Fascinating Interview with A Midwestern Doctor

Illusory consensus in medical science, integrative medicine, unresolved traumas, psychedelic therapy, EMF radiation risks, and more!

Hi everyone,

As you know, we launched season 2 of The Illusion of Consensus podcast a couple days ago with our first guest being Russell Brand. In this new season of the show, our goal is to deeply explore and investigate areas of medical consensus that obscure powerful truths about how our mind and body interact and create disease or positive health.

WORLD PREMIERE: The Illusion of Consensus SEASON TWO

One such bold thinker and investigator of seemingly unassailable medical consensus is A Midwesterner Doctor whose essays on Covid vaccines, SSRIs, emotional health, psychedelic therapy, and FDA's regulatory failures have greatly informed the evolution of my thinking on such complex matters. If you're interested in the "illusion of consensus," you'll take great interest in A Midwestern Doctor's work.

This is why we decided to do an unconventional interview in written format - since M.D is anonymous - at the outset of our new season launch. I hope you enjoy it. I highly recommend you subscribe to their Substack.

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R.A: Appreciate you “coming on” for this unorthodox interview format!

M.D: Thank you so much for reaching out to me and being able to accommodate my unusual request for an off-screen interview. I really appreciate the work Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has done throughout COVID-19 from inside the system to bring sanity back to medicine and I hence want to support what both of you are doing here.

R.A: How did you get into investigating the illusion of consensus in medical science?

M.D: Looking back on the last few years, I’m still in shock over what’s happened with my publication, as I never imagined I’d have the platform I have now. I still very clearly remember what things were like when I started—I’d like to think of myself as someone with robust strategies for maintaining my own mental health, but in the winter of 2021-2022 I had become quite despondent about the state of things.

For context, at the end of 2019, I learned about what SARS-CoV-2 was doing in China and immediately knew that if a solution was not found for it, a lot of very bad things were going to happen over the next few years. Sadly, I also knew, based on past precedents (e.g., the 1980s AIDs crisis), that the medical orthodoxy would most likely do everything it could to cover up any solution people found for the virus.

Because of that, I put almost all of my time into trying to find viable solutions to SARS-CoV-2 and simultaneously tried to warn all my colleagues to prepare for a coming global pandemic (only two of whom listened to me). Knowing how monolithic the forces we were up against were, I was seriously doubtful anything could stop what was in motion, but nonetheless, like many others in this movement, I tried to do the best I could to move a viable treatment to clinical trials so I wouldn’t have any regrets once the coming disaster happened. While my team was ultimately not successful due to a “Warp Speed” FDA being difficult, I was overjoyed that other teams had more success and were able to bring attention to the fact the medical-industrial-complex was intentionally sabotaging viable therapeutic options for COVID-19 (e.g., hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin) to protect their lucrative big pharma pandemic racket.

As I watched all of this unfold, while distraught with the state of the world, I was grateful all the work I’d done was able to at least save the lives of those in my immediate circle. By the time the vaccines rolled out, I had looked into them and expected they would be ineffective and fairly unsafe (especially in the long term), but I was not at all prepared for how dangerous they would be, as from the moment they hit the market, I began having a deluge of general patients come in with significant vaccine reactions and before long, people I knew from around the country began contacting me to share details about sudden deaths they had witnessed following the vaccine.

Despite this (even when I documented all of these cases), due to the religious euphoria surrounding the vaccines, almost none of my colleagues would listen to me and at that point, I realized we had a massive problem on our hands that I couldn’t see any solution for. As the months went by (e.g., after Australian protests were suppressed by the police), it dawned on me that we were re-enacting a century-old historical drama.

Specifically, when the smallpox vaccines were first developed, they were an unproven experiment, had an extraordinarily high rate of injuries, and frequently caused rather than prevented smallpox outbreaks. This understandably made many not want to vaccinate, but since vaccination was what all the governments around the world were pressing for, they responded to each ensuing smallpox outbreak with harsher and harsher mandates, which met more and more public protest (due to how cruel and unjustifiable they were).

Eventually, a massive protest broke out in England that resulted in the city of Leicester ending its mandates and switching to a more sensible smallpox management approach (targeted quarantines and improved public sanitation). The medical profession (who had been continually covering up the injuries and failures of their vaccine) immediately decried this “experiment,” and said Leicester would quickly be overrun by smallpox. Yet, Leicester’s approach worked, and before long the rest of the world started using aspects of it (which is what actually ended smallpox).

