The Decay Of The American Medical Establishment | Dr. Drew Pinsky
56:32 Share

This is something I did not know until the COVID outbreak. 70% of physicians are employees. I didn't know that. They raise their hand, they lose their job. And they were afraid. There was fear, fear, fear. Fear was rampant in my profession. And so people just shut the hell up. And you had hospital administrators dictating how doctors treated patients. And telling patients to go home, come back when you're O2 side is 60%. This was astonishing.

Dr. Drew Pinsky is a board-certified internist and addiction medicine specialist with over 35 years of experience in national TV and radio, as well as a New York Times bestselling author and host of the Dr. Drew podcast. All within the past couple of years, crises like COVID-19, fentanyl epidemic, and skyrocketing rates of chronic illness

have pulled discussions about America's national health to the forefront. Dr. Drew's nuanced focus on public health has become a valuable resource to millions of Americans, particularly as our trust in our expert class has deteriorated to a historic low. In today's episode, Dr. Drew shares his personal experience being censored by the legacy media and his biggest frustrations around the pandemic and its aftermath. He also surveys the decay of the American medical establishment and highlights the backward incentives in our governmental agencies.

While we navigate an extremely polarized political moment, the restoration of Americans' physical and mental well-being should be of paramount importance to all of us. Don't miss this important conversation with Dr. Drew Pinsky on this episode of The Sunday Special. Well, Dr. Drew, thanks for stopping by. It's good to see you. It's been a minute. It has. It's been a while. So you're now joining us in Florida, but you're still living in L.A., so I'm going to start by badgering you about that. How is L.A. treating you? Why are you still there? Am I allowed to say it's a show? You are.

I love coming to South Florida because everybody is happy down here. It's crazy how much more vibrant and palpably happy everybody is, and particularly young people. It drives me crazy in California. Young people look at the economic opportunity. They look at the landscape. They're like, ugh.

Everything sucks. Why should I do this? Where am I supposed to put my bed? Should I become a doctor? Why would I do that? It's like really is so discouraging and it depresses me. And here, the vibrancy just, you can see it. You can smell it. So it's nice. So congratulations. And thank you. And most of the country does not know that. But I visit here and I see it. This is one of the things I think that California gets away with, especially if you're in a big city. So I grew up in L.A. I spent my entire life in L.A. I spent three years in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

But aside from that, I was in LA my whole life. And one of the things they do when you're in LA, when I say they, I just mean kind of just living there. It's not a person. Well, you were in the valley, weren't you? I was in the valley. I was in the valley where everyone looks down their nose at you because you're from the valley and they act like you're on a farm or something. But living in LA, the treatment is sort of like in New York. There are only a few places on the map that actually matter. And if you're anywhere outside those places, that's not actually like an important place in the universe. And then you spend five minutes outside of LA in say South Florida or hell in Iowa. And you're like, this is

This country is amazing. And there are amazing places here that are way easier to live and where people are a lot nicer than in L.A. Yeah, and so it's why I like traveling around and doing things. It gives me a break from back there. But I'm stuck there. We've lived there forever. My practice is there. My kids. It'd just be impossible. So here we are. I'll visit you guys. You should. And then you should buy a house here. And just like everyone else, you'll end up here as well. I swear to God, Dave Rubin says every time I speak to that guy, it's the same thing. No, I got two of you on me. Yeah, I know.

And I owe you another apology. You'd forgotten this, but Adam Kroll and I do a podcast still to this day. And you called in one time and I said, Ben, I apologize because I told you, I forget where I told you this, but I made the case that media wasn't biased. I was on HLN and CNN for years. They never ever got involved with what I said until I ran afoul of them. And then it was on. They were very, very,

And so apologies again. I look for opportunities to apologize. And this is one. And I look for I look for opportunities to receive apologies. So we're so we're definitely in sync here. But why don't we why don't we start with that? What happened? What lines did you cross at CNN and LHLN that made you persona non grata over there?

So I used to do Don Lemon's show almost every night, particularly during the run-up to the 2016 elections. And Don was trying to figure out who was Donald Trump. Like, what is up with this guy? And I was like, well, I don't really know him, but there's some narcissistic qualities. But it's not a malignant narcissist because his family, you can't maintain a relationship with your family when you're a malignant narcissist. And he never sleeps, so maybe there's a little bipolarity. And then I would say,

But be careful. We have had presidents, great presidents, with bipolar disorder, with alcoholism, with depression, and some of our best presidents have been people with certain proclivities. I mean, that's an extraordinary office. Extraordinary people should go into it, and that comes with certain liabilities. Not all liabilities are, strictly speaking, a problem.

It's only when they affect functioning. Like Abraham Lincoln, his depressions were profound. There's a story of him dragging, I think it was Willie behind him or Ted, Robert in a wagon and the wagon spilled over while he walked to the Capitol building. He left his kid like a mile back and he was so lost in his depression, he didn't even notice it. Any event, so the next morning I come into my radio station. I had a daytime radio show at the time.

And the general manager goes, hey, that was really interesting. Could you do that for 30 seconds for our website? And I said, I think I can get it down to 30 seconds. And I did. And then I was getting up and he goes, you know, it's an election season. We have to have balance. Can you do 30 seconds on Hillary? I said, funny thing. Her doctor has just released her medical records this morning. She had a transverse sinus thrombosis and a stroke.

They had her on Armour Thyroid for unclear reasons. They were treating the hypercoagulability without a workup. I had lots of questions about what her doctors were doing. So I did 30 seconds on why I thought there was concerns about her medical care. Not that she was unfit for office. Not that there was anything wrong with her physically or mentally. Just that these medical records made me very concerned. Drudge report next morning. Headline, finally a doctor says she's not fit for office.

And I was like, uh-oh. Well, that I heard from the highest echelons at CNN, shut up. Just shut up. No more from you. No more talking. And I was like, I'll have you set the record straight. Shut up. We had decided a month before that we were going to cancel my show. The following week, the cancellation date was coming, or maybe two weeks hence, we canceled the show. It looked like it was canceled. I said, let me go on the air and straighten this all out. Shut up.

