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June 13, 2022 - RFK Jr. The Defender
25:54
Pediatric Health Disaster with Dr Joel Gator Warsh

Why are children so sick? Dr. Joel Gator Warsh and RFK Jr discuss the rise in pediatric diseases other health problems.

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Hey everybody, I have a Los Angeles pediatrician on today, which I wanted to have on for a while.
Dr.
Joel Gator Warsh, who grew up in Toronto, Canada.
He completed his undergraduate training at Toronto York University before going on to earn a master's degree.
In epidemiology and community health at Queen's University, where he was honored with the Canadian Institute of Health Research Master's Award.
He was the CEO of the International Innovation Media and Design, Inc., and was the Ontario Student Entrepreneur of the Year in 2009.
He's an integrative medicine doctor, functional medicine doctor, who has also expertise in traditional Chinese medicine and homeopathy and functional medicine and every kind of integrative medicine.
So welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me on.
I'm excited to chat.
You know, the first thing I really want to talk to you about is I know you have pediatric You have about 700 families in it.
And I'm very curious about what you saw the impact of children on children of the lockdowns over the past two years.
Yeah, it's been really tough.
I mean, it's been tough on everybody, but it's certainly been tough on children.
I think we've, you know, we've been seeing this increase in chronic disease and mental health concerns over the last, you know, even few decades.
But what was already there, I think we threw some gasoline on the fire when it came to the pandemic.
and my practice went a lot from colds and coughs and runny nose and earaches and all the normal stuff to a lot of mental health concerns, anxiety, stress, worries.
And I think that was just a very unfortunate turn of events for everybody and especially for kids.
It's just really been very tough on them.
And I have thankfully seen things improve somewhat, but there's definitely a lot of long-term complications, stress, anxiety from what's been going on the last couple of years.
How does a child express the stress or anxiety when they come into your offices?
Do the parents bring them in and say there are mental health problems here?
Or how do you even diagnose that?
Yeah, it varies a lot.
It really depends on the kid and the age for sure.
You know, sometimes it can just start with vague symptoms like stomach aches or headaches or just general aches and pains.
Sometimes it can be mood or behavior changes.
So kids that were, you know, very happy, friendly, all of a sudden go to being in a more...
They stay more in their room.
They don't want to be around their friends.
They don't want to go out.
They don't want to do anything.
They can be a little bit more depressed or sad.
So sometimes we'll just see changes in mood, but other times it will be the parents will actually physically come in.
And that even more so over the pandemic, you know, it wasn't usually the parents were coming in and saying, oh, my kid is depressed or they're very anxious, but that became the norm.
Almost every teenager, almost every child that was going to be like four to 12 or 15 years Those were the calls I was getting every single day.
And that was devastating.
I mean, these are kids.
They should not have this level of mental health concerns.
They're not meant to be put through this kind of stress.
And what we were seeing and what we're still seeing is just the fallout of everything that has happened over the last few years.
And I think it's terrible.
It's really terrible what's happened to the kids.
And what part of COVID was that was really stressing them?
Was it the fear from the disease?
Was it the constant reminder?
Was it the mask?
Was it the isolation?
I think it's a mix of the isolation and the stress.
I think, especially for teenagers and kids, they're social creatures.
I mean, we're all social creatures and we need community and we need to be around other people.
And I think we need hugs and love and family.
And there was a lot of discussion and changing messaging.
And so that's hard for even an adult to know exactly what to do during everything.
And it makes sense.
Sometimes there are changes and things do change over time.
But for a kid to hear, oh, you might die day in and day out.
Oh, you might kill grandma.
Oh, this messaging that they heard, it's no wonder that they were stressed out.
And then as things have improved somewhat, certainly over the last few months, there are many kids that are still very afraid.
It's very hard for them to go from to understanding of this raging pandemic is going on versus, okay, things seem to be getting better.
Oh, you might die from this thing.
But then females are like, oh, it's not so bad.
That's just messaging that it's much harder for children to get.
I think it is...
Important to be safe and to be conscious about what is going on there, but what was certainly missed over the last few years has really been the greater implications of everything that's been done, and so there's going to be positive and negatives with everything that we choose, but a lot of the mental health aspects to this were really forgotten, were really secondary, and I don't think they're as secondary anymore.
more.
I really do think people are starting to recognize how much of an impact this has.