I spent a while trying to figure out how to get the word out on this, but like many other things during COVID, nothing I tried went anywhere. Before long, the next escalation of this cycle (Canada’s Truckers protests) happened, and I felt I needed to somehow get the word about all of this to the truckers. Not being sure what to do, I posted the article I’d drafted with an anonymous account, and then with the advice of another anonymous commenter who supported its message, republished it on Substack and asked Steve Kirsch to use his massive platform to promote it. Much to my surprise (without knowing who I was) he not only did, but furthermore had a hunch about what I could do and encouraged his readers to subscribe to me.

Steve’s act of kindness gave me the window to begin making the impact I’d wanted to make since 2019, and before I knew it, a lot of people offered to help me and this thing really took off. Initially, my mission was to do everything I could to help stop the shots and help those being injured by the vaccines, but gradually it’s pivoted to trying to open people’s eyes to the underlying dysfunction within our medical system that allowed COVID-19 to happen as without reforming our medical system, disasters like COVID-19 are bound to keep on repeating.

In my eyes, there are two main takeaways from that story. The first is that I feel fate placed me in a position of great responsibility, so as best as I can, I put a lot of thought into exactly what I write about and how I approach each subject. The second is that I still viscerally remember how helpless I felt throughout that period, and as such, whenever I see a window to make positive change, I’ve supported and promoted other people I feel are doing important work but don’t have the platform I stumbled upon.

R.A: Your essays are extremely thought-provoking - and they provoked interest in me. I’m very much looking forward to asking you my in-depth questions on mental-physical health.

M.D: As I was looking through all of the questions you posed to me, I realized I had a few thoughts that applied to all of them I wanted to mention before going into the specific questions.

In Buddhism, there is a phrase that says, “There are ten thousand roads to becoming a Buddha,” which essentially means that if one is interested in genuine spiritual evolution, there are many different paths that can get them there, but they typically take a lot of work over many lifetimes to realize.

After I heard this, I realized it encapsulated something very similar I’d noticed within medicine—many different medical models exist, each capable of curing a variety of ailments. As a result, I frequently see almost identical medical conditions “cured” with completely different approaches. Unfortunately however, I also frequently see those same approaches fail in many other instances of the same condition.

This touches upon an important issue within medicine—medicine is just as much an art as a science, and ultimately, it’s often just not possible to fully standardize an approach. Because of that, I often use very different approaches for each patient I see, based upon which one I think they’ll get the best response to, which ones they can afford, how urgent a solution is, how accessible a therapy is to a patient (many things people need they simply can’t get access to), and how effectively I feel the therapy will be administered wherever it’s available (as the quality of care varies immensely by location). In contrast, the existing model seeks to standardize everything (which is obviously sometimes very helpful as much of medicine has been a dysfunctional Wild West), but unfortunately, in many cases, the weighted average that is derived from a large body of data for the average patient simply can not produce what a specific patient needs (e.g., I wrote about this in regards to how one actually determines the correct dose of a therapeutic intervention).

In my publication, I’ve made the decision to go at a very slow and steady pace, as I feel I’m ultimately responsible for making sure each “Forgotten Side of Medicine” I present is introduced properly with lots of substantiating evidence, as if I rush anything or do a partial job, it will be akin to creating an “interesting” bright ember that rapidly is extinguished (due to issues arising from its improper usage) rather than being a steady fire which can illuminate a topic for a long time. Because of this, despite being over two years and more than 1.5 million words in and spending most of my time outside of work on it, I still have not written about the majority of what I use in clinical practice (although I’ve covered some of the highlights such as the critical importance of zeta potential).

Similarly, since so many of the highly effective approaches I know of are very much practitioner dependent rather than something that just requires you to know what substance to administer, I’ve shied away from discussing these methods as I don’t think it really helps anyone to say ____ is amazing, but I can’t send you to a doctor who can do it (as the position I’m in makes it very difficult for me to offer referrals).

R.A: First question - as is relevant to our publication theme, what are the top areas of illusory or false consensus in medical science that you've seen and which cause the most harm?

M.D: This is a really difficult question for me to answer because it’s one of those topics where the more I think about it, the more complete my answer will be. Hence, my response will be partial, but I’ll try to look at it from a few angles.

