Webinar from 10/2/24 | DrTomCowan

Okay. Welcome, everybody. It’s another Wednesday. Webinar today is October 2, 2024. And thanks for joining me. I saw somebody, I just happened to look at the chat on the YouTube and somebody mentioned that they had missed or, yeah, the last webinar, because they were hanging out in a bar and forgot about it, which is close. So I meant hanging on a bar. I’m sure you knew that. By the way, I’ve been still hanging on a bar, and now I’m up to two minutes and 14 seconds. I think I got the world record that I mentioned at five minutes.

Very wrong. It turns out it’s, I think, think about an hour. So I have only about 58 minutes to go. And my prediction is I’ll never get anywhere close, but maybe three minutes someday we’ll see. So again, thanks, everybody, for joining me. And the only other thing is, I’m sure most people know there’s a Westin Price conference coming up, and I think October 24, 25th in Orlando, Florida. And I will be there, and Asher will be there, and family and many of the staff and practitioners of the new biology clinic will be there. And we’re doing a presentation on what the new biology clinic is all about.

So if you can make it, I would love to see you. And as always, if you do make it, please introduce yourself to me and just say hello. I’d love to meet people in person. And I think that’s all those kind of announcements. So today I have three different subjects. The first is the boring, well, I was going to say science, but there’s nothing very scientific about it. I used to have the, one of my favorite saying was, the problem with science is it’s not very scientific. And so this is another example that, but I bring it up because this gets mentioned a lot in the, quote, virus debate, as in, how can you guys, Tom, you guys possibly say there’s no viruses, and yet you admit that there’s been bacteriophages or phages that we all know about.

They’ve been proven for 100 years, and those are viruses. So it’s totally ridiculous for you to admit that there’s these things called bacteriophages but not viruses because bacteriophages are viruses. That just shows how screwy you guys are. I thought I would take a few minutes to look at what is a bacteriophage. Again, some people get phage and have they been shown to exist, and are they actually viruses? So that will be the first agenda, and then we’ll see how far we get. And go on to the next thing. Okay. So I wanted to share a little bit.

Not that quite yet. This one first. This just something I saw from, I think, a guy named Ben, who is. Can’t remember his us mortality substack, something like that. He does a lot of really good stuff. He happened to get this freedom of information. I’m not sure if that’s who this is, but I think it is freedom of information request, which I thought I would read. We do not have records on single virions. That’s a virus sequencing that ensured that the virion was physically isolated from any other genetic material. Before sequencing, sequencing was only on clinical specimens or unpurified virus isolate material, lysate or supernatant.

We do not have methods to purify a single virion away from all other methods. So that’s the official word from the center for Disease Control, essentially saying we’ve never have sequenced a virus apart from sequencing the entire material, which means they’ve never sequenced a virus, which means the sequence, the genetics of a virus, the sequences cannot be used to confirm that the virus actually exists because they’ve never separated it from the rest of the material, and we all knew that anyways. So that just confirms from the so called horse’s mouth, what is a bacteriophage. This was from Wikipedia, so we know it must be true.

It’s also informally known as a phage. It’s a virus they say that infects and replicates within bacteria and archae. The term was derived from bacteria and meaning to devour. Bacteriophages are composed of proteins that encapsulated DNA or rna. Genome may have structures that are either simple or elaborate. Their genome can encode for as few as four and as many as 100 genes. Phages replicate within the bacteria following the injection of their genome into the cytoplasm. They’re the most common and diverse entities in the biosphere. They’re ubiquitous viruses. So again, we see the. The claim that bacteriophages are viruses.

They say they’re made of the same thing, proteins that encapsulate a DNA or RNA genome. And the only difference is bacteriophages, or the main difference is bacteriophages particularly and only infect bacteria, whereas viruses can infect other organisms. So in other words, a phage and a virus are the same things. The only distinction is the bacteriophage is specific to infecting and replicating inside a bacteria, and the viruses replicate and infect everything else. They’re the most abundant biological entity in a water column, second largest component of biomass. They were used in the 1920s as alternatives to antibiotics. In the former Soviet Union.

