so, you know, I'm a pretty skeptical person.
I've been hoodwinked before, but I'm pretty skeptical.
I know that someone's pushing a part of my head harder and then asking me if that part and then claiming that they can tell from the fucking skin on your skull.
I mean, at some stage of your life, whether it's your parents telling you about Santa Claus or something along the way, we've been tricked.
And it's not your fault that you got tricked.
Man, sometimes it's not even the fault that the person is tricking you if they're being sincere and they're just misinformed and they don't understand that what they're doing is actually harmful.
Explain to me how they lead people into giving him enough information that he can form a reasonable assessment of who they are and then he would answer certain ask certain leading questions and he's like I've just done this so many times I know how to get be and people are shocked and they don't know what to do and they've never done this before so you know it's like you can ask them questions and they start giving you information and like your parents were divorced when you were young how do you know Because you said it.
It's so common, first of all.
You can read certain things from people.
He showed us a bunch of shit that he does, like the spoon bending thing.
A bunch of different things that people want you to think that it's magic.
It's funny because there's a big crossover with the magician community and the skeptic community, and it's because they know how easy it is to trick the Sure.
And I kind of love that.
It's been interesting to see this group of entertainers that people think of as goofballs be a little bit of a bastion of intellectualism because it's hard to get people to pay attention to anything on the internet.
But if you make it funny and you add a dick joke, suddenly people are like, I've got to learn about this.
Well, that's why Penn and Teller, I think, are so important because they were the first magicians who were really adamant that what they're doing is bullshit.
One of my favorite ones is there was an episode where they attacked organic food, and this is this thing where people double down on things.
They took a banana, cut it in half, and it was, I believe, a conventionally grown banana, and on one plate they'd say it was an organic banana, the other plate they'd say it was organic, the other plate conventionally grown, and have people take a bite out of each one.
And people, you know, they'd sit there describing the organic banana as creamy and sweet and tastes like a banana should taste.
And the conventionally grown, yeah, it's really bland and it doesn't taste good.
And this one girl after they explained, to quote Penn, it's the same fucking banana!
And this one girl afterwards, she's like, I don't know if it makes me question my opinion of organic versus conventional.
unidentified
It really makes me question the concept of the banana.
Well, I think it's a unique time for exposing bullshit, you know, because there's enough articles and videos, and there's enough, like, you can kind of get a sense, like, oh, I see a pattern here.
I think people are tired of not knowing what's real on the internet, and it's partially, like, this whole trend with fake news, and, like, there's kind of a breaking point, I think, in terms of what people are willing to accept for just...
Shit being spewed on the internet and being accepted as real because there's so much content out there and people want to spend their time reading stuff that's for real and that they can trust and they don't want to trust shitty sources you know like they want to go all right here's a source I can trust I can keep going back to this website I can get good information.
And they want things explained that they know was researched well.
And I think that this is a valuable good to offer out to people saying, you know, here's something real and here's a dick joke to read while you're reading something real.
Now, when you did this article and, you know, you said it was 4,000 words, it's a particularly long article.
What did you have to omit?
I mean, it seems like, I mean, when you're dealing with 4,000 words, I mean, was it just the comprehensive coverage on why chiropractic medicine is bullshit?
Or is it just like, like, God damn, I got to keep this thing as tight as I can, but there's so much to talk about.
I was going to joke, well, I do get paid by the word.
No, that's true, but it wasn't like...
I never go into it going, let's make it as long as I can or make it as short as I can.
I'm a contributing writer at The Outline now, and whenever we write a piece, it's always, let's make it cover the topic in as entertaining and as...
As cohesive of a story as possible.
We kind of say, what points do we want to cover in this piece?
And it's basically to tell a good story.
And my goal whenever I write an article on something is, let's write a piece so that I never have to cover this topic again.
And with chiropractic...
One thing I would have liked to have covered if somehow we could have condensed it a little so we could have fit something else in, I would have maybe added in a piece on are there science-based chiropractors.
When you say chiropractor science-based, if it was bullshit when it started, if it was something that was created by a magnetic healer, it was a nonsense thing that came from a seance.
How does that ever become science-based if the original, the origin, it's not based on medical research where they figured out that if you do this, look, here's all the studies that we've shown.
When you do this, this is the immune system response that the body has.
And I don't want to diminish, and this is something that I'm sure people are sitting there with daggers still mad at us for questioning their subjective experiences.
I don't want to tell people that they did not feel relief from what they...
Because pain is really subjective and it's hard to manage.
Sure.
I think that there are chiropractors who aim specifically to relieve low back pain.