And you're starting to see research and studies and more discussion about the impacts and really, you know, trying to, to decrease the impacts long-term for children and most kids, you know, overall, I think in the long run we'll do okay.
But I think this is an important lesson that we need to learn and we need to just be mindful of how important community, family, and the messaging that we have around health is because if we're just talking about disease every day, all day, if we're just talking about all these stressful things, then it's no wonder that kids are going if we're just talking about all these stressful things, then They already had enough to deal with and they're already having a lot of mental concerns as it was.
And then you see 30% increases in hospital visits for mental health concerns and more depression and more suicides and That's a big deal.
That's a huge deal.
And that's on top of the chronic disease that we're already seeing with the rates that are skyrocketing before even the pandemic was like 50% of kids or so, depending on what study you look at, have a chronic disease.
And that shouldn't be that way.
One out of two kids should not have a disease, should not be on a medication, should not be needing to see their doctor every few weeks.
We need to be raising the flags and saying, like, this is a problem.
We need to do something different.
And what did we do during the pandemic?
We had to stay home more.
We watched more TV. We didn't eat as well.
We were more stressed out.
All the things that we know that lead to chronic disease.
Again, we threw gasoline on a fire that was already there.
And it's not surprising that we're seeing more health problems and diabetes rates doubled in some places.
I mean, that's crazy.
Doubled in the last two years?
There's no reason for that.
That's not okay.
And what was the reaction that you have in talking to other doctors?
You come from a community, Cedars-Sinai.
It's kind of the center of allopathic medication and medicine.
You must be an outlier there anyhow.
Yeah, I think that it all depends on the way you approach things.
And I'm very cordial with my colleagues, and I went to a great allopathic Western medicine program.
And to me, it's more around the way that you balance things.
I'm not against Western medicine at all.
I did all the regular medical training.
You know, we have medications in our office.
We do all of the normal stuff that you would do.
I just...
I think it's unfortunate that we've forgotten about all of these other modalities in alternative medicine.
There are so many ways that we can balance between both worlds.
And again, I'm not against Western medicine.
I just think that we're way too quick in modern medicine to give a medication.
We're way too quick to give an antibiotic.
And if you never learn about supplements or other options out there, then if you have In illness, a parent wants you to do something, and if the only thing you have for them is an antibiotic, then you're going to give that.
And even in Western medicine, there's so much discussion about antibiotic stewardship and not giving medications when you don't need it, but there just isn't the training and the knowledge in that.
So for me, I never talk poorly about my colleagues in medicine, especially pediatricians.
They're great people, right?
They're going into medicine.
They want to treat kids.
They want to keep your kids healthy.
So I think that some people in the natural world, they might have different opinions on how to get there, but everybody wants kids to be healthy at the end of the day.
And to me, what I think is important is balance and balancing between those worlds.
And it's really frustrating as a human being and as a pediatrician to see this division and to see people getting so angry at each other and fighting and not discussing and not putting the kids first.
And that's what we've seen just get worse and worse over the years.
And I know you know this, but there's no reason why we can't discuss these things.
There's no reason why we can't find some middle ground.
And there's no reason why we can't use the best of natural medicine and the best of modern medicine together.
And I think if you come from that angle and you make sure you're keeping patients safe, Then there's no reason, you know, to be, oh, just think about acupuncture, right?
Acupuncture used to be woo-woo, you know, 15, 20 years ago, and now it's in every hospital when we use it instead of pain medications with the opioid crisis, and that's the first-line treatment.
And things do slowly trickle into modern medicine, but it's just slow.
And I've certainly seen over the last few years more and more practitioners getting interested in natural medicine.
There's still a long way to go, and there's a wide range of of what somebody can do when it comes to natural medicine.
You don't have to be the most knowledgeable person, but at least if you're open to learning about it and bring it into practice, then we can bring these two worlds together for the kids.
You know, that's why we're here.
That's why I'm here, is just to help kids get healthier because what we're doing isn't working.
We're great at infectious disease and treatments and, you know, antibiotics and pneumonias.
We're much better than we were 100 years ago, but chronic disease rates are skyrocketing now.
And so we need to, I think, change the system and really focus as much on prevention as we do on treatment.
Yeah, that's one of the things that I wonder about with pediatricians, because I know, of course, like you say, virtually every pediatrician got into that line of work because they love children.
But I grew up, you know, I had 10 brothers and sisters, so there were 11 of us.