There’s seen as a possible therapy against multi drug resistant strains, even though they’ve been repeatedly shown not to work. Then they interact with the immune system, affecting bacterial expression by injecting these genes. And that’s how a lot of the gene transfers and so called genetic engineering is accomplished, by infecting and transferring the genes through the use of bacteriophages. And so here you can see some pictures. These are of course our artist’s drawings. They look like little spaceships, and then you can see actual electron microscopy pictures and you even see some that look like little spaceships. And there’s many different kinds of them.

They’re in different families, just like viruses. And so that’s what we mean by a bacteriophage. Again, same composition protein coat with a DNA or RNA genome on the inside. They replicate in inside bacteria, and when they do, they kill the bacteria, which is why they thought they could be used instead of antibiotics. Because if these phages infect and kill bacteria, you could expose somebody with a, quote, bacterial infection to a phage and it would get in there and lyse or kill the bacteria, and then that would work like an antibiotic, although it’s never been really shown to be effective, even though I think they’re still using it in the Russia and other places.

And these phages were discovered around 1920. Okay, so that’s what we’re talking about here. So let’s go then. The trick, as always, is to go to the original papers and see how is it that they proved that there was such a thing. And here we can go to the, there’s two people who are essentially credited with the discovery of bacteriophages. One is, I think, either a french guy or is a french name. So I’m going to butcher his name. And this guy is English, his name was Frederick Twart. It’s a weird name. But anyways, the other guy is, uh, D.

Harrell. And again, I think I butchered his name. They are the two people who are credited with discovering bacteriophages. So this was one of the most important papers, if you want to look it up, from the laboratories of Brown institution, University of London. It was around 1920 or so. I don’t see the reference here. Further investigation on the nature of ultra microscopic viruses and their cultivation. And then you can, I’m just going to go through this really quick. You can see a whole lot of stuff on how they went about looking for them and the special equipment that they used.

Experiments on growth media and what the media that they needed. And what happens if you put them in light and solar or sunlight, attempts to grow these bacterial, lytic. Lytic means destroy. So agents in dead bacteria. Does that work? They’re isolated with filtration and ultracentrifugation, and then they have additional experiments, and then a summary. And I just want to point out a quote that I’m not sure is from this paper, but it’s about this paper. So it’s either from this paper or about this paper. And the reason I bring this up is because. And one of the main reasons to go looking at the original papers, this is so key in everything we’re doing.

You got to go to the original paper where they showed that polio is caused by a virus, because what happens is, once a paper gets published, and in this case, the de Harrell guy, this guy got, I think he got a Nobel prize for this. Same thing with enders. Same thing with a lot of things in so called science, then it becomes a scientific fact, and nobody ever relooks at how the original conclusion was, had come about. And what’s so interesting for people like me who go looking for the original paper is almost invariably not 100%, but almost every time.

What you see is that the original people, whether it’s a enders or tort, this was about tort or whoever it is, whatever, whether it’s electrons or whatever, they had their doubts and actually voiced their doubts, and actually, in many cases, suggested ways to try to prove which of the two possibilities or many possibilities were actually correct. And what happens is, over time, that doubt is erased. And the methods for demonstrating which way was correct never get done. And then their claim to, well, somebody must have done that, so they never do get done. And then, like I say, it becomes scientific fact.

We’re left with something that even the originator of the theory had serious doubts about. So let’s apply that in this case. So here we have two possible theories, and maybe there’s more, too. One is we have these submicroscopic, filterable agents that look like these spaceships, which you can see on electron microscopy. Eventually, when they were doing their experiments, they didn’t have electron microscopy, so they couldn’t see them. And they do just what they say. They’re protein coat. They have a genome, DNA, or rna. They infect the bacteria, and as a result of, quote, infecting and reproducing within the bacteria.

They lyse or kill the bacteria, and then they go and infect another bacteria. And so they are exogenous agents to the bacteria, meaning they’re not part of the bacteria. They are infecting outside agents to the bacteria that replicate in the bacteria, damage that is lice, or kill the bacteria and then go on to their next victim. Same as the viruses, that these are independent, exogenous, from the outside entities, particles, you might even say organisms, living beings or quasi living beings that infect other living things, not bacteria. In doing so, this infection, they co op the host’s reproductive capacity.