1. I think one of the greatest disservices modern science has done has been to remove “spirit” from the realm of science and instead classify it as a superstition irrational people believe in (despite virtually every other medical system in history recognizing the importance of the integration of the body, mind, and spirit). In turn, there has been a constant bias to reject any type of scientific (or non-scientific) evidence that validates the existence of this realm, and since it is so integral to a variety of physical and psychological conditions, a lot of health issues are simply not possible to fix with a medical model that rejects the notion of spirit.

While books could be written on this subject, I believe this rejection of spirit is the most consequential with the process of death and dying (and to a lesser extent the process of being born) as these are the two most impactful moments in each human being’s life. In the case of dying, if you die in an unfamiliar place, while under the influence of drugs that blunt your consciousness, with IVs in you, and under painful or highly distressing circumstances, it significantly worsens the dying process—and from everything I and my teachers have seen, all of that can lead to truly profound consequences for the individual. Unfortunately, that’s how most of our elderly die (e.g., by far the greatest healthcare expenditures occur among patients in the last year of their life). Similarly, while not quite as impactful, like many of my colleagues, I’ve lost count of how many patients I’ve run into who had chronic issues emerge from their birthing process which are often still tormenting them decades later.
Note: as I have not had time to delve into the subject of death and dying, I refer readers to a Tibetan one on the subject, as I feel it is one of the most accurate things that has been written on this subject.

2. One of the things that most drew me to your publication was its title “The Illusion of Consensus” as I’ve long believed modern propaganda revolves around abusing the “social proof heuristic” and getting everyone to believe something (false) must be true because everyone is saying it. In turn, I’ve tried to expose just how much time and money goes into propping up artificial consensuses that many rational doctors know are absurd (especially if they were around when the consensus was first being established). So in essence, I would argue one of the most damaging “false consensuses” is the belief that consensus exists in the first place, as it is often nothing more than an illusion the media feeds us to enshrine a narrative within society.

Consider for instance how effectively the medical-industrial-complex censored widespread criticism of the COVID-19 policies (e.g., the vaccines), creating the illusion the entire medical profession was behind them despite the fact widespread dissent actually existed towards those policies (which through being removed from the debate, caused many doctors to assume there weren’t any valid criticisms of the vaccines and hence for them to also align with the consensus). Sadly, this is not all unique, and it’s happened countless times in the past (e.g., for over a century doctors around the world have had scathing criticisms of the vaccines they saw being rolled out in their communities). Yet, since those voices have been so effectively erased from history, most doctors believe the only reason anyone questions vaccine safety is because a disgraced doctor in England wrote a fraudulent paper that manipulated a highly gullible public into believing vaccines caused autism (which for context, is a completely inaccurate portrayal of Andrew Wakefield’s actual paper).

3. One of the common ways a colonial power will dominate an indigenous population is by creating the belief that the colonial power’s culture is vastly superior to the primitive and harmful beliefs of the indigenous population, and in time, erase the colonized people’s culture (termed cultural imperialism). I’ve long believed modern scientific medicine has served as a tip of the spear for the Western World’s cultural imperialism, as it has instilled the belief modern medicine is the one “true” form of medicine (e.g., through the myth that “vaccinations rescued us from the dark ages of infectious diseases”) and created the widely held belief that everything else at best is a complimentary therapy which must prove itself under the standards the medical system puts forward. In reality, while our system of medicine is remarkably effective at treating acute conditions, it frequently abjectly fails to treat the chronic conditions those “primitive” and “superstitious” medical systems can address (e.g., by recognizing the presence of an innate healing capacity of the physical body and the spirit’s relationship to health).

4. In line with the previous, we tend to assume medicine’s existing way of doing things is the “best” way of doing them, but in reality, many of our foundational paradigms are largely motivated by their profitability rather than efficacy. For example, medicine rebranded itself as being “scientific” so it could have a basis for claiming it was superior to everything which came before it. However, what’s much less appreciated about this is that there are multiple branches of science, but we have a very narrow focus on everything needing to be within the umbrella of biochemistry, something I have long suspected arose from the fact a biochemical approach to medicine offers an almost unlimited number of proprietary drugs (since there are so many different biochemical receptors in the body individual drugs can be designed for).

