Peter Gabriel Opens Up About The Fight to Save his Wife’s Life
Dr. Oz sits down with former Genesis star Peter Gabriel about the fight to save his wife's life, after she was told her melon-sized tumors were incurable. Meabh was diagnosed with an aggressive form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma 18 months ago, and underwent crippling chemotherapy. After being told there was nothing more that could be done, Peter refused to listen, and continued to search for answers. In an intimate interview, Peter reveals the treatment that cured his wife, along with the doctors who urge cancer patients to never give up hope. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
We only really had one oncologist who had sort of given up, but that was still pretty scary information to hear.
And he was just trying to prepare me for what he thought was going to happen.
You know, I think there are good people everywhere who do some fantastic work, but it's just the whole system needs to be sort of upturned, and patient power should be part of the new model.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
I was invited to a big dinner recently, and Peter Gabriel was the star performer at this event.
And so we're all waiting with great anticipation, and we're sort of herded into a room, and everyone's quiet, you can hear a pin drop.
And then Peter Gabriel walks out.
And of course, the iconic musician from Genesis and his own career subsequent to that, started to perform.
And then he became very emotional.
As he started talking about his wife, Maeve.
And what I didn't know is that Peter Gabriel's wife was diagnosed with untreatable, incurable non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, an aggressive tumor that her doctors did not think they could get ahead of.
As a father and a husband and a man who desperately loves his wife, couldn't bear losing her.
So he did what most folks would do, which is keep looking, keep pecking.
But because he's an iconic musician and had clout, he was able to get access to people that most of you probably can't get access to, which is a problem.
And I'll come back to that.
Because what he was able to do, working through a...
Actually, two brothers, William and Vincent Lee, was to get access to a cutting-edge stem cell therapy, an experimental approach to treating the kinds of tumor that she had.
And they rolled the dice.
And it turns out they won because she was able to get the drug, had a remarkable response.
In fact, a miraculous response was how it was phrased by some.
And when she...
It was at the conference at the Vatican with me and Peter.
She was completely free of any disease.
So I asked him if he would share his story and if he'd bring Maeve along, who I haven't talked about this much, but I thought would tell her story as well as anybody could.
So here's the story of Peter and Maeve Gabriel, and then afterwards I want you to meet the Lee brothers, and we're going to talk a little bit about what this represents and what this could be and what some of the pitfalls are.
I want to thank you very much, Maeve and Peter, for spending a little time.
Peter, on the stage today, you brought alive the poignant personal side of needing to fight to change the way a lot of folks get access to care.
And I'd love, if you don't mind, to hear the story of you and Maeve.
And maybe Maeve, maybe your side first, because you witnessed the symptoms first, and I haven't heard from you yet.
And then I'll push with Peter.
And I'm hoping by the time we're done, we'll also appreciate how someone with a musician's background sees the world differently.
In a way that might actually transform how medicine is practiced.
Well, I was very lucky.
I wasn't very lucky to get the disease, but I had Will and Vince Lee who look to the future and for me I had genetic profiling of my cancer.
So I started treatment with a chemotherapy that we weren't sure at that point if it was going to actually work.
And by the time I had done two months of that therapy, it takes a while to get that profiling.
It became kind of clear that it wasn't working.
And I was presented with a lot of material that showed me what I might actually, what might work.
And I presented that to my doctors in London and was met with a wall.
I think people don't know how to read the information and people have a protocol and they want to follow that protocol even though you're giving them information that will tell them it's not going to work for me.
And I did do many forms of chemotherapy that just my cancer grew throughout those chemotherapies.
And then we heard about CAR-T. And Will and Vince had researched this extensively for me.
We ended up at Moffitt.
I was accepted on a trial.
It was still at the trial, clinical trial stage, CAR-T. And my trial was in open access.
So you have to meet a lot of criteria to get on these trials.
And that's, I think, the problem for patients.
It's really hard to navigate your medical information.
And even at Moffitt, they said to me, It was great that your information was so clearly presented because it could take us a month to get through this information.
And with other patients, it can take two months.
We just can't wade through this information.
I was able to get on that trial within a few weeks.
And it really struck me that it is too difficult for patients to navigate their medical information to get on trials.
And that's incredible.
Seems wrong to me.
It's incredible that doctors haven't got the time to wait to get through this information.
Patients don't know what trials are suitable for them.