And then I was not allowed to speak ever again on that network. So there you go. I mean, it is amazing the rules around what you're allowed to say about various presidential candidates. So I'm old enough to remember when John McCain was running for president in 2008, and there were all sorts of questions about his health and his fitness because he was

72, which now looks like a spring chicken in American politics. I mean, he's 12 years older than Tim Walz is right now, 13 years older than Kamala Harris, and fully nine years younger than the current president of the United States, and he was running at 72. And whatever questions you had about his health, his fitness, all of those were perfectly...

appropriate. Then you hit 2016 and you couldn't ask what the hell was going on with Hillary when she was collapsing into a van in the middle of the race. By the way, that happened like two days after my crisis. And so everyone, see, everyone sees right. People connecting these dots that are unrelated too. And then you got to 2020 and it was perfectly obvious that Joe Biden was already diminished from what he had been. And he was no great shakes, but certainly wasn't unhealthy in 2016. But he was clearly diminished by the time you'd hit 2020. And if you mentioned that,

then this was considered completely out of bounds. You were not allowed to talk about his age. He was a grand old man of the Republic. And then for three long years, we were told that you're not allowed to ask anything about what's going on with him. How about my profession? You're not allowed to believe your lion eyes. I mean, there are things in medicine that are just, that when we treat medical students, we show them videos and pictures. So when they see it in the clinic, they'll know it. One of those conditions is Parkinson's.

Parkinsonism, not Parkinson's disease, that's a diagnosis. But if you want to see Parkinsonian features, mask-like faces, not very expressive, that's Parkinsonism. We would show a video to a medical student of someone like Joe Biden and say, that's Parkinsonism. But if you said that publicly...

How dare you make a diagnosis? No diagnosis, just describing what we're seeing. We're seeing Parkinsonism. Just like if we saw a rash, we could describe the rash. We might not be able to say what causes it, but we can describe it. No, it's totally amazing. So my wife, the

family doc. So, you know, obviously when you're training in medical school, you're doing exactly what you're talking about. I mean, it's not as though you're seeing patients from your first days as a medical student. You see videos and pictures. Correct. They're showing you features and they're saying, if a symptom looks like this, then give a differential diagnosis to all the things this could possibly be with this set of features. So this is the part that people miss. So I want to shine a light on that because

Because what we do as physicians, we see those features that we saw in the pictures and videos in medical school, and we learn the list of possibilities and how to differentiate amongst those potential causes and then what kind of workup we need to differentiate it. Yeah. Exactly. And you give a probability. I mean, like...

Legionnaires disease, probably not happening. But Parkinsonism, maybe that's what's going on. And you can say Parkinsonism has these common causes. Parkinson's disease being one of them. Vascular dementia. Lewy body dementia. There are various things that can cause it. And people don't...

Joe Biden has had two neurosurgeries, right? I mean, he had an aneurysm. He had two neurosurgeries. And that can cause something called gliosis, which can lead to Parkinsonism. So plenty of cause. But meanwhile, you were allowed to, for years and years and years, speculate about Donald Trump's psychological condition. When it comes to psychology, psychological diagnosis is actually super tough because the symptoms are very often quite vague. I mean, you're talking about symptoms like

He talks a lot about himself. Or you can say things like he never sleeps. Right. You can say that and go, hmm, what kind of people never sleep? Well, hypomania makes you never sleep. But guess what? Lots of very successful people are chronically hypomanic and it's not a condition because it doesn't have any functional significance.

Right. Exactly. I can say that. Exactly. Exactly. But you get all these diagnoses of he has narcissistic personality disorder. And this means he's going to blow up the world or he has sociopathy or something like that. That was perfectly fine. So for three and a half years, if you mentioned anything about Joe Biden, you were totally out of bounds.

So much so that they shut off the entire Democratic primary process to prevent anyone, including RFK Jr., with whom you're friends, from really running against him in the Democratic primaries. They assured that he received pretty much every vote possible in the Democratic primaries. And then the minute that he did that debate and showed everybody what we'd all been seeing, then all of a sudden it was like, wait, this guy, he's actually suffering from senility. Something's wrong. Right, something is happening. And within a month, he was out of the race. They had supplanted in Kamala Harris. I mean, it's enough to make your head spin.

Well, remember, everybody, I want to educate your audience for a second. May I speak directly to them? Please. Here's what happens. 20% of the people are hypnotizable immediately. They are the ones that respond to propaganda and there's nothing you can do about it. They're the ones that were calling in Tim Waltz's helpline to report their neighbors because they weren't wearing a mask. That's 20%.

10% throws the BS flag right away and is thinking and is autonomous because this doesn't feel right to me. Let's figure this out. 70% is everybody else.

And that 70% is the group we need to gaffe into reality and keep them fighting for things like freedom of speech and things that they need to fight for because they just want to live their lives and be left alone. But that 20% is the one you need to worry about. And those are the ones that get swept into these propagandistic shifts so quickly. And they feel like they're

That's what's happening. It's the 70% that needs to become more objective about this and look at it. And the sort of media bias, this sort of indoctrination that's been occurring. 100% go with it. And it has massive downstream effect because the reality is that institutions in order to function always require a core level of trust. Any institution that functions has to have trust. The police have to have trust. Your doctor you have to have trust with. And when you have another institution...

the media in this case, that just says that there are certain things you can talk about, certain things you can't talk about, promotes actual false narratives about health, for example, then what it ends up doing is infecting these other institutions. And those institutions respond to incentive structures. They don't want to be smacked by the media. So they start changing how they do business in order to avoid getting clubbed by the media.

which takes us to COVID-19 and medicine, a lot of the stuff that you've been talking about, which is sort of the perversion of the medical industry. So let's talk about that. I want to talk about that in the context of sort of your own experiences, COVID-19, big pharma, and also with regard to RFK Jr., which I mentioned earlier, you and he have become pretty close. So let's talk about what has happened to the medical industry, the lack of trust that people have. It's sort of like how people feel about Congress. It's like 8% love Congress.

80% like their congressperson. Most people still like their doctor. Most people hate the entire medical system and don't trust any of it. What's going on? Let me take it all the way back. Let me start at the beginning. This is going to take a few minutes, okay?

So I started practicing in the late 80s. If you remember at that point, the HMO phenomenon was occurring. So people were being considered risk pools. They were part of a risk pool and you could reduce the medical costs by putting people into these giant populations where the organizations, the insurance resources made money by restricting your access to care. That's literally what they were doing.