And I mean, I think if you aim just to do that with your chiropractic practice while still telling people, look, I'm just doing this while you go to physical therapy.
You should still be going to a physical therapist.
This is an adjunctive thing solely to relieve pain.
And they try to see how it can just relieve pain.
I think it's possible that that can do that, but I think that adding that into the article takes away from it a bit, because that's not part of the article's point of view, and it's also not part of my point of view of how it's not a science-based practice.
So I think that, and I mean, I've seen some ethical chiropractors, there's Sam Homola, I'm not sure how to pronounce his name, I've never heard it said out loud before, but that was one of the chiropractors who I cited in there.
He's continued to practice while speaking out against the chiropractic, very vocally speaking out against chiropractic as a whole, because he's seen that it can, you know, and there is some evidence.
And that's one of those things where I feel like I'm in a gray area, because I don't want to diminish the people who have said that it's helped them have...
Pain relief, but I also think these people should be going to a physical therapist and to a massage therapist.
So I'm not sure what the exact right answer is on that.
If someone says, I've been to a physical therapist, I've been to a massage therapist, and this is the only thing that's ever made it feel better, and I went in one session.
What do you say?
And I... I don't know where the exact right answer is to that person.
What if, and this is, I get it, this is completely a hypothetical, what if it hadn't been started by this nutjaw-bagnetic healer and it was a doctor who said, oh, this can, you know, this can help.
And if it was just an osteopath who was trying to see if this could help relieve pain along with physical therapy.
So I encourage people if they are looking for a way that manipulation can help, maybe not go to a chiropractor, but seek out in your medical practice an osteopath who knows much more about anatomy and please keep going to a physical therapist and maybe a massage therapist because massages feel fucking great.
Yeah, and I mean, that's, like, I think it's, and I get it, like, I'm, I don't want to, I think the hardest part is telling people that their subjective experience is wrong.
I got it as an adult because this is kind of shitty.
They do need to make a new whooping cough vaccine.
That is not a reason not to get it.
Please get it.
Please re-up it.
But the whooping cough vaccine, when they made it, some strains of it wore off faster than was originally expected.
Somebody came into my lab, and we were, I mean, we were given, you know, along with our packages working two labs ago at a drug testing lab, we were given health insurance.
And it was around the time of the first Obamacare debate, you know, when people were all like, I don't need to buy health care.
And one of the guys in the lab who was all, why should I get health care?
And this is something that chiropractic does yell about in the pain care department.
And in the medical system that they have a point about, doctors do throw pills at you haphazardly.
My doctor, and I'm never going to not be mad about this, my doctor instead of saying we should do a scan with contrast to see what's going on because you're really complaining about this, chucked me a bottle of Vicodin and said go ahead and run.
Oh yeah, I'm not gonna say because you know it's like it's there was that part of me that was really happy that I got to do my ultra but God damn it if you need Vicodin to run a marathon don't do it.
Oh yeah, it's I mean don't don't do that but I mean it was funny because after I ran I'm like all right I don't need to you know take the medication anymore because I'm not running and suddenly I realized how fucked up my hip was and it was like oh my god I can barely walk like I What was wrong with the hip?
It was the week that I turned 29. I'm like, it's...
Turned 29 and already I'm getting hip surgery!
I'm like, this was...
Yeah, so that was my...
All of my surgeries have been on...
I'm pretty sure my parents dropped me as a baby and just won't admit to it because my headache left side, three surgeries on my left shoulder, surgery on my left hip.
My friend Anna, she knows all the things we're doing.
I just kind of show up and I'm like, please let me not kill myself.
It's a thing where it's a lot of fun.
And I'm loving the crap out of it.
It's a great workout, especially for your lats and your upper shoulders.
But it's like, dear God, I'm still clueless at what I'm doing.
It's funny because she's won a few tournaments.
She knows what she's doing.
I'd gone shooting with her a few times.
Then we went out and my boyfriend came with us.
And he's hitting bullseyes right away.
I'm like, are you fucking kidding me?
me he just naturally great at it I'm like what but I'm like I it's fun meditation oh yeah it's just you're just you're sitting there going who who do I want to pretend isn't the tartan but it's No, not at all.
I'm not an angry person.
It's funny.
All of my rage goes into my writing, and that's...
I'm like, anger, daddy issues, all the times that I did.
It's the one thing, and I keep waiting for this, you know, there was the one article where somebody called me a Sith Lord, and I'm like, they gave a bunch of...
I'm like, you know, after all the insults that people have thrown, I found an article written about me once, and this was beautiful, that said that I was a big pharma shill because I admitted to taking medication for my headache.