They make multiple millions, thousands of copies of themselves. In doing so, that kills the host, and that’s how they cause disease. So that’s one theory. The other theory is now, these little particles that you see are simply just the bacteria breaking down. And when bacteria break down, because you starve them, poison them, or do nasty things to them, they break down and they break down into little forms. Maybe they have certain shapes at certain times, especially if you put them in an electron microscope and do all the things that you have to do to get an image on an electron microscope.

They have different forms depending on the type of bacteria and what you do to them and how you poison them. And they don’t infect anything, they don’t reproduce. They’re just the breakdown products of these bacteria. Same with viruses. So that’s the, the argument to put that into a normal situation, to help people maybe understand this. I don’t know if this is the best analogy, but it might help some people to get what I’m talking about. If you claim that there are steering wheels that are part of cars, but actually steering wheels aren’t really part of cars.

Steering wheels are independent, exogenous, from the outside. Entities that infect cars, reproduce inside the cars, and make more of themselves. And in doing so, they destroy the cars. Okay, so that’s our theory, or the other theory is no, they’re just part of a car. And if you break the car, then you see little bits of steering wheels, and depending on the type of car, you’ll see a different color or different shape or I, depending on how you do it. So if you take a car to a wrecking center, you know, they have the big wrecking ball and they start smashing the car, you will in fact see little bits of steering wheel.

And if you say, see, every time we wreck the car, then we see little bits of steering wheel. Does that prove that the steering wheel infected the car and caused the death of the cardinal. Well, obviously not. And so the de Harrell phenomena was he took the smashed up bacteriophages. In other words, he took bacteria and he poisoned them, and they broke down, and then he filtered it, and then he put that on another culture of bacteria. And if it was the same bacteria, he would poison it again in the same way, and it would break down and you would see the same submicroscopic particles.

And because he did that 50 or so times 50 passages, that, in his mind, made him claim that something was reproducing, and he would get different phages if he chose different bacteria, or if he poisoned them or starve them in different ways, that’s sort of like saying, so if you take these steering wheel parts and then you put them in different types of cars, and then you smash the cars and you get more steering wheel parts in the next one, that proves that the steering wheel reproduced itself and basically smashed the cardinal. And obviously that’s nonsense, right? So here, if you read this, you can see that these guys toward Bourdie, et cetera, they were actually wondering about this.

So they were wondering, is this a product of the bacteria itself themselves? They’re not exogenous agents infecting. They have shown, moreover, that by starting with a culture of bacteria devoid of any bacterial phage properties, I’m not sure how they did that. These can be made to appear by various artificial means, such as unfavorable temperature, treatment with immune serum, the mere process of filtration through porcelain filters, etcetera. In other words, if they started with something that they say doesn’t have these phages in them, and I’m not, again, I’m not sure how they would have proven that then.

And they do nasty stuff to bacteria. They get the appearance of phages. So they couldn’t have been an exogenous agent. And so they say this is due not to a living organism, but probably to an enzyme or something furnished by the bacteria themselves. So in other words, the bacteria are breaking down. These are not infecting agents. They are just a little bit of a bacteria, maybe even a kind of spore form or something to do with the enzymatic degradation. We don’t really know. And that is the central issue. And they actually, the, even the people who originally said these were bacteriophages ended up coming to the conclusion that, no, that’s not true.

These are just things from the breakdown of the bacteria themselves. The next thing I tried to do was look at, is there a current paper that actually proves that they could isolate these phages and show that they infect bacteria and cause the degradation. And the only variable, the so called independent variable, was one group of bacteria exposed to identical conditions of whatever they were doing. They were exposed to phages and the other one was not. That’s how you would isolate that. It’s the phages coming from the outside that are killing the bacteria, and it’s not something that they’re breaking down because of the conditions.

So there’s literally hundreds of papers, maybe thousands, on the purification of different phages. This one’s called M 13, and this one is improvement in the production. So they were saying, how do you get these pure phages so that they could do the experiment? So this is similar to what we’re asking for with viruses. Show us how you got the pure virus and show that it’s an exogenous, independent entity and not something coming from the breakdown of. In this case. In the case of viruses, the cell culture or the person or the lungs. In this case, the bacteria.