There was also just private practice at that time. My dad was a family practitioner. My uncle was a psychiatrist. Thank God I got some of their judgment and I saw what they went through. They lived in sort of a golden age where all they concerned themselves with was the well-being of the patient. In front of them, they had deep relationships. With all of them, that was being systematically dismantled in the 80s. So it's just been going on a long time.

And there's one story I experienced that really was the cornerstone of insight into what was happening back then. I started running a drug treatment program. So my story is I'm an internist by training. I was doing general medicine when you can do intensive care medicine. I was doing hospital medicine, doing outpatient medicine. But I also had this second job in a psychiatric hospital where I was running medical services and I ended up running their addiction services. So I was just getting going, running the addiction services in the program.

at this freestanding psychiatric hospital. And I got a call from a friend of mine who was a really excellent physician who had become essentially an insurance administrator running an HMO. He started developing those models. And he called me and he goes, hey, you know, I need a three-day detox from your program. I go, look, man,

three-day detox. We've been doing the three-day detoxes for your patients. They come back in two weeks. Of course they come back. It does nothing. What are we doing here? I said, I'll tell you what, you name your price. I will treat them across my resources. We'll manage them as an outpatient and we'll keep following them. My staff can't tolerate these three-day detoxes. These people

come back, come back, and then die. And he goes, no, I want a three-day detox. I go, I think they're not going to bounce back. He goes, oh, no, they'll bounce back. But if they do that three times, they'll lose their job. Then they're no longer my concern. I was speechless. I was like, you're a physician. How can you? And he literally, I was like, he could tell I was just like dumbfounded. And he said, he goes, I'm an insurance resource now. I'm not a social agency. So I can't tell you whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.

Okay, that was HMOs. So that's where we started falling off the cliff. The next great misadventure in medicine was the opiate crisis, which I was fighting mightily against.

Here's how that worked. Can I? Please. Okay. And this will sound very familiar to you. In fact, I'm going to correlate it with COVID as I tell you the story. In the end of the 19th century, the hypodermic needle was developed, as well as morphine sulfate and methadone. And at the end of the Civil War and during Reconstruction, we physicians brought the first opioid crisis to America.

We literally were the distributor, we were the source of everything, we were the drug dealers. And it was a massive opioid crisis. The Harrison Narcotic Act was a response to that, that put physicians in prison for prescribing of opiates. That stopped it immediately. It created an absolute phobia of prescribing opiates to patients. When I was in training, we would use them only very occasionally in surgical setting.

You would not give them to cancer patients. Well, in the 70s, a group of nurses and doctors realized that was dumb, and we should be developing a way of managing pain with opiates for cancer patients. Of course we should. So they had a great idea, but then they kept going. They said, oh, no, no, you know what? The answer has always been here all along. It's the poppy flower. It's the opiate. We should get rid of pain opiates.

in America. There should be never anybody experiencing pain everywhere, anywhere. They were starting to catch on, they were getting some momentum, the pain management world developed,

And then some wise attorneys realized that they could step outside of the malpractice system and civilly prosecute physicians and criminally for inadequate treatment of pain. Now that the standard of pain management had developed in North Carolina, in Florida, in California, doctors were having these million-dollar suits and going to prison for inadequate, not giving enough pain medication.

Well, that stopped this again. Everybody stopped in place and we sent all of our pain patients to the pain management doctors who took the position that they were a white hat profession. I have quotes from them saying literally, we were the salvation, we were evangelists. We were gonna save America from pain.

Pain became the fifth vital signs. And there were several certain personalities that went around and got the VA, pain is the fifth vital sign, got the medical societies, pain is the fifth vital sign. Then the standard of care in all the subspecialty professional societies, pain is more important than your pulse. And you couldn't leave an ER without a pain scale and 60 Vicodin in your pocket if you've ever had a knee twinge.

This became the standard of care. And so I was fighting mightily against it. I was getting sanctioned by the Department of Health, by the California Medical Association, by my own hospital administration. Why? Because I wasn't treating my heroin addicts in withdrawal who were uncomfortable with an opiate. Think about how insane that was. So this was going on until, I don't know if people know how it stopped. I was actually at a White House symposium and Jeff Sessions came in. This was

He stopped it. People don't know that he did this. He came in, he goes, yeah, I see what's happening here. He goes, there's something with his little southern drawl. And he goes, I'm going to stop this in about three to six months. He goes, you watch, I'm going to do it. He put a bunch of doctors in prison for over-prescribing. Whole thing stopped right away. And then people started looking around like they woke up from some sort of trance going, what have we been doing here? And of course, no apologies to me. 15 years of fighting it. Sound familiar? In COVID, you have an evangelist

Dr. Birx running around saying lockdown is the only way to do things. Masking is the only way to do things. Society is picking it up. Regulators picking it up. And all of a sudden, an evangelical physician gets a hold of the regulatory system and now it's on. It's the same exact thing.

playbook as the opioid crisis. I think the thing that people have trouble understanding is how a scientific profession purportedly gets captured this way. You understand how people get captured ideologically because it's all very vague and it's all kind of floating up there in the clouds. When it comes to science, the general idea was that it was all disinformation.

data-driven. And when it came to things like pain as a fifth vital sign, when you're talking about, for example, self-reporting, that's completely unscientific. I mean, people self-reporting their own pain levels, it's completely subjective. There's no way to actually measure it on any sort of serious gauge. Not only that, but there was never a single study that showed that opioids were useful in chronic pain.

In fact, I remember because of the regulatory setup, you had to go to symposiums to maintain your license on pain management. And I remember I went to one and the doctor stood up and went, one of the pain specialists, he goes...

Yeah, you know, we've never really had any data that suggests opioids are useful. So let's figure out how to use them safely. It's like, why are you using them at all? It's like, what are we doing here? It's like incredible. The California Medical Society actually put out an encyclical saying that. Like, there have been no studies so far, but we're going to tell you how you should be using these things. Never, ever any studies in chronic pain. In fact, there still is no studies in chronic pain. Occasionally, it's a little useful.