And I had probably close to 70 first cousins on both sides of my family.
And I didn't know anybody who had a chronic disease.
There was nobody that I knew who had diabetes, who had rheumatoid arthritis.
Obesity was extremely rare.
There was no autism when I was a kid.
To this day, I don't know a single person my age who has full-blown autism.
And now it's one in every 44 kids.
And then all of these other neurological disorders that are now common, like tics, facial tics, and Tourette's syndrome, and narcolepsy.
You know, why are the pediatricians not standing up and saying, you know, at least saying, what the heck is going on with our kids?
Why is that not happening?
I'm not exactly sure why we're not looking into the root cause.
I think one part of it is everybody's just so busy these days and you don't necessarily have enough time to spend with the patient.
You don't have an hour or two hours to kind of go through our full history and have a full discussion on diet and nutrition and All the things that you really need to be focused on.
I think there are certainly some people that are starting to really look into it.
But to me, I think it's crazy that we're not stepping back and saying, look at the numbers.
Look at the chronic disease rates.
Look at where we're going.
There's something that we're doing.
That is not working.
I mean, you can say, okay, sure, we might be a little better at diagnosing things nowadays, but there's no way that that accounts for the rapid increase of disease that we're seeing.
And just like what you're saying, I don't remember anyone really that had a peanut allergy when I was little, you know, maybe one person.
I don't remember autism.
It doesn't mean it didn't exist.
I'm sure there were some people that had or, you know, a few, but it's, you know, one out of every few kids has one of these things now.
And a lot of patients that I see and have seen Have these things.
So we didn't change genetically that much over a few decades, right?
That's just not possible.
Maybe very minor, but realistically, that's not what happened.
It has to be something in our environment.
It has to be what we're doing.
It has to be what we're eating and what we're exposed to.
You know, it's very complex, but it's also very simple.
It's something that we're doing, and it's probably many things that we're doing.
You know, people always ask me, well, why?
Why are we seeing these rates of chronic disease?
And they always want to point to one thing, but there's no way it can be one thing.
It's everything.
It's the way that we're living.
It's the nutrient poor food that we're eating.
We're not getting the nutrients that we need from our food because we're eating crappy, preservative, chemical, prepared food.
We're not making it ourself.
And even if you are making it yourself, you're buying from the store, the fruits and the vegetables and everything that we're getting isn't nearly as good as it used to be.
And you're literally built of what you eat and you're made of what you eat.
And so if you're not getting the nutrients, then how is your body going to be able to And we're also just surrounded by more chemicals.
We're exposed to chemicals all the time in the air, in the water, on our clothes, everything that we spray down.
And so if you're just increasing those chemicals on a daily basis and over years, and you're not getting nutrients that you need, how are you not going to get sick?
There's no logical way that it's not going to happen.
And that's what we're seeing.
That's why we're seeing these rates increase.
But at the same time, Many of the families that do focus on these things and are cognizant of the food that they eat and the chemicals that they're surrounded by, their kids can be very healthy.
Anybody could be healthy or could get sick, but you by far and above see...
I think, and certainly I've seen in my practice, the families that are just cognizant of this and take small steps to decrease the chemicals in their life and to eat healthy and buy from farmers markets and buy locally and plant a garden.
By and large, they're not nearly as sick as the other kids that I've seen over the years.
Why doesn't the American Association of Pediatrics or Academy of Pediatrics, why aren't they taking on these issues?
You know, what do you think?
Is it because they're owned by the drug companies?
What is happening?
Because I, listen, I was a pediatrician.
Mm-hmm.
I'd be saying, why did we go?
We know what the data showed.
The data showed that by 1986, it was 11.8% who had chronic disease.
By 2006, it was 54%.
This is HHS's own data.
Why is nobody saying, what the heck is happening with these kids?
I'm not 100% sure.
You mentioned about the pharmaceutical companies, and I think that's an important piece.
Again, I don't think most pediatricians think about things in that way.
I think we have to step back and think about marketing, and we've certainly been marketed to by all sorts of companies, but everybody has on every single issue.
Most doctors are not getting huge payments from, you know, drug companies or whatever.
Most doctors wish, right?
I think that's not really, really what it is.
I think it's just more of being very focused on your patient panel and just seeing patients and trying to keep them, trying to treat what you do see.