I know they were talking about an app downstairs that would give you a marker, you out, and doctors could get you on a computer and go, we can put this person on this therapy.
But there are extraordinary trials out there that patients don't know about and don't know how to get on.
And that's what kind of struck us about, you know, it was the future is out there.
It's just not everyone can access this.
Peter, how did they make you feel when you were witnessing your wife go through therapies that weren't working, and yet you were hearing there were options out there that the physicians, in Maeve's words, were resistant to, blocking?
Frustrated as hell.
You know, they talked about a chemo ladder.
You know, just, this one doesn't work, step up and we'll increase the potency, toxicity, and give you another.
Until, really, you're either eliminated or well.
But unfortunately, you know, and I think most of the people in your world now see chemotherapy as the old model and it's, you know, it's not going to be around too much longer, except perhaps as an adjunct to other treatments.
But the level of toxicity, of the current levels of toxicity, I think, belong in history books.
And when you first started to notice that Maeve was responding...
After months of probably thinking the worst, what was the prognosis they were giving you?
Well, we only really had one oncologist who had sort of given up, but that was still pretty scary information to hear.
And he was just trying to prepare me for what he thought was going to happen.
I mean, it was not...
You know, I think there are...
Good people everywhere who do some fantastic work, but it's just the whole system needs to be sort of upturned, and patient power is what should be part of the new model.
You know, that the old days, you had this sort of parent figure, the expert.
You just trusted their knowledge, their experience, and you handed...
You're abdicated responsibility over to them.
But the new model has to be that it's a collaboration.
And you have to think about it and get better informed and possibly change your allies.
But you need the confidence.
You need the information you can rely on to do that.
What I'm trying to capture, though, is a world-famous, iconic musician and his beautiful wife, also a talented artist, sitting down with...
Give it up.
She may have just started to blush, but it's true.
I have witnessed it myself.
Are going through a not-rare problem.
Cancer that seems refractory to traditional treatment.
And yet, confronted by the possibility, there's a whole new world out there that you barely found, because you were, in many ways, blessed to have access, but many others haven't found yet.
And I'm just trying to capture how that affected you emotionally.
Even the ups and downs of realizing there was hope when maybe there shouldn't have been.
Well, for example, it's CAR-T. In Europe, I know a friend was sent to meet her oncologist and spoke about CAR-T. I had met her and spoken about CAR-T. The oncologist said, I've never heard of this.
This is two months ago.
You can't, we are years behind in Europe to the States with CAR-T therapy.
I don't understand why that's, I just met an immunotherapist last week who said we're going to start these trials hopefully in the fall.
This was an FDA-approved treatment last year in the States.
Why is it?
And we have the regulators here, and you want to just ask, well, you're both sitting, the FDA and the European regulators are sitting downstairs.
But why is that?
What makes that happen?
Why is this treatment not available to everybody?
Yeah, it is the big question.
Peter, what's the answer?
Well, I mean...
You know, it's surely a complex problem.
We were extremely lucky because we had Will and Vince guiding us, and we had access to money.
But I think while we were sitting around in hospitals, we were thinking, we know how privileged we are.
The issue is access, access, access, and how could that be changed?
And so part of...
What we're thinking with this TAP project is to see if there are ways of integrating some of the new technologies which are impacting cells, such as low-intensity electric fields, such as infrared light, such as focused ultrasound or low ultrasound.
Seem to be producing some great treatments.
Could they be integrated into something which becomes affordable through consumer electronics, that could provide a platform that would be universal, that would talk to everything and everybody?
And so that's a dream.
And the other part of that is just to say, in any part of the world, what is immediately around those patients?
what foods, which the Angiogenesis Foundation are working on, doing fantastic stuff, what herbs, what commonly available drugs that may impact and have real transforming power on their disease.
But can we get science to put all this information with AI in a place that is really useful and can be trusted?
You know, these smart systems that are really good at pattern recognition could provide sort of rapid response regulators in the home.
And, you know, the great advantage of having it in the home is that if it's through consumer electronics, it will be there when you need it, when a problem is just beginning to be identified with these fantastic new diagnostic tools we have, and we don't have to wait for the problem to grow into something really difficult and we don't have to wait for the problem to grow into All right, we're just scratching the surface here, but we've got a lot more to discuss, so stay with us right after the break.
You were iconic even before the music industry was digitized and transformed.
You witnessed it firsthand.
You witnessed the industry, probably felt like it was going to implode, and yet it's come back stronger than ever because it used digital technology the right way.
