2335 Exit Interview - An American Doctor Flees the System
Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, speaks to Dr. James Eversole, author of the letter featured in the "A Doctor's Lament" video.
Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, speaks to Dr. James Eversole, author of the letter featured in the "A Doctor's Lament" video.
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Hi, everybody. | |
It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio. | |
I hope you're doing very well. | |
I have the doctor. | |
Dare I call him the frustrated doctor? | |
Dare I call him the doctor who can treat his own ulcers? | |
But I guess 30,000, 40,000 of you have heard his story. | |
So why not get the opportunity to meet him sort of face-to-face? | |
This is Dr. | |
James Eversol. | |
Thank you so much for taking the time today. | |
My pleasure. | |
So this would be your coming out as a voluntarist moment on the internet. | |
And I guess my question is, what was the journey towards this madcap belief system? | |
And do you think it helped or hindered your frustration with your profession? | |
Well, I think that ever since I was young, I've been kind of guided by rational thinking and empirical evidence. | |
So I kind of have gone along that route my entire life. | |
I was an atheist from the time I was in high school. | |
My mom took me to church every Sunday, but my dad stayed in the parking lot smoking cigarettes himself. | |
But I actually kind of read the Bible cover to cover, and I've had a big interest in reading since I was very young, even outside of my assigned reading. | |
So I've Kind of been very amenable to anything that kind of made sense to me. | |
So that's kind of how it all evolved. | |
And this kind of hearing your podcast has kind of congealed everything that I was kind of already thinking all along. | |
So basically my worldview. | |
Right. | |
Because there's There's a certain amount of accepted rationality or I guess you could say culturally sanctioned rationality. | |
So if you're an atheist or agnostic, people aren't like, well, that's insane. | |
They may disagree, they may strongly disagree, but they don't think it's mental. | |
But the idea of a stateless society, even though it's perfectly consistent with the way that we live, with the way our personal lives work, and if the government started ordering us who to marry and what to do for a living, we'd be all up in arms. | |
But the idea of a stateless society, was that something that you had come to on your own? | |
Then my podcast and other shows helped with that or did it come to you through the show? | |
Because that's something that's really tough. | |
It's a tough, a jagged big pill for people to swallow, I guess. | |
Well, I would agree that I didn't come to the conclusion of a stateless society right away, but I certainly was very conservative in my views and, like many conservatives. | |
kind of went through the process of initially going through the political – Thought processes of the classic Democrat-Republican viewpoint and voting and things such as that, but I've kind of evolved past that now. | |
When was it you first decided to become a doctor? | |
Well, when I was very young, my sister is actually six years older than me and she is a nurse. | |
So she was kind of going through her training and I looked at her books and just my interactions with the doctors that I had that were my personal physicians. | |
I kind of wanted to do something where I could do an intervention and make people better. | |
That was one of the reasons that I kind of picked my specialty was because I liked the idea of feeling like I could handle a wide variety of problems and do something that I could actually see the direct benefit of It always has | |
been pleasing to me, the idea of intervening and changing a bad situation into a good one. | |
Oh, yeah. | |
I can imagine it's enormously – the philosophy game sort of feels like pushing string into a windstorm sometimes. | |
You don't really see a whole lot of effect, but I imagine that it's very satisfying that way in terms of healing people. | |
Did you – Or I guess, when did you sort of first start to feel the seaweed tentacles of the state beginning to wrap around your dreams and ideals? | |
Was it in school? | |
Were there any horror stories before that? | |
Or was it more when you got out into the world as you wrote to me? | |
It was pretty much when I got out into the world. | |
I actually did some time in the military, so I've been kind of involved in that. | |
And that area as well with being more of a kind of property of the state, which is essentially what you are as a military member. | |
So I was in the Air Force for nine years. | |
And this was after you were a doctor? | |
Yes, yes, it was. | |