So we then, as usual, go to the methods section. So when we’re going through this, you’re asking yourself, at what point in this procedure, this propagation and purification, did they actually demonstrate that the phages were independent and not coming from the bacteria in question? That’s what we’re looking for. So here’s what they say. The phages were purchased from a bio lab. Now, we don’t know how they claim they were pure, so we can’t trust that. Then they were transferred into a chemically competent E. Coli. So that’s some weird kind of e coli that they got from thermo Fisher.

And so we don’t know how they came up with that. So neither of those are convincing evidence that there’s something independent exogenous infective called a phage. It was subsequently self propagated in batch cultures using the E. Coli strain. So in other words, they grew the E. Coli. They used this nutrient broth, they autoclaved it, which I think is heated it or spun it or something, then they cooled it down, they put in some antibiotics, was added to the final concentration, which cannot be good for bacteria. Then they put the m 13 in the E. Coli at 37 degrees and they spun it for 24 hours at a high speed, which is a weird thing to do to a living organism.

And then after the propagation. So again, ask yourself, they put the phage into this mixture with the antibiotics and the nutrient broth at a certain temperature and spun it around really fast. And then they centrifuged it again. And they got a pellet. Where did they demonstrate that it was the phage that caused the new phages to appear and not the breaking down of this E. Coli? I don’t see where that’s been demonstrated. The supernatant liquid contains the phage, which was subsequently incubated. So now they have this product, but at no point do they actually prove that the product was independent, exogenous, or coming from the bacteria.

Then they stir it, then they mix it with some peg, and they centrifuge it at a really high speed again. And then they throw the liquid away, and then they give you a fancy diagram, which I guess you can’t see in this thing about how they did it and the pellets. And then they do all kinds of analysis of these, uh, these little particles that came out. So, to my mind, there, at no point in this did they describe or demonstrate or prove to that these phages did not come from the bacteria. In fact, everything that I see makes it very likely that that’s exactly where they came from.

Meaning we have the exact same problem with viruses. These are not independent exogenous particles that replicate and have their own independent genome. They’re simply just a storage breakdown. There’s just product of bacteria. They’re just garbage. When you poison and kill bacteria, you get little particles. And if you make electron microscope pictures of them, some of them look this way and that way. And just like the steering wheels, you get obviously different steering wheels. If you break a ford or a corvette or a BMW or a mercedes, the steering wheels will be different, and then the steering wheel breakdown will be different.

And you call those different families of phages. And the whole thing is basically nonsense. So I don’t know at this point whether there is such a thing as a phage. That is a way that the bacteria, essentially, it’s like a spore, that if you threaten, poison, starve, etcetera, bacteria, they coalesce themselves into a storage form, maybe sort of like microzyma, and then they have very uniform forms, and it has something to do with how you starve or poison them. It has something to do with the bacteria that you start with, etcetera. But these are not anything that you could call a virus.

They are not independent exogenous infective particles by any means. Nobody has proven that. And my main point here is even the people who started this mess had serious doubts and actually came to the conclusion that this is just the way that bacteria break down, just like viruses are just the way that bureau cells break down. If you starve and poison them, just the way that all these particles break down when you have some problem in your lungs and they don’t infect anybody, they’re not independent exogenous agents at all. And there’s no attempt anymore to actually prove that because my guess is they know they can’t.

So hopefully that puts to bed the issue of. But Tom, aren’t phages proven? And aren’t they viruses? So how can you say there’s no viruses? They’re exactly the same thing, and neither of them are what we’re told. So hopefully that clarifies that. And I always like to say, if you wanna prove me wrong, you’re gonna have to show me the study where they have isolated purified phages. They expose them to bacteria in the exact same conditions as they control group. And there’s. In the control group, there’s no phage exposure, and the bacteria in the one break down with the phages in the other, they don’t.

And that would be a start, at least showing that they are independent exogenous entities. And as far as I’ve looked this week, I found no such study because I don’t think it exists. And therefore the whole thing is anti scientific rubbish. Okay, moving on to totally different subjects. I don’t know why I got into the thought about this, but I don’t know why. I think about a lot of things. Probably, probably most people don’t. But I actually read an article that I thought was really interesting that described how economics works, or in a sense, could work or should work, and then, then went through an argument.