Give me any parallels to healthcare.
Well, I think the streaming suddenly meant any content could be accessed by anyone Anywhere, at any time.
These brilliant minds, a lot of whom are here, could they be employed to do what they're doing, but in a format that could stream in the same way that music streams?
Clearly, not everything is going to fit into that, but a ton of stuff could.
If you can get that platform up there, But just in the same way, there's an explosion of young people creating amazing app content with no funding, just great ideas, but they can get it out there because there is that universal platform.
And medicine is, in our opinion, I think, screaming out for that sort of common universal platform.
And finally, you regaled us last night with a wonderful performance, which was very special.
You're not going to do the same thing again.
No, I'm not going to do the same thing.
You got very emotional on stage.
I couldn't speak.
You asked me about this song, which I dedicated to Maeve, and I just lost it.
Well, for my audience, I'd love them to hear in your words what it meant to you.
Ah, well, it's a song called Love Can Heal.
Yes, she's...
I mean, I'm the soft one.
She said...
Anyway, typical marriage, yes.
But, you know, nothing more important in my life.
And so I'm really respectful and thankful to all the amazing scientists and people in the healing business that we just want them to work together and talk together and come up with a single platform.
He obviously loves you.
I can see why.
But as someone who's pulled through, where's the wisdom for many others who have not yet?
I think you've got to go out there and find the information, research, approach the scientists.
They're very happy to talk to you.
Don't take no for an answer.
Keep fighting until you find somebody who can give you some hope.
Bless you both.
Thank you.
So you see how emotional Peter still is.
It's hard to make a man speechless when they're strong and known for it, as Peter Gabriel is, but he dearly loves his wife, Maeve.
And his big point was that a lot of people didn't realize there was a stem cell solution.
And, unfortunately, even if they do, a lot of people in the world wouldn't have access to it, which is a problem that the Vatican, in particular, was concerned about.
It's one of the reasons they hosted the conference on ethics in medicine, was to figure out if there's some way for us to make these cutting-edge new ideas accessible to everybody.
So I asked William and Vincent Lee that the brother of doctors Up in Boston, who Peter Gabriel turned to for advice, and he gives credit for shepherding them through the difficult task of getting access to CAR-T, which is a stem cell therapy.
And they're going to explain what it is.
Remember, this is not just some esoteric little idea.
This is a cutting-edge concept that is revolutionary and is going to come into your town if it's not there already.
And you need to understand some of these ideas because they will cure what we think are incurable cancers, and they're going to say some things, William and Vincent Lee, That are going to stun you, shock you.
And among them, listen carefully, they're going to point out when they genetically screened Maeve Gabriel's tumor, she would not have responded, most likely, to the first-line therapies offered for this type of lymphoma.
I'll say it again.
The radiation and the chemotherapy she would have normally received and had already started getting, probably, would not work.
But what did work was taking her own immune cells, awakening them to the tumor in her body.
And this is the story.
All right, so Peter, maybe we're enthusiastic fans of the Lee brothers as I am as well.
I think most of America should appreciate why that's the case.
So before we get some of the cool cutting edge things that you're doing, I want to just track back for a second.
They talked a lot about CART, which is immunotherapy.
In plain English, can you explain to everybody why they ought to know about this and the family of drugs that it represents?
Immune therapy is an entirely new approach to cancer that isn't directed at killing cancer cells, which is what we've been taught is the way to go about this.
But in fact, it's the most sensible approach, which is boosting our immune systems and allowing our own immune cells to actually take care of the cancer.
There are many ways of doing this.
One of them is called CAR-T, where you remove your own T-cells, engineer them, sort of make them, send them to a clinic and get them to be superheroes.
And then when they've grown up and they've got the appropriate muscles, put them back into the body and they just go straight to work and they take care of the cancer.
And so it really has completely transformed the way that we think about cancer now in the sense that I think in the near future, we're going to be looking back in the rearview mirror at how we used to treat cancer, which is to hit it with a sledgehammer.
And of course, we destroy our own bodies and our health and our immune system along the way and realizing that, you know, maybe we shouldn't have been doing it that powerfully all along.
And in fact, what we should be doing is turning the tables on cancer by making our bodies stronger.
And that's really the whole class of immune therapies.
I just want to add one other thing.
The reason why people should know about it is that usually you think about treating cancer in cycles.
You poison, you let the body recover, you poison again, you keep on doing that.