But I imagine, I guess in the military with limited liability and so on, you probably didn't face, I mean, obviously in your whole life outside of medicine, you would face more government restrictions, but I imagine it was a little bit different when you started dealing with people in the remnants of the free market rather than as an army doctor or as an air force doctor. | |
Exactly. | |
Yes, it certainly was. | |
And what were the big changes there? | |
Yeah. | |
Well, first of all, in the military, there's no real personal liability. | |
You have corporate liability, but you can't be sued personally for malpractice, things like that. | |
Of course, the downside of being a military member is that you basically have no control over your own life as far as where you go and And things like that. | |
So they're going to tell you where to go and where your family's going to go and that type of thing. | |
But that was just kind of a double-edged sword with it. | |
But I was certainly glad to get out into the free market out of the military and gain more freedom over my life and where I was going. | |
Right. | |
And was it, because obviously in the letter that you sent, I'll link the video of the letter that you sent below this, was it sort of a slow accumulation of frustrations that caused you such, I mean, a completely understandable upset that prompted the letter? | |
Was it a slow accumulation? | |
Was it something sudden and particular? | |
Or was it the old straw that breaks the camel's back? | |
Right. | |
I think it really, really became evident when I actually got into the entrepreneurial aspect of it. | |
Having to go out and having the experience of what it would be like to start a business and having to put your own… Money out there and your sweat equity and worry about it 24-7 and worry about liability issues and worry about actually the welfare of your own family as far as your financial, if your practice failed, that type of thing. | |
So that was the main time that I can think of that really... | |
You really got a feeling of what it was like with the over-regulations and liabilities and things like that. | |
So when you started your practice, I know that you did ER work for a number of years, and when you started your practice, how did you go about even apprising yourself of the regulations? | |
You said, oh, I want to go start my own practice. | |
It's a great thing. | |
Then does somebody sort of thump you down with like 16 thick books and say, okay, just conform to this and you're good to go. | |
Do you have to hire someone? | |
I mean, how does it work? | |
Well, basically the way I did it was I hired a company to do all of my insurance credentialing and things like that. | |
And then the insurance companies each have their own requirements as far as rules and regulations. | |
And then you have the federal regulations, the OSHA regulations and the regulations. | |
Americans with Disabilities regulations. | |
So you can't really know all of the regulations because they're just too voluminous. | |
So you just have to ask other people, kind of get the lowdown. | |
You buy products that are already out there to try to help you. | |
Like OSHA in a nutshell type of thing that come in kits that you can try to learn, but you're still out there with it as far as not knowing all of the details of every regulation there is. | |
And it's a moving target, right? | |
I mean, they change every year. | |
It is definitely a moving target. | |
That's right. | |
Okay, now, so I was really struck, and I was sort of mulling this over when you were talking about The need for a deaf interpreter if somebody comes into your clinic. | |
So the devil's advocate position would be, well, they get sick too. | |
Deaf people get sick too. | |
They need help. | |
So this is one example that you gave of regulation that became very hard to fulfill. | |
I mean, I don't agree with the state providing the solutions, but I do, of course, like everyone, like the idea of deaf people having access to easy medical services and not having to go to some specialized place. | |
What's your argument against, not against servicing deaf people, but against the way the regulation was imposed? | |
Well, I think my point there was that you could be held liable under ADA regulations even if you don't know of an interaction that your employee told someone. | |
Like if an employee tells a deaf person that you don't have an interpreter… Then they leave and then you're open for liability. | |
But certainly if a deaf person comes in and I knew about it, I would go ahead and do whatever. | |
I mean you can write on a pad of paper. | |
Sometimes they read lips, that type of thing. | |
But it also applies to people who don't speak the language too, so who don't speak English, that you have to provide an interpreter as well. | |
Given that there are several hundred human languages, all the varying, I guess, levels of rarity around where you are, it would be impossible. | |
I mean, functionally impossible to have that level of interpretation. | |
