It's not something that people think about, but the reality is that
doctors are licensed drug dealers.
When your doctor gives you a prescription medication, perhaps a statin drug like
Lipitor, are they getting a kickback from the pharmaceutical companies?
What if they recommend a flu shot or they put your kid on a vaccine schedule?
Do they get an affiliate commission for that?
What about your local politician or a national politician?
Are they getting paid by pharmaceutical companies?
Lastly, media organizations like news and alternative media, are
they getting paid by Big Pharma?
The short answer to all of this is usually no, not directly.
The more complicated answer is yes, but it's convoluted.
You see, Big Pharma has ways to skirt the law in a way to exert
influence that often works around and incentivizes influence in ways that
are legal and sometimes even illegal.
And so while your local doctor is almost certainly not getting paid
for that Lipitor prescription, they are almost certainly
influenced by Big Pharma spending.
The risk here is that people like you and me grow cynical and we throw out
the baby with the bathwater and we stop necessary medical interventions.
Hey, my name is Lucas.
I am a yoga teacher and a health coach.
I work with really vanilla, run of the mill health topics, like
weight loss, metabolic health, strength, flexibility, aging well.
I have a podcast I've done for over 10 years and I often have medical doctors,
PhD researchers, and anytime anyone brings up allopathic medicine, research,
and especially prescription drugs, in the past two to three years, the
negative comments have really exploded.
This is new.
People will say things like "This libtard is clearly working for Bill Gates".
They'll say "Pfizer has this guy on his payroll" or they'll say "Who got to you?"
or "I hope you're getting a good commission for this," assuming that
somehow I'm getting bankrolled by Pfizer or Big Pharma, Moderna or
one of these other organizations.
This is crazy conspiratory thinking it's not what's happening.
But here's where this all comes from hesitancy around allopathic medicine
is absolutely justified skepticism around prescription drugs in the
medical community and pharmaceutical involvement is absolutely justified.
But since the COVID pandemic, because governments and pharmaceutical companies
handled this whole thing so badly on an international level, our healthy
skepticism and our hesitancy turned into cynicism, which has turned into
outright rejection of all things medical.
What that looks like is an estimated 125,000 people every
single year, just in the U.
S.
125,000 people will die from medical non-compliance.
That means people not showing up for a follow-up exam.
That means people not taking their blood pressure medication and having
a stroke or having a heart attack.
That means people getting a cancer diagnosis and foregoing cancer treatment
for juice fasting, or intermittent fasting, or some kind of weird
online protocol that they've found.
Now, I am all for food and lifestyle interventions.
It's really the basis of my whole career.
And so many things can be prevented and even cured with natural approaches.
However, allopathic medicine is also amazing and when people have acute
illnesses, this is what allopathic medicine does incredibly well and to
ignore that completely or to have some sort of false dichotomy is really a
mistake, an understandable one, and this is why I'm making this video.
Here's what we'll talk about.
Number one, how the pharmaceutical industry does
exert influence, skirting the law.
Number two, we'll talk about why it's appropriate to be skeptic
and hesitant around medical interventions, but why we don't want
to become cynical or throw it away.
Number three, I'll share with you some very simple ways to use artificial
intelligence to fact check your favorite online influencers and also to get a
consensus idea so you can make educated choices for you and your family.
A quick disclaimer, I'm not a medical doctor.
This is not medical advice.
I'm also nonpartisan.
I'm not a Republican or a Democrat.
Whatever guy you hate who's in office or not in office.
I didn't vote for them.
I don't care.
This is about health information.
I know that people have politicized health.
It really shouldn't be.
Let's focus on you and your family's choices.
OK, so how does this whole Big Pharma thing work?
Developing a drug is very, very expensive.
It can cost hundreds of millions of dollars even a billion dollars plus.
As an example, there's a newly approved R21/Matrix-M
vaccine, which is anti-malaria.
If you don't live in a country with malaria, as I don't, you
might not have heard about this.
It's also a new approval, which means you haven't heard about this.
