EPISODE 10
Destructive Treatment:
Are Doctors To Blame?
In the third of three mini-episodes, Heather and Lee recap lessons learned from previous guests Dr. David Healy and Dr. Charles Bennett, and look ahead to forthcoming episodes with Andrew Marriott and Dr. Beatrice Golomb.
TRANSCRIPT
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Lee: So here we are today and, you know, we’ve done numerous, wonderful podcasts and we hope to do many more, some coming down the pipeline. But, you know, I was just listening to an interview of a really well-known cardiologist from the U.K., Dr. Malhotra, and some of the things that he said really struck me and just thought we’d have a quick conversation about it. But he was saying in the U.S. there’s something like $3.5 trillion spent on, you know, health care there and the U.S. tends to have one of the worst health outcomes in the world. And you know, one of the things — some study, and I’d love to get my hands on it, so don’t quote me on anything I say, but he was saying that the higher the amount spent on health care in a certain area, there is evidence to show that there’s actually worse health outcomes. And he was speaking about physicians. In order to give — practice ethical medical practice, you need to be giving this informed consent, and I know a lot of our podcasts have talked about the importance of informed consent. But he said, you know, when a patient is actually given informed consent — and the example that he used was to do with his work in and around statins and that — I think he mentioned it was only like 1 percent benefit. And he said, you know, if patients are presented that information, more often than not they’re choosing a more conservative option, whether that be less surgery, less medication, and certainly in this scenario, statins, but not a prescription. So that alone is saving health care costs, but what they’re finding is that it actually doesn’t have a worse outcome. As a matter of fact, in numerous cases, it actually has a better outcome. So, you know, you take a medication like statins — and I know this is a topic that we really want to cover in the future — that he’s saying only has 1 percent chance of benefit, but what are the side effects? Because I know looking into it when my mother was being prescribed statins that there’s a huge correlation with memory loss. So, you know, it’s always that risk versus benefit. But very interesting to me: The concept that maybe less prescribing is better, you know, obviously weighing risk and benefit, and there’s some medications that people necessarily do need and they’re life-saving and life-changing.
Heather: Yeah, and another, you know, really knowledgeable researcher on statins is Dr. Beatrice Golomb that we had on, and we had her on to talk about the Gulf War. I wish we could have kept her and I hope she’ll come back on to talk about statins. But she did a wonderful article for the BBC where she touched on statins and how they actually change your behavior. You know, when you’re lowering cholesterol to such a level it could have different outcomes of aggression in people also, which is just — it’s just so interesting, you know, that a lot of times, as you mentioned, these drugs are given but if we really had an opportunity to contemplate — if we were given informed consent, which is an obligation; it’s mandatory; we should be given informed consent for our health treatment; that’s, you know, our right as health care consumers. And unfortunately, that’s not being done, but if that was the case, where those risks and the benefits, you know, were weighed and we made a decision, and also what’s not being done in a lot of cases, too, is alternatives to the medication. You know, a lot of these things revolve around diet, you know, and that’s something that — and, you know, movement, exercise, things the human body needs to thrive, and those have really been taken out of a lot of these conversations as options, because unfortunately — and, you know, I think I mentioned in other podcasts — for years, many years, I was an executive in a health care setting, mental health care, and the area I focused on was prevention. And you know, as a parent at the time with young kids, we liked to think about prevention. Unfortunately, the way I see it, and of course this is my opinion, but a lot of prevention, especially in behavioral health care, is medication; you know, it’s screening. The screening is very broad. I think if any of us took a screening for a behavioral health issue, we’d all probably have some — (laughs) — diagnosis from the DSM-5, you know, whatever that might be. But you know, there’s a medication to address that and we’re really bypassing the issue. Someone might be going through a rough time, it might be past trauma, whatever it is, but what we are learning, especially in that arena, is that these medications are not an answer, and I hope to have more, you know, discussions about that, maybe even getting Dr. Healy back on to talk about that. But you know, what we do know and what he did touch on is these drugs are not quick fixes; people are not only being told of the risk, they’re not being told of the nature of taking them, the risk of not being able to get off them, because getting off them is horrific and in so many people I’ve talked to — whether it’s SSRIs, antidepressants, the whole line of mood stabilizers — coming off of them is much worse than the symptom they presented with at the health care provider’s office. And that is a long process —
Lee: And dangerous too.