They didn’t do this in the article, but then I went through an article, an argument, mostly with myself, as to how this gets sidelined or sideswiped or derailed. So this is how a. And some people would call this capitalism or free market, or a freedom based economic system, and some people would say it’s the road to what we call progress, whatever that is. It’s just a model or a way of understanding how new things come about in the world that actually are beneficial, and then how that process gets derailed. Because the question I was trying to answer is, people who criticize freedom, and particularly like free markets and capitalism, are always pointing to, yeah, but look at all the horrible things that are done in capitalist free market systems, and particularly even by private entities called corporations.

So doesn’t that prove that we need regulation and managing this? Because essentially it’s like an argument that human nature is such that if you leave things to their own devices that all kinds of horrible things will happen. So first, let me describe how a model of how a good thing could happen. And so I’m stealing this little image, and it was of a bunch of people who got stranded, shipwrecked, whatever, on an island. And there’s a lot of wild food on the island. And so they start building their houses and they start collecting berries and other wild food and maybe fishing.

And that goes on for a while, sort of like Robinson Caruso type of story. And then at some point, somebody realizes that we’re spending two, three, four, 6 hours a day picking berries, and we eat all the berries that we can pick in a day. And then so the next day we have to pick more berries, and maybe we could do more productive or more fun or have even leisure time or do things that we enjoy more or be able to diversify our food if we had a better strategy of picking berries. So the person who thinks that that’s called, like the entrepreneur, they decide to do a few interesting things.

One is to spend less time picking berries like everybody else, which actually, in a sense, has a cost to them, you could see, because they may not have as many berries, so they may not even have as many much food as the rest of the people on the island for those days, right? Because they used to spend 6 hours to get all the berries they need, and they decided to maybe pick berries only an hour and spend the rest of the time inventing a more efficient berry picker. So they may use, you know, hemp or not hemp, but, but leaves and makes twine and sticks and something that will more efficiently take berries.

And so they end up stopping their usual use of their time and instead investing, so to speak, their time into future gains. In other words, if, and they don’t know if this is true, but if I invent something that’s useful, that makes me be able to pick the same amount of berries in 15 minutes as I used to pick in 6 hours, then I will have improved everybody’s life, not only myself, but everybody around me. I can actually, like, sell them or give them or trade them this berry picker, and then we can then spend more time picking roots or leaves or catching fish or playing games or telling stories or whatever else we want to do.

So he does that at a cost to him, at a risk to him because, or her. He doesn’t know if this is going to work. So he spends his time and uses whatever savings he has because he may have had to pick more berries, like 7 hours in order to get enough so he could survive this time. So he uses his personal saving to spend a week or a month or a year, whatever it takes to invent a good product. And in fact, it does make berry picking more efficient. And now you can pick the same amount of berries in half an hour as used to pick in 6 hours, which means you can catch fish and do all the other things.

And then he trades it or sells it to the rest of the people and they give him some fish and they give him some other things and he makes some profit out of this. And everybody has gained in the entire society or culture or group or people on the island have progressed. Their lives are better because he took, he or she took it upon themselves to be an entrepreneur and make something that was useful. So that’s the pure model of how this works. And in fact the so called freedom or free market, or you might even say capitalist model.

So the question then is how does this model become the scenario where the guy who makes the berry picker decides, I’m going to make something that actually poisons the fish and makes it. So there’s people who buy this get fleeced and they lose money and they become dependent on me. And actually it ruins the berries so that the berries get degraded and their health gets degraded and everybody then loses, which is sort of what the argument that these sort of so called capitalist corporations, they do things like pollute the water and poison everything, or their pharmaceutical companies and they make products that actually harm people.

So how does the first scenario become the second scenario? So here are my thoughts of what I came up with, and I’m sure I’m not the first one to come up with these, but as far as I can see, there are three things that have to happen, have to happen in order for the first beneficial, positive scenario to become the scenario that we see all too often in our world, where corporations, supposedly, companies supposedly working in a free market system, become so poisonous to the general population and in our health and to the overall integrity of the environment.