And now the next step is marketing, awareness, grassroots education, and it
could very likely result in the saving of millions of lives over the next
decade, specifically children's lives.
This is a really positive use case, hopefully, with
pharmaceutical interventions.
But what happens now is the joint venture pharmaceutical
manufacturers who created this drug, they need to market this product.
So what they'll do is they'll hire medical doctors.
They will fund political campaigns.
They will create continuing education, grassroots programs in
countries where this is rolled out.
And it'll be a very long, expensive path to market, but hopefully the
outcome will be positive both for public health and also for their
investors and for their shareholders.
This is, in an ideal world, how the pharmaceutical industry works.
I understand there are a whole bunch of problems along the way, but
this is a potentially good outcome.
Now, on the flip side, you have a drug like OxyContin, 20 years ago.
You have a drug like Fentanyl more recently, and the exact same practices
were used with nefarious intentions.
What that means is drug makers knew that these drugs were addictive.
They knew that they'd create problems, and they marketed them just as aggressively
as a malaria vaccine, for example, knowing full well that they would create problems.
We could argue that the pharmaceutical industry actually invented the
opioid crisis, which is killing tens of thousands of people every
single year just in the U.S.
alone.
How do they do this?
Again, the same thing.
They hire medical doctors.
They have them write papers.
They have them do speaking tours.
They fund research.
They, in some cases, create scholarships at medical schools
and they throw lavish parties and they have bands and free drinks and
holidays and all of those things.
So when you go to your local family doctor, what are the chances that
they've been to an OxyContin party where there were strippers, and there
was an open bar, and there was a five star resort that they spent a week at?
I would say there's almost a zero percent chance that your family
doctor was at one of those events.
But there's probably an 80 or 90 percent chance that with one degree
of separation, your family doctor is influenced by somebody who
did have an experience like that.
Maybe their friend or their colleague or someone they knew from university
is paid to write a paper or is paid as a continuing education provider.
And again, if we're talking about an anti-malaria vaccine, that's amazing.
If we're talking about OxyContin, a highly addictive opioid,
that's really, really terrible.
Herein lies the conundrum.
The solution to this is way above my pay grade.
I have no idea how to even begin to solve this problem.
But what I do know is that on a personal health, not a public health
perspective, we've got some real, real issues because there are problems
that you might need to address.
Maybe your lipid levels are off the charts and you're at high risk for
cardiovascular disease but you're really worried about taking statins because
you've seen people on social media saying that statins will give you dementia or
statins will give you type 2 diabetes.
Maybe you have high blood pressure but you hate pharmaceutical drugs
and you're worried about taking the medicine that you've been prescribed.
How do you figure out exactly what to do?
To be skeptical, to be worried, to want to have all the
information, this is important.
We just don't want to tip that over into cynicism or outright rejection.
Let me share with you a personal story about how I've done this myself and
then help you with some tools that might be helpful for you in your
journey of self-discovery and research that you can communicate with your
doctor, not in combat with your doctor.
I was hospitalized about five years ago.
I had a really strange skin infection in my arm, kind of a gardening
accident, weird thing, but it was five days in the hospital and
it was a pretty major surgery.
And when I was in the hospital, the doctor put me on a whole regime
of medication, some of which were really necessary, like antibiotics.
It was a major incision operation.
I needed to be on antibiotics or I risked major infection.
He also gave me opioid painkillers as well as standard anti-inflammatory
painkillers like ibuprofen.
And I asked the doctor, do I need to take these?
And he said, you really should take them.
You're going to have a lot of pain.
I said, but what if I don't have pain?
He said, you'll have a lot of pain.
We went back and forth a total of three times.
And I said, if I don't have pain, if I don't take these, will there
be any negative consequences?
Finally, we concluded that if I didn't have pain, I wouldn't take them.
And for whatever reason, I have no idea why, I had a big open wound
in my arm, but I had no pain.
Zero pain at all.
So I didn't take the opioids, and I didn't take the anti-inflammatories.
I absolutely took the antibiotics.
And long story short is everything was fine.