Heather: — and it’s just a shame because here they are; now they’re stuck — and dangerous; you’re absolutely right. But there was no warning of this. You know, when was it — just a few years ago — there’s been a warning that benzodiazepines — you know, your Ativan, your Xanax — are addictive? How could that have not been known, you know? And again, of course we’re giving our opinions here, but I don’t know how you get away from the fact — you just mentioned it when you talked about this doctor — we have tremendous health care costs. We have industry making huge profits off of us being on medications or sick, you know? And with all this science that they want to promote that — you know, a different spin on that story is that these are advancements and we can address different issues now and how wonderful science is. Then why is the mortality rates going down? Why are young girls committing suicide at higher rates than ever? And we have more access and more young people, more adults on all these drugs. It doesn’t comport. So if we really want to look at science, I mean, why wouldn’t we start there, you know? It’s really incredible.
I would love to see this discussion that you saw; I’m not familiar with that doctor, but maybe we can even encourage him to come talk talk to us. (Laughs.)
Lee: Yeah, he would be wonderful.
Heather: It sounds like he would be a fascinating conversation. But yeah, I think a lot of this does go back to informed consent, because I don’t think anyone would sign up for this, you know?
Lee: He also mentioned something — and I know that we discussed this in one of the podcasts with Dr. David Healy about the randomized control trials, but a lot of the medical students that are — you know, have come out, they’re not — they’re reading the literature, but the literature, now we know, can be biased, it can be funded by, you know, the industry and not really showing their raw data, like you had mentioned earlier, just showing potentially the benefit but not looking at the harm. And so if these physicians are only reading these certain publications that aren’t presenting all this raw data and both sides, then that’s the information. So how are they even able to provide informed consent if it’s not even there, you know? Like, I mean obviously some of it was — in the case of my daughter receiving the medication, of course, there was information that I should have been informed of, but in some of the cases it’s also just them being taught to critically look at the statistics and health statistics and the true story about some of these medications.
Heather: Yeah, and they’re not even aware that — they’re not even aware — they don’t know what they don’t know.
Lee: Exactly.
Heather: That is the problem, that they’re not getting that data, they’re completely — and I don’t say ignorant — just by the meaning of the word, but they’re unaware, ignorant of what that raw data is. There’s, you know, ghostwriting and only getting a portion of the data. And that is — that can be, yeah, a viable excuse for a doctor, but I think my point is — and this came after going through nine years of litigation, when I had people telling me, you can’t blame the doctors; they didn’t even know. Even some of the initial experts I talked to told me that, that do confirm the reality of this that doctors aren’t getting the proper data and, you know, what they’re getting and what they think they’re basing their scientific decisions in is flawed. I could never go that route, though. Now, realizing, you know, that’s me and I am an attorney, but when you have — in my case it would be a client, in a doctor’s case a patient — coming to you and offering you an explanation that they feel is the reason for, you know, whatever the illness or ailment might be. I mean, even if you initially want to disregard that, if the patient, as in my son’s case, continues to get worse with either providing more medications or different medications with the same diagnosis, when that treatment becomes destructive, you have a human obligation; you’re seeing this happen; you know, you have an obligation to change course, and at some point — and I would hope it would be sooner rather than later — explore what, you know, the patient is telling you. That is, in a nutshell, the doctor-patient relationship. And if you don’t have that, you don’t have anything, you know? And so I think it’s becoming cliche but it’s very true: If your doctor won’t listen to you — you know, we hear the word being “gaslighted” and all these things when people have adverse drug effects. If they won’t listen to you, you need to get out of there. When they start, as Dr. Healy said, parroting responses to you that totally undermine your concerns or your questions, go find somebody else, and do it with a quickness, because the result of a continued trust of that type of care is, you know, what happened to my son. It’s a fatality, and it’s unnecessary. And a lot of cases, they’re treatment-induced.