So here are the three conditions that without these three, this, I would contend will never happen and can never happen. The first is that there has to be a mechanism where the entrepreneur is able to shield themselves from personal responsibility for what they do and what they make. If you go back to the island scenario, so here’s this guy, and he’s with 30 or 40 or 50 or 100 people that he knows and he makes something and somehow coerces people or bribes people or something to use his product. And the product has the result of degrading people’s health.

And everybody can see that, or at least a lot of people can see that, or even some people can see that. The likely result is they will be very upset and pissed off at him and actually take retribution on him. And so he has learned that the way to protect himself is to set up an entity, and we call them corporations, where it becomes the invisible, non real corporation. In other words, the corporation doesn’t actually exist. The person still exists, but he’s now only a board member or shareholder, or maybe the worker or even the CEO of the corporation.

But he is absolved of personal responsibility. So anytime you hurt somebody, that person can’t go after you. They can only, if at all, go after the corporation. And the only entity that can enforce such a shirking of personal responsibility is of course, the government. And in fact, that gets to the next point, which is the corporations, which is the entity that we all use to shield ourselves from personal responsibility, is actually simply a government entity. The government, through its essentially co opting or monopolization of violence and the retribution of possibilities, says you can’t, you individual or you group, can’t take action against that CEO or that entrepreneur or that individual.

You can only take action against the corporation and maybe make them make a fine. You can’t put the corporation in jail because the corporation isn’t a person, even though they say it is, but it isn’t actually a living real entity. And so the person is shielded. And I would contend without that shielding, really bad things would never happen. Now, just to be clear, I’m not saying that people wouldn’t try to get away with stuff, wouldn’t try to cheat people, wouldn’t try to make defective products. All that is sort of human nature. But when you come to doing really bad stuff like mass poisoning and vaccines and wars and creating hurricanes and all the rest of it, there’s always the shielding that has to come in because people would be worried that if they were personally responsible, it might not go well.

So that’s the first condition. The second condition is the people, and so of the people of the island somehow have to be convinced that it’s not their responsibility or even their right or even within their moral purview to actually do something themselves about the wrong that they see. In other words, they see you made a berry picker which kills the fish in a really free system. The people would see it. There’s nobody else who’s going to do something about this. If you, you, person keep doing this, our fish are going to die and we’re going to starve.

So it’s, nobody else has the ability to do anything. There is no other entity that can do something. We’re going to do something about it, and we’re going to take responsibility and we’re going to hold you personally responsible, and we’re going to stop this. Now, hopefully they do it in a nonviolent way and communicate. But my point really is it’s actually very unlikely to come to that because once people know that a, that they’re going to be held personally responsible and the other people, the consumers, know that it’s nobody else is going to take responsibility to do something.

You then have to confront your neighbors and the people in your village and the people in your towns and cities, and very few people will actually want to do that. So they will stop way before it becomes the typical atrocity. Only when you convince people, no, there is, it’s not your responsibility. There is some entity like the FDA, like the CDC, like the EPA. No, they’re responsible for doing something about this. This is why all the people who try to fool you into thinking their version of freedom will actually do something say, no, we want to have better people at the EPA.

We want to have honest people at the CDC or the NIH. And that, of course, will never happen because inherently in there, you have chosen the people who don’t take responsibility, who see it as their, quote, job. They don’t have any particular stake in this matter as the people who’ve been harmed. And all that’s really happening is you’ve dissociated the people who are affected and the responsibility onto a mythical superstition called a government agency that supposedly has the mandate to do something about this and as we all know, never does. So that’s the second condition is the people have to be convinced that it’s not their responsibility to do something.

And the third condition is people have to be convinced that the new entity that has been created, the CDC, the NIH, the government Regulatory Board, has the moral rights and responsibility to decide what’s right and wrong and that we’re going to live with that. So it’s no longer individuals or individuals coming together who hold other individuals responsible for what they do, which, as I would contend, has a huge break on people doing big atrocities, not little things. Of course, that’s kind of human nature to do stuff and see what you can get away with, but you immediately get pushback, and you get pushback from angry people who see it as their moral right and responsibility to do something.