Now, if I had taken those drugs, would I have become a Fentanyl addict?
No, I don't think so.
If I had taken that ibuprofen, would I have developed gut issues?
No, absolutely not.
However, this is just an example of having agency over what you put in your body.
This is an example of not throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
In this case, the baby was the antibiotics.
But still having some control over what I'm doing.
The reason this is important is because many times patients have
no idea what they're dealing with.
And many times doctors just want to err on the side of safety.
And my doctor was very concerned that I was going to be excruciating
pain because, well, my arm was gashed open with fluids dripping out of it.
I would encourage you to take a similar approach.
Whether it's a lipid-lowering drug, whether you're looking at weight loss
medications like semaglutide, whether you're considering mental health drugs
like Wellbutrin or Xanax or anything else, there are lots of different things
to be concerned with and it's really hard to separate signal from noise.
Unfortunately right now, there are people who communicate well and people who
have dissenting voices who are online who can really, really confuse you
when you're trying to make a decision.
For sure, you should listen to all opinions, but you want to make a
decision based on consensus and what you're most comfortable with.
With that in mind, let's take a look at how some new AI tools can help
you research and understand what you might want to consider for treatments
for conditions that you have.
So let's imagine you go to your doctor for your annual checkup and your
blood results come back with elevated lipid levels, specifically your LDLC.
Let's say it's in the 140s or 150s, and your doctor recommends a statin,
something common like Lipitor.
But you heard from an influencer, a med influencer on YouTube that Lipitor,
statin drugs, might be correlated with type 2 diabetes or with Alzheimer's.
So here's what I'd like you to do.
First of all, go to the website ProPublica.
org.
They have a search there called Dollars for Docs, and you can
type in your doctor's name and see if they're getting dollars.
Now again, those dollars aren't going directly to your doctor's bank account.
That's illegal, but to circumvent the law, it's certainly possible that your
doctor got paid to write an article, paid for a speaking event, or paid
as part of some type of R&D program.
Now unlikely, but possible.
Do that just to alleviate any doubts you might have.
Now, the next step is go to an AI search engine, something like ChatGPT, and the
prompt that I like to use is "fact check".
So I'll type in "Fact check Lipitor causes type 2 diabetes",
and then see what comes back.
And what we find here is that there is some evidence that statin drugs can, for
some people, increase their propensity for insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes.
So this would be something you'd want to talk to your doctor about.
Maybe for you, it's completely negligible.
Maybe your blood glucose management is amazing.
Maybe for you, this is a real concern.
Let's go back and do our second one.
We want to do "Fact check Lipitor causes Alzheimer's disease".
Here's what we find when we research that.
The consensus data shows that there's actually a negative correlation
between statins and Alzheimer's, meaning it might even prevent or
reduce the incidence of Alzheimer's.
Now there are some reported side effects with statins that include
things like memory loss and brain fog.
People report all kinds of things with statins, so this might be
something to take a look at.
But in terms of your risk of Alzheimer's, it seems like the consensus data
is not something to worry about.
Now again, all of this is not designed to give you a definitive
answer, but to give you agency over the decisions that you're making.
Rather than relying on just one doctor or just one med influencer on YouTube,
you can take a look at consensus data, not just in your region, but all around
the world, and very quickly get an idea about what you're working with.
If you're interested in healthspan, I have a program you might be interested in.
It's called YOGABODY Daily.
Nothing to do with prescription drugs.
We focus on strength, flexibility, and cardiorespiratory fitness.
It's a daily training protocol.
You can learn more at YogaBody.
com.
Down below in the description, I put a PDF link that includes information about
how to research your doctor to see if they are, in fact, paid by Big Pharma.
And number two, some of these artificial intelligence prompts, little cues
that you can copy paste in that can be really helpful for research.
Please remember, AI is fallible.
It makes mistakes all the time.
So do I, so does your doctor, but more information is always better.
Lastly, if you enjoyed this video, I'd really appreciate it
if you hit subscribe down below.
That helps to support the channel.
Thanks so much for watching.
I'll see you in the next video.