The amazing thing with CAR-T is that it's a single infusion.
I think for me it took about 10 minutes.
That's it.
And then her own body started to...
Her own T-cells started to actually work on destroying the cancer.
And it's a totally different kind of approach, and it's a different patient experience, too.
It's actually very, very fast and easy for the whole process.
Of course, there's other things that you have to do as part of the therapy, but a 10-minute infusion?
Who would have thought that that was possible before?
So no hair loss...
Radiation exposure.
Because it's your natural body's immune cells attacking the cancer.
And I know, because Peter shared this, and he gave us permission to talk about this case, which I treasure, because it means that by sharing his private information, May's private information, he's helping many others.
When they did the genetic screening, it turns out that they actually were sort of, she was sort of resistant to the first-line chemotherapy, resistant to the radiation.
So she would have gotten treated more with stuff that probably wouldn't have worked.
Well, what we're able to do now with cancer is essentially decode the Rosetta Stone using some of these genetic tests.
What that means is that what we used to call cancer, whether it's lymphoma or breast cancer or prostate cancer or colon cancer, it's not one disease.
There's a fingerprint, a molecular and genetic fingerprint on every cancer.
And we're finally able to get at that fingerprint.
And by looking at it, we can even find out which chemotherapy drugs the tumor will be resistant to.
So just a few years ago, we would have just essentially used the same formula, the same recipe, the same chemo drugs for every cancer of its type.
What we now know is that every cancer in every patient is going to be different So when you hear about personalized cancer therapy, it's really about reading the fingerprint of that cancer for an individual person and then choosing the right medicine.
We're just at the beginning of this, but it's going to change everything about the way we approach cancer.
Peter articulated a vision.
He called it the TAP. But you guys have been instrumental in putting the pieces of this puzzle together.
And when you liken it to other technologies like music, which have gotten comfortable with now streaming when you want it, how will this so-called dashboard, I guess, function?
Give me a broader understanding of what health could look like even in 10 years.
Yeah.
So the amazing thing is when you go to see a doctor right now, you get your blood pressure, your heart rate, your electrolytes, a whole set of laboratory values, but those things haven't changed in 30, 40, 50 years.
And in a way, we know so much more than that.
We know down to a very, very fine detail that How to test for the functions of certain biology, the cells, the molecules, and the key thing is how do we integrate them all together?
So imagine, if you will, a dashboard that allows us to have a readout for all these different parameters of health but also disease.
The reason why we like to think about it as a Goldilocks zone is because every value has a range.
There's a lower normal and a higher normal.
So long as you're within the low to high normal, it's still normal.
And if you take a circle and you divide it into lots of little pieces of pie, each of those pie wedges represents, say, a way of looking at a piece of the biology of your own body.
If you were to take a look at all the normal values, it would form a donut.
And in a way, that's what people want, something easy to look at, easy to interpret.
So if everybody every day is looking at a green readout, a donut, it means that all things are good.
The autopilot on the plane is all working fine.
When you start to have something that goes outside the donut, maybe it's a different color, it's red, or inside the donut, it's too little.
You know that there's something that's abnormal, either too high or too low.
And then as Peter describes it, you can do a Google Earth deep dive to find out exactly what it is that's wrong.
Until that happens, actually, all people really want to know is that everything is okay.
And that's why this kind of dashboard is so critical.
I think the problem is right now, even with things like Fitbit and Apple Health, there's so much information out there.
Most people find it intimidating or they don't know how to interpret it.
It's just too much numbers.
If we could only change it to something a little bit more user-friendly, it would be so helpful to people.
And the key thing is to engage artificial intelligence.
It should be really what's processing all this tremendous amount of data and helping to find and tell you whether you're at the normal Goldilocks zone, too high or too low.
And then if it's something that we can do as individuals, things that we can access in our daily lifestyle, foods, medication, supplements, and lifestyle, sleep and exercise, that's something that we should be able to get distributed to us through the system so that we can do it ourselves. that's something that we should be able to get distributed If it's something we need a medical expert to do, there should be a way of getting a health coach, a health mentor, a health navigator that's a professional.
And that will lead to more intensive types of therapies.
But it has to be an integrated system.
That's, I think, the most important part of this.
Got a lot more questions to go, but first, let's take a quick break.
We've been on the show many times, talked a lot about basic preventive strategies.