Lee: I would think, Heather — you mentioned just the word trust and that was another thing that I heard in this interview was that the trust in physicians is, you know, in a lot of cases where people have been harmed or not been given proper informed consent, the trust is going down and one would hope that the physicians will, you know, keep doing their research in being knowledgeable and making sure that they do give the informed consent, because there is no perfect option, and there are times that medications that are dangerous absolutely need to be used. It is the risk versus benefit. But being allowed to make your own decision and having a physician that supports your decision — you know, I’m not willing to take that risk. I can give one example. Somebody had recommended to Charlie to do the hyperbaric chamber after she had been injured; they said that that could potentially be — it was a physician — said it could be helpful. But I had just been through where I trusted someone; my daughter was harmed; I wasn’t given proper information. I was terrified of anything that could cause further harm and wanted to be very careful, and everything that I did I usually got two or three opinions and I researched and I read. And at the time, I was nervous about putting her in a chamber where you’re locked in and you can’t just open up the door because you have to depressurize and if her eardrums — I just couldn’t even go there. And subsequent, I haven’t done enough research on it to know if it would have been beneficial or not. I don’t think it would have been as harmful as I thought at the time, but I just wasn’t prepared to take that risk. And that physician supported that decision. He said, you know, I understand where you’re coming from; let’s find another option; like, we won’t go there. And that’s what I think needs to happen is there needs to be a relationship of trust, and like you said, if you’re not getting that from your physician, you know, there’s somebody else out there that hopefully — there are some very good physicians out there; we don’t want to, like, put them all in a box. You know, I just think you need to be your own expert and find the right physician as well.
Heather: And there’s no reason to put them in a box because they — it’s that relationship that will show us, you know? We can go in with a trusting attitude, but when those flags come up, when you’re not listened to, when, you know, that relationship is either never established or eroded, that could be one of the biggest detriments to your health as anything, and the what we want to call red flags are clear; it’s essentially being ignored. And when that happens — and there are good doctors out there. I think we’ve found a lot of them.
Lee: Yeah, we have, and we’re going to have more of them on our show too.
Heather: Most definitely. You know, we have a lot of — I think, you know, initially how we’re kind of rolling this out — and I think it wasn’t by any contemplated plan, but I think it’s important — you know, we’ve talked about the fluoroquinolones; they’ve affected our lives greatly; would like to talk more about psychotropic drugs, the huge issues there, and also this issue — you want to look at informed consent. We’ve talked to Andrew Marriott — that will be posted soon — and Dr. Golomb on Gulf War illness. These are people who were ordered to take these drugs. I mean, even then there should be, just on a basis of, you know, integrity and — these people are offering to serve their country. They should be made aware of the risk, I mean, of putting these drugs in their body, because we’ll learn with Gulf War illness, we’ll learn firsthand from Andrew Marriott, these — I mean, the — what they’re suffering from taking these drugs is lifelong and, in a lot of cases, it’s irreversible, and in many cases it has been fatal, for the very reason that a lot of these issues are labeled as something else, rather than an adverse effect to the drugs that the military — whether it’s U.S. or, you know, Andrew’s from England — labeled something else, oftentimes a behavioral health problem or a mental health issue, where more medications are given, causing more toxicity, and really just the most destructive treatment you could think of, and these are people who opted to serve their countries. So it’s — you know, it’s something that really — those stories to me are just heartbreaking, because especially in his case, they had — the soldiers had no clue. Now, it started circulating, you’ll learn from his podcast, amongst the soldiers, especially I believe it was the French soldiers who were like, don’t take that. But you know, this is coming top-down from the military when there was certainly complaints, and I don’t see how there was not an awareness of the harm that these drugs were causing to an awful lot of our military.
Lee: Yeah, if you haven’t — we’ll be posting those shortly or maybe they’ve been posted by the time you’re listening to this — you have to listen to their very, very — and he’s also got a great book, but please listen to the podcast —
Heather: If You Wake At Midnight, yeah.
Lee: — yeah — on Andrew Marriott, and the also the one with Dr. Beatrice Golomb on the Gulf War illness.