I guess you can arrange for someone ahead of time or get a family member who speaks both languages, but that's quite a lot to ask for a private clinic to provide that kind of service. | |
Well, there are some telephone-based interpreters, but it's very tedious. | |
You have to go back and forth with the telephone like this, back and forth with the person you're dealing with. | |
So it can be quite time-consuming, to say the least. | |
You also mentioned about... | |
Being able to let go of employees who weren't working out. | |
I mean, I come from the software field, so everybody is always hanging by a thread, including senior management, and letting people go was a pretty significant part of what I do. | |
I mean, not necessarily due to incompetence. | |
Some people just like a slower pace. | |
Some people like a faster pace. | |
It's just not necessarily a good fit, but the company doesn't have anything to do with the judgment of overall competence. | |
But in your area, it seems very hard to get rid of people who aren't working out. | |
Why is that? | |
Well, we did actually have cases, a couple of cases where we were literally being stolen from the co-pays, the cash out of our cash drawer was being stolen by an employee. | |
And I did, we did fire that particular person, but there are, it's just, I suppose it's Partly rational, partly irrational fear on my part about potential liabilities in the event you get rid of someone that there's going to be some allegation that it was secondary to some factor having to do with the employee as far as something which could | |
be considered discriminatory. | |
Right. | |
I don't think it's particular to this particular area. | |
It's probably true across the board. | |
So if you had three, you know, if I'm a genie who's granting you three wishes to improve the practice of medicine in the United States, what would the top three things that you would suggest would be the best thing that could occur? | |
Well, I think that certainly going to a more of a free market model and getting away from the central government controlling your practice, every detail of your practice, it certainly provides a better product. | |
I mean, I was successful in my practice because Lots of people wanted to come to me as opposed to going to a hospital-based clinic just because it's a better product, and it has to do with a lot of different factors, mainly being that the owner of the business is actually working in the business. | |
You're not an employee of... | |
A hospital entity where there may not be as much empathy because you're just working for an hourly paycheck, that type of thing. | |
So certainly, decentralizing would be mind-blowing. | |
My biggest recommendation for the field just because you get into the bureaucracies and hospital systems are kind of not unlike the government bureaucracies. | |
They're just loaded with deadweight administration types that basically just impede any kind of innovation. | |
When you're working in a hospital system, You can't just make a decision and have it occur the next day that the change is made. | |
You've got to have several committee meetings and things like that, and it's very resistant to any kind of innovation and positive change, whereas when you're lean and mean, You can make these changes and you can provide such a better product. | |
My employees were also a part of the family, basically. | |
I was very good to my employees. | |
They were compensated very well. | |
We kind of felt like a team. | |
And it's much easier to do on a smaller scale than it is the larger corporate type of bureaucracy, similar to the government bureaucracy. | |
Yeah. | |
I mean it seems that wrapping yourself around regulations and fear of lawsuits provides a kind of, okay, we finally got this thing configured to optimally not get sued and to comply with regulations. | |
and if you want to come and change it, it's like pulling a little matchstick out of the bottom of a huge structure that could cause it all to come down. | |
I mean, I don't want to tell you anything about the practice of medicine, but the sort of layperson's thoughts that come into my head is there's a continuum, right? | |
I mean, obviously there are bad doctors who do stupid things and dangerous things, and they should be held accountable. | |
You hope that they would get weeded out in school beforehand, and you hope that the insurance companies would not want to have anything to do with them, so there's ways of dealing with that without regulations. | |
But there is, of course, a belief in... | |
In the perfectibility of medicine. | |
We have this platonic ideal of the perfectibility of medicine. | |
I would go to a doctor. | |
I would get a pill. | |
All will be better. | |
No mistakes will be made. | |
And that, of course, is completely unrealistic. | |
And, of course, if people want doctors to be perfect, then we should not be controlling them so much. | |