So for folks who, if they could get this TAP dashboard, would know they weren't where they needed to be, maybe they can even feel it right now if they don't They're not going to 100 percentile of who they should be.
Basic ideas, insights that the Angiogenesis Foundation has looked at and collected, tabulated to help us understand the best first steps.
Well, the first thing I think is that you should know your body.
And most of us know when we like to eat something and when something agrees with us or doesn't agree with us.
I think that's our first practical step.
Second is we know that it's really clear that a plant-based diet in general is the way to go.
It doesn't mean that you have to only eat plants, and I'm not saying that you should be vegan by any means, but using plants to build the base of what you eat is actually a really safe and healthy thing to do, and this actually starts at childhood.
So anybody who's got kids, this is a great way to actually protect them for the rest of their lives, is it starts when they're a kid.
So I would say use plants as the basis, and you don't have to look far.
If you look at Italian food or Mexican food or Chinese food, there's many cultures that embrace lots of vegetables and they make them delicious.
And I would start with what tastes great.
Part of why I'm excited about this whole vision is that we actually intuitively believe vegetables are good, but how good are they for early cancer or preventing an early cancer?
Or helping with the late cancer.
And if we actually had better ways of identifying how you were doing, I gather we'd be able to figure out exactly how beneficial broccoli is as a pushback to those many of you out there who are broccoli haters, of which I am not one.
I want to thank you both very much for the wonderful work you've done.
God bless you.
The Lead Brothers.
Thank you.
So William and Vincent Lee, incredible duo.
They explain that so beautifully.
And they also make it clear that, you know, this is understandable.
We can imagine this growing up.
You enjoyed them, Lisa.
Oh, I love them, both of them.
They're so warm and accessible.
What I loved was that they could take really complex ideas and make them seem like, you know, everyday occurrences.
And...
They really, really care about their patients and about...
Well, I wouldn't say curing cancer because I don't know that we'll ever cure cancer.
You always like to say that we'll probably live with cancer rather than dying from cancer in the future.
But these guys are putting a real dent in cancer.
Well, the fact that I actually emailed them literally today about another friend who's...
My nephew, in this case, has a bad cancer, and they're helping.
And they already had a half a dozen ideas I never thought of.
But again, what's crazy here is that they're going to be good doctors and bad doctors.
And they're going to be great doctors, like the Lee brothers.
But you would want, in the modern era, when you have technology accessible to all of us that should help us figure out what's good or not, that we'd all have access to these kinds of therapies.
How many other husbands who have been married for 30 years, like me, by the way, Might have a wife that's deathly ill and not be able to get access to the kind of care that Peter was able to get from Maeve Gabriel.
You shouldn't have to be an iconic rock star to be able to save your loved one's life.
And that's where we are right now with a lot of these new ideas.
We have to get them good enough that they're clearly cutting edge and worthwhile, but they also have to be accessible to everybody.
Well, so I think the takeaway here is keep asking.
Whatever diagnosis you get, ask the extra question, go the extra mile, keep going, because don't take no for an answer.
So on that line of reasoning, we're going to ask more questions.
And I asked Dr. David Pearson from Stanford.
Stanford's a big healthcare system in the middle of the country.
They're based in the Dakotas, but they have all kinds of innovative ideas they're doing, because they cover a huge landmass.
And they've got a stem cell initiative.
Which I feel passionately about for two reasons.
One, stem cells, like the kind that were used to save Maeve Gabriel's life, offer huge opportunities and not just for cancer.
I heard ideas for autism or neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson's that might benefit from stem cells.
Again, they're conceptual still, but there's another reason that this is important because there is a fake stem cell clinic popping up near you right now, advertising on a billboard, trying to take your money.
And I want you to hear from someone who's legitimate so that we can transition to the bigger issue of the scams.
And these scams are dangerous because not only do they take the wind out of the sail of legitimate clinics, but when these technologies evolve and are proven to work, you're not going to believe it anymore.
So take a listen to David Pierce.
So, David, we spoke at the conference about some of the challenges but opportunities when you're trying to take cutting-edge ideas and expose them to lots of folks.
At Sanford Health, you've been able to, because of the nature of how you take care of folks in the Dakotas and a lot of surrounding areas, streamline this process in a way that's caught a lot of people's attention.
So, for the many listeners out there who maybe they might benefit from one of these cutting-edge ideas, take stem cells as an example.
How do they engage in the process?
Yeah, I think it's been a great conference for us to realize we're on the right track.