Most people would never want to confront that the only way it can work is if you outsource that to an agency and then say they have the moral right and only they have the moral right to mitigate these things. They of course never do. They’re always corrupt. The people who are in those agencies always end up working for the people who do the atrocities in the first place. Because why not? They’re just looking out for their own interests and they get a better job. And if they shown that they can run interference and be run graft for the corporations, they get even better promotions and more money.

So you’re incentivizing them to not do their job. And that’s exactly what happens. And that’s why this whole thing that we now see in huge parts of the freedom community, that we’re going to reform the agencies and make them moral and make them do the right thing. Of course, that’s just keeping you on the plantation, as that will never work. And it’s a one of the preconditions for the fact that big atrocities happen again, little things will happen, people will be held accountable, will hold themselves accountable, and out of their own self interest will not want to be involved in pissing off their entire city, because then it would never work and nobody would even buy their stuff and people would blow the whistle.

And so they always shirk responsibility, outsource it. And then the next step is to convince people that that’s the just and moral way to do it. Once you do all those three things, then you can do really bad stuff. And if you don’t do all those three things, you can only do little bad stuff, which will be checked by the natural processes of life. So I hope that makes sense. And then in the final ten minutes, I thought of something that I could suggest, since we’re talking, supposedly talking about health and medicine, which, and this also got brought up in a number of things, but particularly in doing a workshop sort of thing with Kelly Brogan, who was describing her vital mind reset program.

And one of the things that is a component of this program is there certain things that you’re meant to do, like eat certain things and not eat sugar for a certain period of time, like four or five or six weeks, and do a sort of meditation or contemplation three minutes a day, and do coffee enemas once or twice a day. And she’s been able to publish case studies and series of people who, with significant illness, who’ve been helped through this technique so the question that came up for me is, this is a little bit of a formulaic approach, even though, on the other hand, we’re working with very basic principles of good nutrition and good, not poisoning yourself and good, you know, helping your body get rid of toxins and good approaches to understanding who you are and how you work.

So whether they’re formulaic or generic or not, they’re also the foundation of a sound and good healing approach. So the question then, for me was to reconcile that with the story approach that we’ve been talking about at the new biology clinic and that I’ve been basically working on for so many years. And so I wondered whether there’s a way to merge those two ideas together, that is to be very strict or particular with oneself, that I’m going to do this for a certain amount of time, and if I make a mistake or blow it or I have to go and start over, so I’m really holding myself accountable.

So that’s the one side. On the other side to make this very individualized. So that was my goal, to try to reconcile those two. And I actually went back to the first book I ever wrote, the fourfold path to healing. I’ve talked about this before, but one of my favorite chapters in the book, which made me think I was onto this idea, but fully didn’t really understand what I was actually trying to get at with this was how to be a patient. And in there, I said that the way to be a patient is to go into an encounter with a healthcare provider, doctor, whatever it is, and describe your story.

Just give the facts. Like, I woke up this morning and my heart was racing and it was beating irregular. And I may have drank too much coffee, and I had a fight with my friend, and I didn’t sleep well. And then my heart was racing and it was irregular. And that’s the first time this has ever happened. So those are the facts. You can make up all kinds of different scenarios where you just describe exactly what you experience. They sort of call it the observables, and you eschew and do not say any kind of diagnoses. Right.

No diagnosis, just describe the facts. After all, it’s supposedly the responsibility of the provider to give the diagnosis, to give an analysis. But in this case, then the provider just. Just essentially tells you what they heard. So I heard that you were basically fine and you never had this problem, ever had before. And then a bunch of things happened. You got in a fight and maybe drank too much and didn’t sleep well, drank a lot of coffee, and then your heart raced, and it was irregular, and that’s what happened. Is that right? Yep, that’s right. Now, contrast that with what usually happens is the person would go then, and their heart was racing, and they would get scared, and they would go to the doctor, and then they would go to emergency room, and they would get an ekg, and they would say, you have atrial fibrillation.

And so then comes the way that medicine is done. It no longer has anything to do with the story. It’s the diagnosis. Atrial fibrillation. Atrial fibrillation can cause blood clots, so you go on a blood thinner for the rest of your life. Now, contrast that with the story of this person who. Nothing really happened. This is the hundredth time that my heart has started racing, and it’s irregular. And they go to the doctor, and they say they have atrial fibrillation, and they’re. So they have the same diagnosis, and they say they need blood thinners. Now, if you go back to the first person, it’s clear they may never have so called atrial fibrillation or that experience of a fast, irregular heartbeat ever again.