But There isn't or hasn't been this wave of movement yet, at least amongst doctors or pediatricians, to really think about the root cause and really identify just chronic disease in general as a major issue, and then really focus on prevention.
And, you know, when you talk about companies, a lot of things do come down to money, and there's not a lot of money in Improving your vitamin D or eating healthier.
There is money in treatments.
And so that's what is talked about and what's focused on.
I do think if, you know, maybe if there's a movement towards thinking about prevention more and talking about prevention more and the ability for doctors to do it, I mean, the payments from insurance companies and the amount of time to do it, you would see more focus on it.
But it's really nearly impossible to do what you need to do in three minutes when you see a patient or five minutes when you see a patient.
And unless you're in A private practice where you don't have that many patients and you have, you know, maybe some concierge or whatever.
You just don't have the time.
I mean, when I was working in the hospital, you might have to see 10-15 patients in an hour, at least 5-10 at a minimum.
So there's only so much that you can do in...
You know, those five minutes, you want to make sure that they're healthy, and they're not going to go to the hospital, but you can't spend 20 minutes talking about their diet.
And my hope and my dream one day is that, you know, maybe these worlds will come together, natural medicine world, and, or, you know, just talking about nutrition, and maybe we'll be more like a dentist, where you'll go to your doctor's office, and you'll spend 20 minutes with a nutritionist, and, you know, another 10 minutes with a coach, and then you'll, you'll spend 15 minutes with your doctor, whatever it is, but Unless we change the system around to be able to offer doctors longer time to speak to patients, it's really not practical to spend an hour with everybody.
So we have to find some middle ground.
And at some point we have to say, you know what, this is a big problem.
It's a huge problem.
We have to do something about it.
And as important as treatment is, and it is important, we do want to, you know, cure cancer and do other things like that and treat disease.
That's important, but it's just as important to prevent.
And if we don't change something, every kid's going to have a chronic disease.
So we have to find a way within the system to pay doctors appropriately so they can do this, so they can spend the time or find a system where patients can spend that time to actually talk about diet for half an hour or do whatever they need to do with it for that patient on that day.
It has to be done.
We have to prioritize it.
And I think it's possible.
It's possible to be done.
It's a big change.
But it can happen in the long run if everybody prioritizes it.
And doctors want kids to be healthy.
So I think it can happen, but it's not happening at the moment.
It's just not a priority or something that people are thinking about.
But I do hope that we think about it before every kid has a chronic disease.
And I say that for my own kid.
I have a two and a half year old.
And, you know, we eat pretty healthy, and we do a lot of the things that I think you need to do to stay healthy, but it's terrifying to think that the numbers state that if I have another kid, there's a good chance that one of those two is going to have a chronic disease.
Like, that shouldn't be.
There's no reason for it, and it wasn't that way 50 years ago.
You know, you talk about...
The doctors don't have time to talk to the patients anymore.
They have to see 10 or 15 patients an hour.
And is that because BlackRock and Vanguard now and all the hospital systems and everything is driven by Wall Street and profit motives?
I mean, how did that happen?
I think it's a mix of medicine becoming more corporate and I think it's also just a mixture of the way...
I can speak about what I do and insurance reimbursements seem like they just continue to become...
They're not keeping up certainly with inflation and with the increasing costs.
You can only be open as a practice for so long.
If, let's say you get paid $20 or $30 to see a patient, but, you know, you have a certain cost to keep that office up, so you have to see more and more patients.
And that, I think, is one of the reasons why so many practices close over the pandemic.
There was some huge amount of practices that close over the pandemic, because a lot of them are volume-based, and when the volume dropped...
Then you just can't keep up financially.
And that can't be.
We can't be financially motivated to see people.
We need to be able to spend as much time as we can, or we need to, with those patients.
And I think it's just a mixture of trying to corporatize medicine.
Because, I mean, it works more efficiently, you know, if you do things exactly the same way.
But it's not necessarily the best thing for the patient.
You think about, like, an assembly line.
That's going to work efficiently.
But people are not an assembly line.
Kids are not an assembly line.
20 minutes with one kid and 40 minutes another kid.
And you can spend two minutes with a third kid.
It just depends.
But if you need to keep up your numbers, because that's what you're looking at.
And if you, let's say you're a private practice and you wanna keep your doors open, then there's a certain amount of patients that you have to see to make enough money to stay open.
And so you just don't have the time.
So I'm not sure it's like, I think it's just a mixture of the way that medicine has gone and just the practice of insurance here.