Samford Health is a very integrated health system.
We have not just healthcare delivery, health plan, and then research, all integrated.
We all sit at the same table at the high level and strategize once a week.
So for a stem cell clinical trial, for example, just imagine this.
You're going to take fat-derived stem cells, so basically a lipoaspirate, Centrifuge that, filter those cells, then inject in a targeted way into an orthopedic injury, and we've done rotator cuff to start with.
So here's what an integrated system can do.
Just imagine at any normal facility, scheduling the radiologist, do the imaging to where the target is going to go, the vascular or the plastics guy who's going to actually do the lipoaspirant, then the orthopedics group.
The fact that we all have such an integrated system means we got that trial done very, very quickly because we're all on the same team.
And research is a team science.
So expanding that to the rest of the country, because you don't cover most of the people in the country, the average American sees a stem cell offering.
And it's in one of the almost thousands clinics that promise to do things with stem cells that I never thought were feasible.
Cure Alzheimer's, reverse all degenerative disease, heart failure, diabetes, etc.
How much validity is there to these claims, especially when they give you a credit card payment plan?
And how does that impact on legitimate stem cell research?
I would say the vast majority out there is not legitimate at all.
Unfortunately, it's not regulated in a very great way, but as a large health system like ourselves, if we were to follow that path, then I'm sure we would be visited by the FDA very quickly.
So we've taken the path to follow the scientific path, which is to work with the FDA, and by the way, they will work with you.
We have designed a clinical trial, submitted it to them, taken their feedback, and we're on the path of actually legitimizing the use of these adult-derived stem cells.
How much does it hurt you when the average American is getting concerned about the legitimacy of stem cells because they're seeing huge billboards on their weekend football games?
It does.
I mean, obviously, education is extremely important with respect to this.
I would say anybody who's considering one of these procedures, you just have to ask questions.
What is it you're going to put into me?
Why are you going to do it?
What's your expertise in this area of the field right now?
Of the major opportunities that exist for problems ranging from stem cells to some of the newer cancer therapies, what are the best tactics to be able to find clinics, facilities like Stanford Health who are operating in other parts of the country so folks can get access to them?
Yeah, I mean, really, you need to go to the fdaclinicaltrials.gov website.
That will tell you all of the clinical trials that are actually available.
More importantly, it will tell you if they're recruiting and if they're actually open as well.
Are you an experimental animal?
Are you a guinea pig if you join these trials?
A clinical trial is a term I personally don't like.
A clinical trial is this.
It's an increased treatment option.
So particularly in oncology in particular, most clinical trials are you getting standard of care and then it's an increased treatment option.
In orthopedics with stem cells, it probably is what I would call an alternative treatment option to what the standard of care is.
Thank you very much, my friend.
Good luck to you.
Thank you.
All right, so now you understand a little bit more about what these stem cells could represent when they're studied the right way.
And genetic testing is important to figure out exactly who you are genetically as well.
You can match up to the right stem cells.
But I've done shows this year, some of the most popular ones, exposing the scam stem cell clinics that are out there.
And these are guys who will take your credit card and, you know, Charge you monthly fees.
These are not typically the way doctors work, by the way, right?
There's an insurance company that pays part of your money, then you get a co-pay or whatever else.
These guys, literally, it's a credit card business.
You go in there, I have a stem cell for whatever problem you're ailing from, and I'm going to charge you $25,000.
We have a layaway program, and off you go.
And I don't know, have you seen these advertised, Lisa?
I have not, and I don't know, I'm perplexed.
How do you, if you're a consumer, how do you know, besides whether your insurance pays for it or not, how do you know it's legit?
Sure.
Well, because stem cells are pretty much all experimental now, there should be no charge.
You should be entered into a trial.
They should be figuring out if the stem cells might work before they start charging you, pretending that they work.
But there's a loophole.
And it's a loophole that I completely respect.
The loophole is this, that a doctor can take tissue out of you Or your own blood and then change it if they need to and put it back into you.
Now, why would we need to do that?
Well, let's say I'm going to do a bypass operation on your heart.
I take veins out of your leg.
I pick them up.
I clean them.
I put them in a little saline solution and then I use them upside down so they don't cloud off in your heart.
Well, you don't want to stop that from happening, right?
You don't want to have the government telling a doctor you can't take a vein out of your leg and put it in your heart to save the person's life.