If we want doctors to be better, we should not be having them have 40-hour workdays. | |
You know, during their grueling post-school but pre-full license scenario. | |
And so, there is this weird expectation. | |
I don't expect food, perfect food to fall out of the sky onto my plate. | |
But people do have a belief in... | |
Like, healthcare should be – if I need it, I have to go and someone should give it to me. | |
And there's this sense of entitlement around healthcare, which is kind of frustrating to me because, you know, 60, 70 – depends how you count it – 60, 70, 80% of health problems are – It's lifestyle-related, to put it as nicely as possible. | |
Smoking too much, drinking too much, not exercising, doing dangerous sports, whatever it is going to be. | |
And so, to me, if you roll the dice, then you take your chances. | |
I mean, if you want to live a risky lifestyle, if you want to live a sedentary, smoking, drinking, skydiving kind of lifestyle, I think that's fine. | |
I mean, I can't tell anyone else how to live and what level of risk is acceptable to other people. | |
But there is this belief that you can live as riskily as you want and then when you get sick, by God, somebody's just got to be there to provide it for you. | |
And if they're not, then society is holding back something that it legitimately owes you. | |
And I think that sense, I don't know, as a doctor, do you see that sense of entitlement a lot? | |
Maybe it's more up here in Canada where we have completely socialized medicine. | |
Well, what I really dislike about the way that the medical profession has evolved, and part of this is societal, in that the pharmaceutical companies have marketed for so long, and we've been so indoctrinated in the idea that the solution to every physical and mental problem is a pill. | |
And this – and we even believe as a society that preventive medicine means you go into your doctor for regular checkups and get your cholesterol, your high blood pressure pill, your diabetes pill, and that that is the perception of what preventive medicine is. | |
But really, it's just exactly what you said, which is – You know, your great-great-grandfather didn't take one pill and may have lived to 100 years old. | |
I mean, it has to do with your lifestyle, your habits, your diet, and your exercise, and whether you smoke, whether you drink, and plus a certain degree to your genetics. | |
But that's what Really why emergency medicine was more appealing to me because it was more of a you could definitely see that you were causing a benefit to occur. | |
If someone's got a collapsed lung, you put in a chest tube. | |
If someone's not breathing, you can put in a breathing tube, that type of thing. | |
You can see definite results of what you're doing, whereas if somebody's just going in every six months to get You know, blood pressure medicines refilled, then, you know, that's not really helping the patient. | |
It's not really prolonging their longevity, I don't think. | |
And it's not making the quality of their life better. | |
Right. | |
And because there is the idea that a pill can cure them, they probably are less open to lifestyle changes. | |
Like, oh no, I got a pill. | |
I got my blood thinners. | |
I got my high blood pressure medication. | |
I've got my antidepressants. | |
Well, at some point, you could change your life. | |
No, no, no, no, no. | |
I have all these pills. | |
That's all I need is the pills. | |
And I think that gives, like up here in Canada, it's crazy. | |
I saw this study recently. | |
I think 50% of people who are told by their physician what they need to do to manage their diabetes just plain don't. | |
And it's like, but okay, I mean, you're going to pull an elephant's jaw, get your leg cut off, but I mean, just, you know, I mean, even when they're pre-diabetic, they don't do much to avoid it. | |
There's just this weird thing where it's like, I don't know, we feel like cars that can be fixed up forever, but it just doesn't seem to be quite true. | |
Well, the magic pill hypothesis is definitely out there. | |
I think that the pharmaceutical industry has a lot to do with that. | |
Why would they want you to go off their medicine? | |
They want you to be on their medicines for your entire life. | |
It is not in their best interest financially to have folks Not need their medicines. | |
Right. | |
So, they spend billions and billions of dollars to market directly to the public and actually to physicians as well. | |
And if it didn't work, they wouldn't do it. | |
Right. | |
And it works. | |
It definitely works. | |
You mean the marketing that the pill will cure your ill kind of thing? | |
Do you think, and I'm sure, you know, the economics of it. | |
Is something that just literally gives me a little tick right here. | |
A little facial tick. | |
Because we all understand that... | |