Suboxone is very useful in chronic pain, and we're having difficulty getting people to adopt that for some reason. But it's people. It's human beings. At its core, they're humans running all these organizations. And it's shocking to me when that happens. In COVID's case, it was flabbergasting. It was gobsmacked.

that there was capture stem to stern to where the publishers, the great storied medical journals that I rely on and love,

suddenly weren't publishing alternative points of view. I mean, the way science evolves, it never all goes one way. It just doesn't work like that. There's just sort of a consensus that builds as you build more studies, create more studies, built on differing assumptions, different analytics, different experimental structures. And you start to learn, oh, this is probably the probably, not necessarily, probably the truth. And we've

reach a consensus. If you don't see other points of view, I only saw things in one direction, masking good, vaccine good. I knew something was wrong. And RFK Jr. was the guy that alerted me to the fact that there had been a capture. And once he started pointing it out to me, I was like, oh my God, he's right. What in particular did he point out to you that kind of woke you up? First, it was the cozy relationship with the

the FDA and the pharmaceutical companies. And then it was how media buys. I never could understand why pharmaceutical companies were advertising this obscure medication that very few people would use. I understand they'd be very expensive and maybe there's a big profit margin or something, but why would you be, why those medications that are just not that commonly prescribed? And he meant, I think it was him that pointed out to me that

No, no, they're not trying to raise awareness about that product so much. They want brand awareness, of course, but they want to capture the media. They want the media companies to be their customer and to listen to them and to be unable to criticize them or to run afoul of their version of

The reality. I thought, oh, boy. And then he pointed out that he thought that the three majors, the publications, and you could see it in the British Medical Journal out loud, that some of the majors have been captured in some way. And he said he was going to bring them in and say, you solve this. His theory was that they were captured by the pharmaceutical companies. I'm not sure. But that you solve this or you're going to be prosecuted as a RICO. And I thought, oh, yeah.

I just woke up. I went, oh, yes, somebody's got to stop this. So we get objectivity back into the medical literature. And one journal I could see through was trying, was Annals of Internal Medicine.

They published a study early in COVID on a combination of Luvox and an inhaled corticosteroid. And I thought, ah, and it was a positive study. It showed a positive effect on COVID. Only study of any positive treatment other than vaccine therapies for COVID. I thought, well, at least they're publishing something.

We'll get to more with Dr. Drew in just one moment. First, listen up, folks. The situation in Israel is dire. It's getting worse. Families have been evacuated. Communities are under constant threat. There's a desperate need for food and basic supplies. And of course, globally, there's been a massive rise in anti-Semitism and continued attacks on Israel. It's more crucial than ever.

We stand with Israel and the Jewish people. Now, the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. They're not just talking, they're acting. They're on the ground. They're providing bomb shelters, emergency supplies, financial relief to families in distress. But they're not stopping there. As we approach the one-year mark of October 7th, the fellowship is launching something extraordinary. They've partnered with over 230 organizations across America for the Flags of Fellowship campaign. Here's what's happening. On October 6th, thousands of Americans will plant Israeli flags in their churchyards.

Every flag represents a victim, a life cut short. It's a powerful visual tribute that sends a clear message. We remember and we will not forget. This isn't just about remembering the victims. It's also about honoring the heroes, praying for those still held hostage and showing the world unwavering support of Christians for Israel and the Jewish people. Let me tell you how you can help. You can be a part of Flags for Fellowship. There's a tremendous need for food and basic supplies for evacuated families trying to survive in communities impacted by the ongoing war. So I'm asking 1,200 of my listeners today to make a gift of 100 bucks

to help provide emergency food boxes for displaced family in Israel. Israel needs our support now more than ever. So here's what I need you to do. Go to BenForTheFellowship.org. That's BenForTheFellowship.org. Let's show the world that when Israel is under attack, we don't back down, we step up. Remember, that's BenForTheFellowship.org. God bless and thank you.

I mean, one of the things that was very hard during that period is if you were a person who was data-driven, it sort of broke down into three groups, as you mentioned. There were people who were immediately skeptical. There were people who were immediately buying in. And then there was a group of people in the middle

I sort of counted myself in that group, people who are trying to follow the data. The problem is that when the data is bad and when the data is skewed, it makes it almost impossible to follow the data. But for the physicians in that group, if they spoke up or raised their hands, and this is something I did not know until the COVID outbreak, 70% of physicians are employees. I didn't know that. They raise their hand, they lose their job.

And they were afraid. There was fear, fear, fear. Fear was rampant in my profession. And so people just shut the hell up. And you had hospital administrators dictating how doctors treated patients. And telling patients to go home, come back when your O2 side is 60%, this was astonishing to me. It was...

I kind of actually get nauseated when I think about it. It's just such a transgression of your oath. And the immediate next thought I have, by the way, is a friend of mine, Aaron Cariotti. Have you ever talked to Aaron Cariotti? I don't think so. You should speak to him. Aaron Cariotti is one of the principal plaintiffs in the Missouri versus Biden case. Mm-hmm.

He was the head of bioethics at University of California, Irvine Medical School for years. He was a storied professor. He was a psychiatrist. The students loved him. He was the chairman of their bioethics department for years, lecturing students on bioethics. And one of his contentions was,

you know, when it really comes along to take a bioethical stand, it's probably going to be hard. And that's when you have to really walk the walk. So the mandates came along and he looked at the data and said, I don't think you have criteria for a mandate here. And I've warned you forever that I'm going to have to do the hard thing when the tough time comes. I have to raise my hand now and say, you don't have proper justification for a mandate. And I have a bioethical problem with what you're doing here at this school. Immediately put on leave.

and then fire. I mean, it was incredible to watch. And I think even today, it's hard to tell what interventions were supposedly good, what interventions were. I mean, there are certain things we hear at this company. We actually sued OSHA to prevent a national vax mandate that the Biden administration was attempting to push. It went all the way to the Supreme Court. We stopped that from happening. We internally at the company, we never had a mask mandate. We never had a vax mandate. We opposed all of that on a personal level. You know, I

I will say that I think early on in the pandemic, I bought what was being sold with regard to the vaccines, particularly. I had said that. Yeah, I was certainly sympathetic. I mean, they were out there publicly saying that it was 99% effective in preventing transmission. Not that it was preventing death, that it was preventing transmission, which of course would make the case for some sort of herd immunity. Yeah. And

I'd never been in favor of a mandate, but my case was, okay, well, I'm not going to get it. I'm not going to die from it, but my grandmother might, so I should get it. And then it became clear they had not even tested for whether it was transmissible

They still have improper endpoints in their studies. They've not adjusted them. It's totally psychotic. And that finally came out like a year and a half afterward where Pfizer came out and said, oh yeah, we never even tested that. We just kind of trotted out that statistic and it was parroted by everybody. At the same time, you have people who have now taken this to, I think, the reactionary extreme, which is,

that no vaccines ever are good. Vaccines in general are bad. That's unfortunate. And, you know, what should people think about when they're thinking about vaccines in general? And also, where do you kind of come down when you now look at the data with regard to how effective or ineffective were mRNA vaccines with regard to COVID? It seems like

The data sort of suggests that if you were very obese and very old, that it was better if you took it than if you didn't. And otherwise, there was really no reason to take it. Well, remember, most of the data was collected around Alpha and Delta, which was a completely different illness than Omicron.