Stem cells go through that loophole and say, hey, listen, we're going to take your blood, take the stem cells out, do some magic in the back room, put them right back into you, and tell you that we're going to cure your Alzheimer's or your blindness or your osteoporosis or your knee pain or whatever.
Does it ever work?
Who knows?
I mean, have you heard of instances where people have gone to these stem cell places and had their knee fixed?
Well, I'm skeptical that the stem cell infusion itself did it, but it's always possible.
And there are some areas where stem cells probably do work, and we don't need long, big trials, but because they haven't been done, we don't know for sure.
There are other places where it's less likely.
I'd be sort of surprised, even shocked, if stem cells cured Alzheimer's.
The one injection of stem cells from your blood after being manipulated by a day or whatever into you again should not, I don't think, reproducibly be able to cure those kinds of illnesses.
But who the heck knows?
What I do know is when we research it the right way, we can learn all kinds of fun things.
For example, there might be I could take some of your stem cells, manipulate them, and get them to go eating up your plaque in your brain so maybe your Alzheimer's symptoms get better, for example.
But the way it's done right now, and I think there are probably a thousand of these clinics out there...
Doctors with no training in stem cells at all, but have an MD degree, are legally allowed to take your blood, manipulate it, put it back, make big claims that aren't really validated and can't be proven to be truthful.
And the U.S. government has started getting louder about it.
It's on the radar screen.
They know that people are being built out of money.
But my bigger concern than the people who are being currently harmed are the future impact.
Because once you've gotten the $25,000 bill for Alzheimer's treatment and you didn't get better, you might tell your friends it didn't work.
And then all of a sudden, stem cells start to get a bad name, and not because of poor old David Pierce at Stanford who's doing his best to really do legitimate research.
So for me, here's the takeaway.
If you're going to get a stem cell procedure done, it should not be charged to you because it's experimental, or your insurance company ought to be involved.
And if it's outside that parameter, it takes you to a whole different place.
You're with me?
I'm not heading out there anytime soon.
So let me transition from that to a problem that I'm really worked upon, which is the scams that I'm seeing on the internet.
Now, everyone listening right now knows I don't sell products on the line.
I hope you know that.
But you'll see ads pretending that I'm selling you a skin cream or a weight loss solution or God knows what.
That's why I'm still fat.
Yes.
I've been taking those pills and nothing's happening.
I hope you didn't pay for them.
Oh, my gosh.
That credit card bill just keeps coming.
Well, that's what they do, right?
I know.
They charge you 80 bucks for this weight loss pill, and then you get billed every month whether you want it or not.
You can't stop it.
Then you write Dr. Oz a letter saying, Dr. Oz, you're taking my money.
That grass!
I took the pill.
It didn't work.
And I'm here sitting.
I didn't bill you.
I didn't pay.
I didn't make the pill.
And I had Barbra Streisand on the show, as you remember, a while back.
And the next day, an ad that came out showing a terrible picture of her that they had photoshopped to look bad and then a picture that looked fantastic.
And then they said that I made her look beautiful again through my Dr. Oz anti-aging pill.
So, of course, what happens?
Barbra Streisand calls and says, why would you do this?
Why would you write a letter like that?
And why use a bad picture of me?
Barbara, are you kidding me?
And it's a true story.
We laugh about it still.
This happens to lots of the guests that come on my show, but it's not just me.
Other celebrities who are respected as not being hucksters are taken advantage of.
And of course, the internet goons use us.
Right.
There's like Christy Berkeley cream that made her look so good.
I thought I could get it and I would look like that.
Rachel Ray apparently has a cream.
Ellen's got some anti-aging product.
I mean, everyone is in a daytime TV lineup anyway.
Look how good you've made everyone look.
Exactly.
If only I wish.
So I got to talk about this at that same Vatican conference that I joined with Peter and Maeve Gabriel and the Lee brothers.
And I was speaking about this and explaining how it works because there's a real business around this.
And here's the deal.
The main companies that do this, sell that junk that you talked about, they're not as big a problem as the biggest internet companies out there who carry these ads.
When Facebook and Amazon and Google run these ads, and other companies too, they're not in any way trying to figure out if it's a legitimate ad.
They don't want to be in the business of figuring out if it's legitimate.
Yeah, but they'll take the money.
Yes, that's the problem.
And the New York Times, the Washington Post, and legitimate companies can't take ABC News, NBC, Today Show, they can't take the money because traditional news is responsible for knowing who's paying for what.