Getting some exercise, eating right, not smoking, not drinking too much. | |
These things are just so economically valuable. | |
I mean, there's not a huge amount of time. | |
It's not a huge amount of effort. | |
I spend, I don't know, three or four hours a week working out. | |
I mean, that's like one night's person consumption of TV on average. | |
So it's not really that big a deal to do that stuff. | |
It keeps you healthy. | |
It's your best shot to stay healthy. | |
And to get on a pill, to take three or four pills a day for the rest of your life and worry about all these things and have all of the escalating complications that occur from when people aren't complying to the things they need to do to do lifestyle changes, it just seems it's so economically valuable. | |
It seems there's such a weird economic incentive. | |
I can't quite figure it out. | |
Maybe it's because the government pays for a bunch of pills. | |
Maybe it's because doctors don't like to really confront people about lifestyle choices. | |
Do you have to sometimes be quite aggressive with people who are just living unhealthily? | |
Is there a risk of emotional volatility in that interaction? | |
I don't know exactly how it comes about that this pill culture has become so prevalent. | |
Well, from the doctor's standpoint, it could be that it takes a lot longer of patient contact time to counsel them on things like that. | |
Whereas the way that medicine has been driven most recently is that they have to see more patients in a shorter amount of time. | |
So there's a very short window of time that they have to. | |
And it's simply easier to write a to write a pill like this disease equal this pill, this disease equals this pill. | |
And unfortunately, that's what oftentimes gets gets done. | |
And then once those pills are started, then it takes a very it's inertia. | |
They're usually just continued indefinitely. | |
And actually, they're even added to that. | |
Elderly people are taking bushel baskets full of pills, and they're coming in, and there's just so many potential interactions. | |
They become exponential when you start getting that they're taking 10 to 15 medications. | |
The cross-reactivity potential there is... | |
Well, it's unstudied. | |
Obviously, you can't study that many combinations. | |
I guess also, if it becomes established as best practices, you have this problem, you prescribe this pill. | |
If you do that, then you're covered liability-wise for the most part. | |
Everybody does this. | |
This is the best practices. | |
This is what I learned at the seminar. | |
This is what everyone is being told by whoever, the drug companies or whatever. | |
And so if you're doing the best practices, you have less liability. | |
And I guess also if you say to someone who's got high blood pressure, here, take this pill, and then six months later say, you know what, stop taking the pill and start exercising, the guy might say, well, wait a minute. | |
Why was I on the pill if now you're taking me off the pill? | |
And if exercise could do it beforehand, why are you telling me to get off it now? | |
Hey! | |
You know, that kind of stuff. | |
So there is, I think, that inertia of not wanting to change without some externally valid reason, not wanting to change your approach. | |
So it's like, yep, just write that script again and I'm covered kind of thing. | |
That's true. | |
And just to go over a little bit about how pharmaceutical companies infiltrate physicians' practices, they have very attractive, detailed people that come into medical practices, | |
and with the express purposes of marketing certain new products that they have, like antibiotics and And different types of proprietary medications that are, of course, very expensive and much more expensive than your typical generic medication that may treat just as effectively and a lot of times more safely because they've been time tested. | |
And they'll come in, and of course the staff likes to get free meals and things like that, and they like free pens that have the name of whatever drug they happen to be using. | |
You know, pushing at that time. | |
I mean, there was one example. | |
I won't mention any names of the drug or the drug company, but heavily marketed. | |
The drug reps were in there every week with balloons and pens and about this new antibiotic. | |
And they even give you free samples, which is also the... | |
The kicker. | |
They give you free samples that you then, you know, justify it rationally by saying, well, I can give it to people that can't afford medicine. | |
I can give them samples. | |
But this particular antibiotic, and there's many, many other examples, you know, they all of a sudden, after a few months, there were problems and they withdrew it from the market. | |
So, but this was already out there, you know, with all these, and I was just one practice. | |