And the Omicrons that have followed have all had different characteristics and features, but they've been much, much milder. So my patients are all vaxxed and boosted. My medical patients that I've followed for 30 years plus are old. They looked at the data. We discussed it. I actually didn't have the data to give them a proper diagnosis.

risk-reward analysis. I really didn't have it. I didn't realize I didn't have it, but I didn't. But I still, I probably made the right call in getting them all vaxxed and then boosted. But as it went along, I was like, I don't know what we're doing. We're no longer vaxxing against the current variant. We're vaxxing against the variant from six or 12 months ago. The illness is so mild. We have Paxlovid. Paxlovid works like crazy in elderly patients.

What are we doing? I don't know. If you'd like to take it, please do. But I don't know what we're doing. I can't give you a risk analysis. I can't do it. It's just not available to me. And that's insane. That's insane. If you're 25 years old, the risk of Omicron to you is zero. The risk of the vax is non-zero. That's enough.

That's it. Right. And myocarditis, I don't know when myocarditis became a mild condition. When my kids were growing up, whenever they got a viral illness, the thing I would always worry about is, please don't let them get myocarditis. Because it's a dreaded illness. It can cause sudden death. It can cause sudden death down the road, cause myocardial myopathies and require the need for heart transplants. It's just a mess.

That is, let's say it's one in 5,000. That's as compared to zero in 5,000. And you're mandating that? I swear to God, I hope you'll take this on. If you're a college-age student and your college mandated you to get this and you develop myocardial, you should sue the hell out of it. Oh, for sure. That is an insane, insane thing. Absolutely. And now they did not protect you. It didn't protect anybody, and it only put you at risk. What are we doing? I mean, the FDA was pushing it on kids. Sure.

I mean, I got vaccinated when it first came out, but certainly my kids are not vaccinated. And listen, I've been looking forward to the mRNA platforms for cancer. And again, different risk profiles. Somebody's going to die of a cancer and you want to take a lot of risk.

For sure, taking tons of risk in terms of what you're doing to help fight that cancer. But a 25-year-old healthy person, you're going to take a platform that has not maybe had some problems for that age group? There are two other vaccines available. You know, there's the Novavax and Covaxin. You want to push vaccines. Why don't you push those two? Why aren't we pushing those two?

I can't understand it. Why only those, the only mRNA platform? There are two excellent vaccines available. Push those if you've got to have a vaccine. Go ahead, I'm sorry. So on the other side of the aisle, what happens when institutions get discredited or when they start to fall apart, the normal human response is to kind of throw the baby out with the bathwater. Yes. So the idea is that big pharma in general, everything they produce is bad, which of course is not true. Big pharma produces every drug that your grandmother is taking at the hospital, literally all of them. I prescribe them, I take them. They've been my...

for my whole career. They've been my partner my whole career. I don't use a knife. I use Medicaid. I use pharmacology. And it costs billions of dollars to develop these drugs. Billions. This idea that you can just cut off the money source for McPharma by...

cramming down pricing based on the federal government's demands. That's a great way to destroy all R&D. Correct. Isn't that in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act? Didn't they do that to like Keytruda and things? These are major breakthroughs. It costs a billion dollars to bring a drug to market, and then you have five years to make your profit, and then it goes off patent. Right.

That's why they're so expensive. That's it. And that's what's hard about policymaking is that there really is very little room for black and white thinking about these sorts of things. You have to be as specific as humanly possible. So, you know, again, the anti-vax movement has gained a lot of ground on both the right and the left in the aftermath of COVID-19. Unfortunately. Again, you can see why, because people responded. They're like, okay, you lied about what the mRNA vaccines were doing or what they weren't doing. It's made me nervous. Yeah, of course. It's made everybody much more. So the natural reaction is, okay, let's open up all the books. And again, I get that, especially because

It's been true for legitimately decades that many medical studies have either been p-hacked or have never been duplicated. That's the kindest blush you can give to the medical literature. The other thing is you can't get stuff published if it doesn't go with the narrative. Right. Do you know that, what's her name, the Danish physician that showed that 90% of the adverse reactions were in a certain pool of vaccine?

It was a great study. It took her like three years to get it published. No one would publish it. That's a very important observation. It should have been an emergency. We all came to, let's figure that out. What happened there? They also won't publish papers that debunk things. So they will only publish new things. And so what that means is that there's no incentive for anybody who's actually doing it. You're upsetting me so much.

This is so disturbing to me. There's no incentive for a researcher to duplicate a study to find out whether it's true or not. If you duplicate it and you find out it's true, you're not getting published. And if you duplicate it and you find out that it's false, you're probably also not going to get published. Correct. So it gets shelved. It gets drawered. Or it gets obscure publication somewhere. It goes on one of the, what do they call those websites where it's peer-reviewed? And no one reads it. Right, exactly. And so you can see why there's all of this mistrust. How should people approach things like,

vaccine schedules for their kids, for example? No, please don't do that to me. It's an honest question. I mean, I have four kids. Yeah, I would make sure you have a pediatrician that is willing to discuss it with you. If they're saying, just take it, you're dumb if you don't,

you got the wrong doctor. I understand it takes time. I understand pediatricians have no time. I get it. It's impossible. It's impossible to be a doctor. It's impossible. Particularly a general pediatrician, general medicine, family practice. I'm sure your wife tells you to actually pay your employees. And it's just impossible to actually be independent and to the job. It's impossible. So when a patient comes in and wants to chat about something like this, it's challenging. But you need to talk to your doctor about it. I have a grandchild coming and I'm

I'm worried about it. I'm worried about it because I've seen measles. I've seen how horrible it is. And most people haven't seen that. They think they're never going to see that. My first kid, she actually was vaccinated for pertussis. She got pertussis anyway. Pertussis is horrifying. When you watch your kid turning blue, it is not a fun phenomenon. Right. And I am from the school. You got to remember, I was from the school that vaccine therapy is one of the top three advancements in the history of medicine. The only thing that really made a difference in medicine was vaccine therapy, sanitation,

I forget even now what the third one was. Maybe anabiosis or something. Yeah, antibiotic. And even that's got some problems. And now I'm like Joe Rogan. I'm like, I don't know. Maybe the world is flat. I don't know. I don't know.