And if they were to use my name wrongly and claim I'm selling something that I don't sell, that doesn't work, then they'd be forced to take it down.
But that's not true on the internet.
And I went back to these guys and said, hey, aren't you going to at least let me know who's buying these ads so I can go after them myself?
If you're not going to do it, let me go after them.
And what they told me was, no, we're not going to tell you who's buying these ads.
And the reason is they don't want to have any culpability or responsibility for running the ads.
And if they share the names with me of someone who's knowingly, reproducibly using my name wrongly, next time the guy tries to pay them $100,000 for an ad campaign, they won't be able to take the money.
So it's infuriating to me.
The other thing I want to point out to all you out listeners, you understand that it's not small little fly-by-night companies doing this, there are big companies involved, is when a really top-notch sports manufacturer wants to sell you a product, they'll just tell these producers of content to get the word out that they're selling new sneakers.
Well, guess what?
They don't write legitimate articles, they write illegitimate scam articles because they know you'll click on them more.
The articles that are designed to purposely and falsely inform you Are the ones that are much more readily circulated virally because you're more likely to listen to something that's completely wacky because you're curious if it's true because it seems untrue.
Whereas an honest-seating article is pretty mundane.
Why would you read more about how being good is worthwhile?
So fake news, fake advertising travels faster than legitimate.
Lies are lies.
Whether it's news or advertising, they're still lying to you.
That was Churchill's famous line.
A lie travels around the world before truth has its pants on.
So now, now think about this.
How are we going to fix this?
Well, first of all, y'all are informed now, so you should be progressively and aggressively angry about this so that when you're upset with Facebook or Google, you should spread the word that they should not be knowingly taking fake advertising and they should probably at least share the names of people who are Doing fake ads with the people who are hurt, right?
Don't pile on the victim.
But here's the bigger issue.
When I was speaking about the Vatican, the Monsignor Vignano, he's a former prefect and he's called the accessor to the Secretariat for Communications.
The longer the title, the more important the person.
Anyway, he was a pretty powerful Monsignor and he was on a panel and he said that there needs to be urgency to transparency.
The real solution here is that everyone should know everything so that we all can make our own decisions.
And if you're not a transparent organization, and I would argue that is unfortunately the case right now for some of these big companies, then they need to become transparent.
Then Cardinal Renata, again from the Vatican, said that intolerance is a sign of weakness.
Which I thought was sort of cool because a lot of these ads are about intolerance.
They're advocating intolerance.
So we have bad things being done in the name of making money.
Don't be tricked into thinking this is all about politics.
It's not.
The biggest scammer of Hillary Clinton in the last election, I had him on the show, Justin Kohler.
This man was a Democrat.
He still is.
I think he did vote for Hillary Clinton.
But he ran an ad saying that she was stuffing ballot boxes in Ohio to angry Republicans who then believed it and voted against her and got their friends out.
So, unbelievably, money is driving the whole system.
It's not a bunch of small culprits in Russia or even government-subsidized problems in most instances.
It's just purely about the money.
It's a Macedonian guy knowing he can con $100,000 out of Americans by writing clickbait.
And that's why getting the Vatican on board and arguing that That we got more to do here is important.
I think there ought to be an association with some certified body.
Like the movies.
When a movie gets launched, you have to say it's an R-rated movie, an X-rated movie, or PG, right?
Yes.
There should be something like that about pieces that are written.
Some legitimacy that at least keeps us in a gated community when it comes to people taking advantage of us.
Otherwise, you're asking the big question, who's responsible?
And no one wants to own the neighborhood of the web.
And as it gets dirtier and uglier and angrier, you're going to have You know, an inner city plight issue where people flee from the web and go behind gated communities, which are basically paywalls.
So you'll be, I bet there's going to be a Wikipedia for social media.
Someone's going to say, oh, just, you know, it's free.
Come join up.
People connecting socially shouldn't be charged.
And if you want to donate $10 a year to contribute to this, it'd be great.
And they'll run the whole thing.
Then you'll take all the ads out of the business.
And by doing that, make it a lot easier for folks to trust what they're reading.
Because without money driving the scam ads and the scam news that comes behind it and all the falsities surrounding it, there's less room for error.
With that note, at a much more upbeat level, when you hear about the Maeve Gabriels of the world and you realize the authentic love that he had for her and what he was willing to do to get her saved, you realize we all have that power.