So, If you expand it to all across the country, a lot of people were given this drug just based on this huge marketing program. | |
And then it was all of a sudden withdrawn. | |
And that takes place with a number of different drugs that have come out. | |
There are these new... | |
Innovative drugs and they're all of a sudden pulled. | |
And actually, at my practice, I eventually banned drug reps from coming in. | |
I told them to take their samples out and take them away and that there would be no more pens, no more clocks. | |
And what really was the last straw on that was I had a drug rep come in and tell me That asked me why I thought you were on board with this medication. | |
And I said, what do you mean? | |
He says, well, we can tell you're not prescribing this. | |
So they have access to data on your prescriptions. | |
And then it just kind of angered me to the point I said, well, that's it. | |
All drug reps are banned from the office, which is what I did. | |
It made me feel better ethically, too, because I think it is unethical to have these companies that are directly marketing to physicians and providing information which should not come from the people selling it. | |
Right. | |
And, I mean, as far as I'm no expert on this, but I had Dr. | |
Ruart on the show talking about the FDA approval process, which is really slanted. | |
Like, you can run as many trials as you want and you only have to show two positive correlations, which simply by the law of averages you're going to get sooner or later, just on the bell curve. | |
This stuff seems very dicey. | |
I just was reading this thing about how kids on ADHD medication year after year after year, like nine-tenths of them show no improvement whatsoever, but they just... | |
They're stuck on it. | |
I mean, this is just – that's the solution. | |
You can't change the schools. | |
The parenting could be abysmal. | |
The neighborhood could be crappy. | |
It might be a single-parent household. | |
There might be three kids too many. | |
But none of those variables society wants to tackle, so we'll just drug the kids with very sketchy scientific backing and, of course, as you know, massive side effects, potentially very, very dangerous side effects. | |
The black box labels on that stuff is pretty scary. | |
But that's – as a society, we don't want to change ourselves. | |
A quick fix and of course the pharmaceutical companies then do that. | |
The doctors find it more profitable to see more patients. | |
The patients are relieved that they don't have to change their lifestyle. | |
It's just that it seems each individual decision kind of makes sense in a small context but in our overall context it just seems like pretty much the wrong direction to be going in health-wise. | |
I totally agree. | |
The ADHD subject, it's amazing to me just empirically over the years, and it's really sad about Medicaid beneficiary kids. | |
This has been my own personal experience, and I'm sure that most other doctors would agree with me, is that there is a much higher use of those medicines among Medicaid beneficiaries. | |
And it just makes sense that there would be, because Basically, what you have talked about, about the home life and things like that, in that the single parenting, the lack of bonding as infants and children, | |
which, as you know, causes hardwired changes in the brain that may lead to some behavioral issues along with parenting problems. | |
I mean, I can see it when I walk in a room Even in the short period of time that I'm seeing a child, that they're on all these ADHD meds, and I can see the dysfunction in the way that they interact with their mother and whatever parent happens to be in the room. | |
For example, if you walk in the room to see a child and the mother is staring, texting on a cell phone, and then talking to you but not looking up to look you in the eye. | |
Now, that's a big, you know, red... | |
Flag for me as far as there's some dysfunction in the household. | |
I'm very skeptical about the diagnoses. | |
I think a lot of times you have these diagnoses that I say it's a diagnosis in search of a disease. | |
Because there's no real pathophysiological or pathologically identifiable property that can be objectively proven. | |
Yeah, or they say, oh, it's correcting a chemical imbalance in the brain. | |
It's okay. | |
Well, show me the test. | |
I mean, you know, you might as well say, you know, you got gored by a unicorn and that's what we're going to fix with our magic pixie dust. | |
I mean, where's the actual test? | |
But that's, of course, that's a pretty big subject. | |
As a doctor, though, I mean, gosh, I just imagine trying to approach the subject of family dysfunction with patients. | |
I can imagine that would be a bit of a cliff edge as a practitioner. | |
Yeah. | |
Well, obviously, when you see major things, you're obligated to report them if you suspect that there's physical abuse and sexual abuse and things like that. | |