It could be. I'm open to anything now. And that, I think, is part of the problem. How do we reestablish some form of credibility? Well, that's the point. And I think RFK Jr. has the idea, which is you have to untangle the incentives and the cozy relationship with the regulators, and you have to really do the right research and do it properly and do it well.

and that observational studies are inadequate. It's not okay to say, well, you use it a lot, it's generally okay. It's like, that's not medicine. I mean, this does raise bigger issues that RFK has talked about a lot, which is we've seen extraordinary increases in diagnosis of a wide variety of conditions ranging from obesity to autism in the United States. And RFK Jr. suggests that a lot of this is because of the food supply, problems with the food supply, environmental issues. For sure, food supply.

I'm with him on that, that our food supply is adulterated. I've got great guests for you coming up. Have you ever heard of Callie Means or his sister? No. Is she an ENT doctor, Dr. Means? One of the leading surgeons at ENT left her practice to go fight this fight because she started looking at all that was coming in. She said, there's a root cause here, and it's food. And her brother was a lobbyist for the food organizations. He left and became an evangelist. Be careful. Anybody who's evangelizing about anything, be careful. Yeah.

for this project. And he educated me that you have to remember the tobacco companies, when they pivoted, they pivoted to food and they brought with them their scientists and their lobbyists and their marketers and have deployed the exact same strategies that they use with tobacco. Make it addictive, protect it with a lobbyist and market it aggressively and brainwash people.

That's our food supply. And look at what it's doing to us. You have to really be careful about what you put in your mouth.

We'll get to more on that in a moment. First, my days are incredibly full. I've got the show, being a dad, various other responsibilities. I can't keep up with my day if I don't actually sleep at night, which is why I appreciate my Helix mattress. Helix harnesses years of mattress expertise to offer a truly elevated sleep experience. The Helix Elite Collection includes six different mattress models, each tailored for specific sleep positions and firmness preferences. If you're nervous about buying a mattress online, you really don't have to be. Helix has a sleep quiz. It matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress. Because why would you buy a mattress made for somebody else?

I took that Helix quiz. I was matched with a firm but breathable mattress. I love it. My wife loves it. We're big Helix fans at the Shapiro household. Helix has a 10-year warranty. You can try it out for 100 nights, risk-free. They'll even pick it up for you if you don't love it. Not sure that's ever happened. Helix's financing options and flexible payment plans make it so a great night's sleep is never far away. For a limited time, Helix is offering up to 25% off all mattress orders plus two free pillows. For our listeners, just head on over to helixsleep.com slash Ben. That's helixsleep.com slash Ben. This is their best offer yet. It will not last long with Helix.

Better sleep starts right now. So what are the biggest problems for people to avoid, do you think, in terms of the food supply? I mean, we all got to eat. So what are the biggest lies that people ought to be? I remember hearing this from nutritionists and dieticians way on to real foods, things that come out of the ground, things that grow on trees. It's fine to eat chicken and fish and beet. Please eat it. Beans, nuts. But things in a package, generally be careful about. Be a label reader.

And when you see seed oils, vegetable oils, I mean, that whole story is another story that's crazy. The fact that we pivoted off butter and tallow into things that are carcinogenic when you heat them up and get stuck in our fat and are metabolically destructive to us.

That's all marketing and lobbyists. Not in the entire corn syrup industry. It's unbelievable. Like corn syrup is way worse for you than sugar. Both are bad. And yes, corn syrup is worse. And seed oil and vegetable oil, infinitely worse than tallow and butter. And butter, it's still hard. Margarine, way worse than butter. Think about that. Think how hard margarine was pushed on us. You look at all these issues and you're trying to just kind of make your way in the world. And it's very difficult to figure out exactly what's going on.

who to trust, how to rebuild those levels of trust. And it seems like... Trust Ben. I mean, it's, yeah, I mean... Trust Ben Shapiro. I mean, no, I think my answer is don't. I mean, trust but verify would probably be the answer. For everybody. For everybody. I think that this goes to government. It goes to health. More importantly, it goes to media and marketing. There are...

the the persuasion and brainwashing game is at an all-time high in this country i have something that stayed with me from the 70s uh i don't know why it stayed with me but it i it came back to me during coven which was i was watching a tv news uh interview like like a 60 minute type interview and it was on probdom and somebody like um

one of the old 60 Minute guys was in Russia talking to the lead anchor on Pravda Television. Mike Wallace, perhaps? Mike Wallace was hammering this guy like, but you totaled the line to the government. You don't do the objectivity. You only parrot the brainwashing the content. He was really hammering the guy. And finally the guy went, hey,

He goes, we have a different set of priorities than your media in your country. In our country, media is a political instrument. In your country, it's a commercial instrument. Trust me, there will be adulteration of your system. And really what got me was all this panic, all this bullshit that was going on during COVID. I thought at the beginning, I didn't realize the government was so involved with it. I thought it was just to capture eyes. If we make you panic, you'll watch us. And that's a commercial instrument.

Watch us so we can sell airtime, so we can make more money. I mean, and you're right that it was a political priority as well. I mean, there was an underlying moral system that had been set up by those who were pushing the COVID lockdown regime. Did you see Zuckerberg just yesterday, a couple of days ago, just published this letter that he will not do that again. I applaud him for that. Yeah, for sure. I mean, that's what I want. I want people to go, you know what? I made a mistake. I will not do that again. Yeah.