And it's different because I come from Canada.
So it's a very different model there.
But you know, this is what I know in terms of working.
And that's what I've seen over the years and certainly showed in the last couple of years.
You think it's any different in Canada?
I think it is different in Canada.
I don't think it's necessarily better or worse.
It's definitely different because you're not really dealing with insurance companies so much.
You're dealing more with the government and kind of one system to work with.
So it's different in that aspect, I would say.
You said you weren't going to say one was better or worse, but which one is better?
I don't know.
I think it depends.
I think overall, it depends on what's going on for you.
I think that you can have to wait a really long time in Canada for things, so that can be an issue.
But overall, potentially, a lot of people are very proud of their healthcare in Canada, and they definitely love and respect their healthcare overall.
So I think maybe generalized care is better.
I think you can You can potentially get better care here in certain places, but I think you can get worse care in other places.
I think overall the problem with American healthcare is it's so diverse, and there's such a wide range of quality of care and accessibility to care.
In Canada, it's kind of standard, so you know what you're going to get, but you might have to wait a while for certain things, but you're not going to have to wait if you need to go to the hospital for something that's emergent.
So it's a balance there.
It depends who you are and how much you're accessing.
Health care.
Also, if you have a lot of health care bills, right, that's better in Canada, I would say, probably because they're going to make sure that you're never going to go bankrupt, but you might have to wait a year for a procedure.
You know, what advice do you give parents in terms of how to have a healthy family?
To me, it starts at home with you.
I think the most important thing that we need to realize at this point in time is that nobody is going to take care of you or your family or your health.
You have to take that into your own hands.
And there are so many things that we can do to make a difference.
Everybody is resilient.
Kids are especially resilient.
You don't need to be overwhelmed by this, but if you can make small changes that improve their health, 1% here, 1% here, 1% here, then by and large, most kids are going to do okay.
So just think about the simple things that you can do, like eating healthy, buying organic, preparing more food at home, making sure your kids get out and exercise, making sure that you're Thinking about the toxins reading the labels on everything that you buy reading the labels on every skincare product cosmetic if you buy a couch just think about those things because we're exposed to enough chemicals already so any place that you can decrease that a little bit is going to be helpful because at some point everybody tips over the edge and that's what we saw over the last couple years right we saw that
By and large, the people that had a lot of trouble during the pandemic were those that already had lots of health complications.
But that's not new news.
That's very common sense, logical stuff to most doctors, that if you have a pre-existing condition or other things going on, then you're just not as likely or not as capable to...
Handle whatever comes your way.
And that's true now and it's going to be true in the future if there's another disease that pops up or whatever comes our way in the future.
The healthier that we are in general, the more we're able to cope and the better we're able to cope with whatever comes our way.
But if we're not eating healthy food and we're not exercising and we're not getting sunlight and we're stressed out all the time and we're stressed out on social media and everybody's arguing all the time and your kids are seeing this and they're always stressed out then They're going to be sick.
They're going to get sick.
This is what we're seeing.
These are the numbers.
We're seeing one of the two kids.
So if something doesn't change, every kid is going to have a chronic disease or most kids are going to have one in the future.
But at the same time, this wasn't happening 20, 30, 40 years ago.
So there's a lot that we can obviously do because the same reason that this is an issue is the same reason it can be Fixed or it can be improved because this is so much to do with what we're doing in our environment.
And so if you're thinking about those things, you can create the environment for your family that lets them thrive and lets them succeed and lets them be healthy.
And if everybody starts thinking that way, then these trends are going to change and we're not going to see the life expectancy keep going down.
It's going to go back up again.
Dr.
Gator, thank you so much.
How can people find you?
You can find me on Instagram, Dr.
Joel Gator, or at integrativepediatrics.com or raisingamazingplus.com.
Thank you for joining us.
How much you stand up for kids.
And I know, you know, sometimes people don't always say everything that's exactly, you know, even when you listen to what you say versus what's talked about out there.
But there are so many people that appreciate everything that you do.
Thank you.
That means a lot to me coming from you.
Thank you.
Yeah.
And by the way, I mean, I take care of even a lot of celebrities and their kids just based on where I am.
And you haven't, I mean, you probably have some idea, but there are so many people that say one thing but totally believe something else.
Yeah.
So, you know, a lot of people know who you are and love what you do, but they'll never say it.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
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