And it's not only legally and morally obligatory to do that, but there are some things where you just kind of get a gestalt and you know that things aren't right, but there's really nothing you can do about it. | |
You're kind of seeing, in my case, it's episodic care. | |
I'm taking care of patients for a specific problem, an illness or an injury, and getting them back to their regular doctors, that type of thing. | |
And I think also, if I remember rightly, if you can get your children diagnosed with a mental disorder, you actually get supplemental income through disability insurance as well as, I think, a social security disability insurance. | |
I'm not sure of the exact terminology, but You actually get more money. | |
I mean, the drugs are paid for and you get more money if you can get your kids on these meds. | |
And I'm not saying that that is the motive of the majority of people who have these kids and are their parents, but boy, it really does seem to be exactly the wrong way that you'd want to design that kind of system. | |
Kind of a secondary gain issue. | |
Encouraging, and of course, once these diagnoses are made, then come the drugs, which, you know, once they're started, it's very unlikely that they're going to be stopped by anyone. | |
Oh yeah, who's going to want to take that chance? | |
Who's going to help the kid to detox? | |
And who's going to deal with the behavior that's been suppressed, if any, by this drug? | |
And of course, the way it's often sold is, well, you know, it's like insulin for diabetes. | |
You just have to keep taking it. | |
You will forever be this way. | |
And oh man, I mean, boy, if people knew the incredibly sketchy science behind this stuff... | |
I think there'd be quite a revolt against it, but, you know, they've got these lovely soothing ads and they've got these fine-sounding pamphlets and, you know, the sketchiness of it all just seems very dubious and what a complete tragedy. | |
And again, it's the usual thing. | |
Society has lots of problems, but it's those who have the least power who are expected to bend so that society can continue without addressing its problems and problems with school and family and society as a whole for kids. | |
It's kind of wallpapered over with this stuff, which I think does have a lot more harm than good. | |
Yes, I would totally agree with that. | |
So, what's coming up for you in the future? | |
What is your thing now? | |
I mean, I know you've scaled back a little bit and you're looking at other things. | |
Do you have anything coming up that has really got your salivary glands cranking out? | |
Well, actually, I made a trip to Barbados a couple of months ago. | |
So I was kind of exploring an opportunity there to take care of patients from the United States, Canada, and England who unfortunately are experiencing socialized or nearly socialized care. | |
And so a lot of delays and things like that. | |
And there's – I explored an opportunity on Barbados to take care of patients who would come in and be seen by US trained doctors in Barbados. | |
So I explored that a little bit and heard a podcast yesterday of Doug Casey with his little community down in Argentina. | |
Oh, yes, yes. | |
So I've been kind of having these mental fantasies about expatriating. | |
But I imagine that's going to become increasingly more difficult as well to actually accomplish as time goes by. | |
But I'm also contemplating the possibility of just not participating in any... | |
Government or private insurance and possibly doing a walk-in clinic. | |
And with all that overhead eliminated, I could probably just get it down to X amount to see a patient and then see them and the deal is done. | |
And that sounds kind of appealing to me to do something like that. | |
I don't know if the time is right for that or not, but I anticipate it will be before long. | |
Okay. | |
Well, I mean, I hugely appreciate the letter that you sent in, and it is great to get the perspective from the other side of the desk. | |
You know, all of us people desperately droning around looking for healing. | |
It's easy to forget what it's like on the other side of the desk. | |
I really appreciate you sharing that with us. | |
Of course, I do forgive you for talking about moving to Barbados to a guy in Canada in February. | |
It's not easy for me to do that, but I am going to grit my teeth and find a way in my heart to like you again. | |
But if you do end up in any of these places, particularly if you do end up opening a clinic up, if there's anything you want to send me, I'd be happy to help publicize it because… You know, it certainly seems like you're an excellent doctor from where I sit, and any more patients that this show can drive you away, I think, would be very well served by what it is that you're doing. | |
Thanks a lot, Steph. | |
And thanks a lot. | |
Have a great night. | |
I hope to talk to you again. | |
Take care. | |
Bye. |