Everybody's got to do that. I made mistakes. I'm looking for opportunities to apologize wherever I can. All of us need to do that. What was amazing about the COVID crisis or faux crisis is that the unwillingness to even recognize basic medical facts, like people are not equally vulnerable to disease. This is like the number one thing that we all refuse to recognize. It was like, if you're a 10-year-old child, you're just as vulnerable to this as an 85-year-old woman. If one isn't safe, no one is safe. One death is too many. If one death is too many, we're not in a pandemic anymore.

Right. Because pandemic is defined by excess death. So if we have one death, I don't know what we're talking about. I mean, I remember from the from the very earliest days. I remember because, you know, you're covering this stuff and it's like, OK, people want proposals. My proposal was basically the proposal from Sweden, which was we trench out the population. So if you're 20, you should be in the workplace. You shouldn't be at home. You should be out working. And then you know what? They'll all get covid and they'll all be fine. And then you should trench out everybody who's 40 and they'll all get covid and they'll all be fine. And eventually what you'll end up with is either herd immunity or shielding the elderly.

It's the Great Barrington Declaration. Yeah, of course. And Jay Bhattacharya was the lead author. He's the poster child for the excesses of COVID. This is a wonderful man, a brilliant epidemiologist. And you destroy him. Fauci went after him.

By the way, when I was canceled, somebody put together some videotape of me trying to get everybody to calm down in the early days and made it look as though I was saying throughout the pandemic you had no risk. And they cut out the one thing I really got wrong at the beginning, which was, you know, we just went through this H1N1 pandemic. I got that illness. That was terrible. It killed 300,000 people. And the Obama administration did a good job with that. And you don't even know what happened.

And now we're going to, this would make a million people, it could, but we're going to destroy the world because of it. Isn't there an intermediate step we could take? And I would say the same thing at every comment I made. I said, look, the CDC and Dr. Fauci have been guiding light through my whole career. Just listen to what they say and they'll get us through this.

that's what I got wrong. I didn't realize how adulterous, and of course they cut that out of every comment I made. And that was the one thing I actually got wrong. So obviously you spent a lot of time talking about physical health, but also about mental health. Yes. There's been a lot of talk about the mental health crisis. Profoundly. One of the things about psychology is that, again, many of the diagnoses in the DSM-5, Yeah.

It's very, very hard to diagnose things properly in psychology because, again, the symptoms are much vaguer. If there's a rash, the rash is on your skin and you can look at it with a microscope. I'm going to stop you and say we are both over-diagnosing and under-diagnosing at the same time. I don't know how we get both ends wrong. But to your point, the one thing that you must look at is, is it affecting functioning? If it is not affecting functioning, it's not a diagnosable condition. It is a trait.

It may become a disorder, but at this point it is a trait if it doesn't affect functioning in work or school, your financial health, your legal status, your relationships, your physical health. If it's not affecting one of those areas, it's a trait.

And yes, you can get treatment for it. We don't want it to become a problem. Maybe a very enlightened, careful practitioner could say, you know, this could be a problem. Most people aren't motivated to do the work, though, until it becomes a problem. So it's very hard to treat people until they really have the motivation. I want to kind of dig in on that because when it comes to something becoming a disorder as opposed to a trait, and we say it's affecting function, in order to even define what it means to affect function, there has to be some standard of what functionality looks like, which means there has to be a norm. I mean, if, for example, you're

means that you only want to work 35 hours a week as opposed to 40 hours a week. Is that affecting function? If it means that you're dating certain types of people, but not other types of people, is that affecting function? How do we establish a baseline for function? Not only that, the patients have denial about it, and so do the family. So your notion of, hey, I can only dig 30 hours of work a week may be a functional problem, but you don't identify it as such.

So you end up, because functionality used to actually have a definition, which was the norm, and because in this country we destroyed the norm and there is no norm anymore, the real question becomes, aren't we all, to a certain extent, self-diagnosing? Because instead of us looking at somebody acting bizarrely, I think I'm Napoleon, but I can go to work and have a relationship. You're like, well, but you think you're Napoleon, you got a problem. As opposed to what it used to be, as opposed to what it is now, which is,

Well, I mean, as long as they can go to work and, you know, have relationships, even if he thinks he's Napoleon, is that really like a huge deal? That's a very weird standard for- It is a weird standard. It is the world we are in. Okay, here we go. Another thing you'd make me upset about. And let me just say this one thing before I go on to this topic. The physician-patient relationship has been under assault my whole career. I've spent my whole career fighting it, you know, by the insurance resources and the regulators and the hospital administration. We lost.

We lost. We saw it during COVID, we lost. We have to start empowering patients, which is, I know you read things for advertisements for TWC, the wellness company. That's why I got involved with them because they are taking stuff right to the patient. And Dr. Kelly Victory is on my medical board with me, said, you know, five years ago, I would have thought maybe this is a little crazy, but now I think you're crazy if you don't do this. You've got to be ready. You've got to be on your own. You've got to do it yourself. So that's why I'm deeply involved with those guys. So for the record.

On Napoleon's side and homelessness, I want to get to a little bit next, this idea that practitioners can't judge, so to speak. We have open-air hospitals in our cities. These are psychiatric hospitals without walls. It's populated by serious mental illness and drug addiction. That's what's there. Think about it. If you have serious enough brain disturbance...

that you cannot find a couch to sleep on or a family member to put you up for a minute. You have to lie down on the sidewalk. That's a specific thing. And you can't take advantage of the billion dollars of resources that are available, particularly in Los Angeles. Lots of resources available. So you have open-air hospitals being run by social workers.

Social workers are not trained to, they're not doctors, they're not nurses, they are not trained to even diagnose, let alone manage these conditions. And they are trained to meet the patient where they are.

That is the most insane thing I've ever heard. If I met my drug addict patients where they were, well, then I'd probably be handing them heroin too. You have to fight the illness. You have to be able to identify it, see through the denial, assess it, and know what's needed to fight it. It's hard. You meet a patient where they are, you just enable the illness. That's what enabling is. You have to have a team and you have to fight it to save that life. A kid I've gotten to know now, he wrote a book called Crooked Smile.

who told me the other day, he'd been off the street a few years now and he's thriving. And he said, you know, when I was on the street, I would meet these caretakers and they would all pat me on the back and go, you're a victim of capitalism. If we get socialism, communism in, this will all stop. But in the meantime, here's your heroin. Can you imagine that?