But what they will have is blood thinner toxicity, which includes problems with memory and problems with liver, and maybe even problems with function of the heart, which may even lead to arrhythmias. And so, interestingly, the solution to the problem, because they were treated according to their diagnosis, was, you need blood thinners, period. That is the treatment for atrial fibrillation. It doesn’t matter. Your story, same as if you had it a hundred times. It’s the same treatment. Look it up in the book, and the one causes you a whole series of other problems, and you may never have had any other episode like that ever again in your life.

And I can think of so many examples I remember from residency, an example I’ve said many times, little boy who had two episodes of wheezing while he was playing soccer. They came three months apart. He came in, we listened to him, and he was wheezing, and the doctor said he has asthma and put him on his inhaled steroid that he was meant to take all the time. And I said, yeah, but he only had this once every three months, and it actually went away, even right after we listened to him before we did anything. Why don’t we just let and see what happened? And he looked at me and he said, so are you saying he doesn’t have asthma? I said, well, no, because he was wheezing.

So that’s like the definition of asthma. Are you saying that prophylactic treatment of asthma isn’t an inhaled steroid? Well, no, because that’s what it says in the book. I mean, I was a medical student at the time, so I knew that that’s the treatment. So what’s the problem? In other words, that’s the formula you find, the diagnosis, you treat. It has nothing to do with the story. It has nothing to do with whether the whole thing makes any sense. It has nothing to do with whether your treatment is actually going to, in a funny sort of way, exacerbate and make that problem even worse and appear what it may never have.

If you said, maybe just when you get really tired, just stop running for a little bit or something like that, or maybe he was eating something you shouldn’t or something. So how do you merge these two things together? The formulaic with the story and what I came up with, which is something that anybody out there who has a health issue, I am going to encourage you to try. We’re going to do this for, say, one month, and then I would love to hear any feedback of how it worked. I’ve actually only done this with one person as clearly as I’m going to say now.

And it was a person who said they had Lyme disease and they were wondering, a person who didn’t believe in the germ theory and they were told they needed antibiotics and they have Lyme disease and they’ve had it for years and they have all these symptoms. And what did I think? And I said to her, for the next six weeks, but I’m only going to have you do this for four weeks. Don’t once, never mention the word Lyme disease, because every time you mention Lyme disease, every time you hear yourself say those words, you’re giving yourself feedback that this is what’s wrong with me.

I have this problem. You can say, when I wake up in the morning, my knee is swollen, my knee hurts, I get, if I see a tick or I get bitten by a tick, then I get a red rash. You can describe exactly what happens, but you never put this label, this diagnosis on it. I’m not right now saying that there is no use in certain extreme situations, like you get an injury and you do a, maybe do an x ray and you say you have a broken bone. So that affects the treatment and that’s the diagnosis.

So I’m not willing to say there is zero cases where it’s possible that getting a, quote, diagnosis may not help. But I would say that in 98% or so of cases, it doesn’t help, number one, and it convinces you that you have this problem, and it will become a self fulfilling prophecy. Interestingly, I happen to see that woman about three months later. She said she did exactly what I said, never mentioned the word Lyme disease, and she was totally asymptomatic, no symptoms, and didn’t do anything else. So the new formulaic part is. So the story part is, depending on what your story is and what your diagnosis is, you can describe the observables, what you’re seeing and what you’re feeling and what you’re experienced.

Never once for four weeks mention the diagnosis. Never separate yourself from the experience. That’s the formula. And my guess is it will create a significant improvement, no matter what is wrong with you, no matter what ails you in just about everybody. So I’d love to hear whether that works. And it is a kind of a formula, so I stole that a little bit. But it’s a formula that I think is under the rubric of, like, Kelly’s was right diet and right detoxing. So this is right thinking or right communication. And if you apply that, no matter what the problem is, my guess is your life will improve, and that’s what it’s all about.

And so, thanks for listening, everybody, and I hope to see you again next week.
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