That's disgusting. That is murder. That is a form of negligent murder or enabling. It's giving a suicidal person a gun. It's murder. It's some sort of manslaughter.

And it's active. And our politicians are participating in that negligent manslaughter. If they didn't have qualified immunity, somebody would have to go after them. Again, a lot of that relies on this bizarre redefinition of functionality because we're both defining it up and defining it down. So you're totally functional if you're living on the street and eating from a shopping cart. Who are you to say, man? It's their life, man. Perfectly functional. But also, you can diagnose yourself as perfectly dysfunctional if you are a college student who has...

has feelings. You had a bad day and now your functionality has been broken. Harm has been done to you and society's job to somehow care for you. And you may need medication. So the person who's living on the street in their own feces does not need medication. That person just needs a different economic system. The person who is rich and actually just needs to grow the hell up, that person actually requires medication.

Apologies again. Guilty. I brought some of this thinking on. I thought it was important for us to understand about mental health and to really be invested in it. I had no idea where it was going to go. But I think this is why, you know, when one institution falls apart, I think all of them fall apart to a certain extent. You've made that point, and I think that is true. And I think that the chief institution, and this is going to sound like out of right field, but it

It is. The chief institution that fell apart actually were churches and communities. When churches and communities fell apart, everything fell apart. Your doctor used to go to church with you. That's who he was. Or synagogue with you. Your...

So did your banker. Everybody had a functional community in which you knew each other and you had the same general orientations for what was true and what was false. And when that fell apart and when truth became absolutely relative, truth cannot be relative in one area and remain stagnant and absolutely clear and set in another. And so as a country that has moved into a post-truth era, we tried to divide off kind of the scientists from everything else. We said scientific truth,

It's a different kind of truth. You can have falsification. It's Karl Popper. It either works or it doesn't. But it turns out that's just as vulnerable to the same kinds of post-truth mentality that destroyed everything else. We have a post-value, post-truth society. And then we just applied that to medicine. And we said, okay, well, we'll redefine functionality, for example. I hope people are listening to you because there is immaturity.

immense factual truth embedded in what you're saying. And it's really where Bill Maher and I forged our relationship. And then he went to Cornell, I went to Amherst. And our training was about ascending to the approximation of the truth. Human brains can't get to the truth. That's why we have a spiritual life that's helping us ascend beyond what our limited instrument can give us. The truth has become an old white guy concept.

and has no value. And that is very dangerous. And back to your point about church and community, when I was growing up, what do the neighbors think, right? So even just our neighborhoods are

So our communities dissolved. I mean, you're right, the church community, but that had many layers to it that dissolved all at once. Yeah, Christe Gestalt. I mean, communities create a broader ripple effect for broader communities, and that's what happens. I mean, there's a reason that Burke suggests that families are the platoons of society. I mean, that's what they are. You expand that out, and you have a community. Have always been. Have always been. And so it turns out when you destroy all those things, what you get is just chaos. Yeah. So the community...

and the family and the relationships, these are things that we have to rebuild. I mean, you're absolutely right. And the truth has value. The truth has meaning. And we need to use our best practices to try to ascend to it. I don't know what else to say but that, the fact that that is not, I get defeated thinking about this because it's so discouraging to me that the system that I valued so much, higher education, is perpetrating all this.

And so you're doing nothing if you're not making the mind, changing the brains, changing the minds so that they continue to learn and continue to grow and continue to ascend to something like the truth. If you're turning them into parrots, into things that just parrot what you say is the truth or what is relatively the truth,

I don't know where we go. I don't know where that goes. It just seems like an empty circle. Well, it sort of brings us full circle. This is why we have to have experiments in democracy like California and Florida so we can tell what works and what doesn't. And it turns out- Nobody acknowledges it though. That's the problem. It's not acknowledged as such. Well, I have found one beachhead in all of this.

and that is speech. We should all at least be defending that. If we can all defend speech and really stand up where it is most difficult, again, my peers as physicians who didn't do that because they're afraid of their bosses, you must speak what you think is the truth and speak up and speak loudly and take risk and do whatever is necessary to maintain and protect that speech, then I feel like we'll find our way through this.

But if we allow speech to be undermined, it's just so easy to point at that as the one thing that could get us through this. I mean, imagine we can't even have this conversation. And who knows? I'll probably get canceled for having this conversation, right? And you know what? Fine. It's the way it goes. These days, I'm like, okay, well, that's not my... No, because that's not my job. My job is to stand up and talk.

And if you don't like it, great, let's engage with it. I'm delighted with that. I saw where Jay Bhattacharya invited Peter Hotez to a Stanford event. That'd be great. I want to see those two guys talk. But if we be quiet or get, or have you ever heard this notion of you're platforming bad people? How dare you platform somebody like that?

What does that word even mean, platforming? When I was on CNN, your beloved CNN and HLN, I used to interview Nazis and white supremacists to try to figure out what was going on with them. I wasn't platforming them. They gave their position. They exposed themselves. You judge for yourself what's going on with those guys. I'm platforming. That's the weirdest word in the world. Anytime you hear somebody saying the word platforming, block them.

Dr. Drew, it's great to see you. Hopefully we'll see much more of you down here in Florida. I hope so. Though this conversation has upset me. I'm sorry to say that. Oh, I'm sorry about that. Not because of you, because it's reflective of so much we're contending with these days in this country. And let me just say, I just think...

this country was founded on brilliant ideas. And I was, I don't know, I was rereading some of Lincoln's speeches, you know, the better angels of our nature and the mystic chords that bind us and the grays of every patriot and malice towards none. I mean, these are words that we should lean on right now and get us ourselves back together and just realign with the principles that were laid out in these brilliant documents at the beginning.

They were an approximation of the truth. They were based on the entirety of human experience with government prior to that point. And guess what? They work if you let them work. They're not just a piece of paper. They're brilliant ideas that we can lean on and we should. Well, again, it's great to see you. Thank you so much for stopping by. You bet. The Ben Shapiro Sunday Special is produced by Savannah Morris and Matt Kemp. Associate producers are Jake Pollack and John Crick.

Thank you.