Conversely, other branches of science (e.g., physical chemistry, general chemistry, and biophysics) also provide crucial insights into what goes on within the body, but since treatments within these scientific frameworks tend to be fairly universal (rather than specific for a single biochemical receptor) those model are unlikely to continually produce new pharmaceutical products. In turn, if you look at the early history of the United States (prior to the AMA monopolizing American medicine), a variety of extremely innovative medical approaches were developed from sciences not based on biochemistry.

Those therapies in turn were mostly suppressed here (leading to many of them becoming forgotten sides of medicine) but were then taken up in poorer countries with intact scientific apparatuses (e.g., the ex-Soviet ones), and repeatedly found to be highly effective for a wide range of conditions. I, for example, have tried to bring people’s awareness to the lost science of the physiologic zeta potential because the fluid congestion (e.g., microclots) a poor zeta potential creates is foundational to so many diseases (e.g., vaccine injuries).

Similarly, we are all raised to believe we have uncovered the best process in history for doing science (rigorous peer-review and deification of the highest quality of evidence that manages to meet the bar to be published in the most prestigious academic journals). Unfortunately, the entire process is corrupt, and since all of the journals are financially dependent upon the pharmaceutical industry, the basis of whether an article is published is primarily a product of how much it supports a sponsor’s interest rather than how truthful it is. Because of this, throughout COVID-19, we continually saw clearly flawed studies published by all the major journals, while in parallel, almost all of the groundbreaking research that challenged the COVID narrative could not find a single journal willing to publish them.

Sadly, the chief editors of the world’s most prestigious medical journals have warned us about this for decades, but their warnings have largely fallen on deaf ears.

Note: I believe that both the biochemical model of medicine and the academic peer-review process have an immense amount to offer for discerning “truth.” The problem however, is that they’ve both become so corrupt that much of their value has been lost (something that also holds true for many of the other highly regarded aspects of our medical system, such as the national drug regulators).

5. One of the things I’ve come to appreciate about modern propaganda (public relations) is just how effective it is and how many different things that are widely believed within our society are the result of a public relations (PR) firm being commissioned to instill that belief on behalf of their client. For context, this industry was birthed in the early 1900s after the evolving science of social manipulation made a lot of previously impossible things possible (e.g., the creator of PR initially earned his reputation by overturning the social taboo against women smoking by seeding a protest for the right to vote with paid actresses who lit up cigarettes as a symbol of women’s liberation, and then blasted that through the media which overnight got women across the country to start smoking and hence doubled his client’s business).

Within medicine, you continually see a similar pattern—a drug or procedure is developed, and then a marketing firm gets to work figuring out how to change society’s beliefs so that everyone will buy the medical product into perpetuity.

For example, in order to sell an experimental gene therapy to the world (which people would understandably object to), it was necessary to first create as much fear of COVID-19 as possible, use that fear to justify a variety of pointless rituals (e.g., social distancing or wearing masks) to cause those who performed them become invested in the narrative, then use both of those to get people to agree to disastrous lockdowns which in turn made them desperate for any type of salvation from the disaster.

Hence, many of them had an almost religious zeal for the vaccines once they became available and rather than listen, were willing to attack anyone who raised fairly straightforward issues about these products (to the point much of the vaccine crowd supported imprisoning or taking away the children of people who didn’t want to vaccinate) and bought into a variety of ridiculous lies (e.g., that a vaccine which could not prevent transmission would be able to end the spread of a rapidly mutating virus and bring us back to normal). In turn, because of my past familiarity with PR campaigns, I recognized this was in the works at the start of 2020 (e.g., the suppression of all effective treatments for COVID-19 was remarkably coordinated), and as we all saw, that manufactured consensus was a complete and utter disaster for everyone).

Since there are so many examples of a drug market being created which is predicated upon one or more fundamental falsehoods, it’s difficult to list all of them, so I’ll just list a few of the ones I’ve covered so far in my Substack (and include links to the articles which discuss the topic in greater depth):

•Using the belief that cancer is a scourge upon humanity to argue that cancer caused by the sun should be viewed in the same light and that we should hence do everything we can to avoid the sun and aggressively screen for and remove all skin cancers and all skin pre-cancers. This in turn leads to people avoiding the sun (which doubles their risk of dying), and doing a variety of unhealthy behaviors (e.g., avoiding the sun or using toxic sunscreens) which cause a variety of diseases including the deadliest skin cancer (as melanoma is linked to a lack of sunlight). Likewise, it’s led to the simple and safe treatments for skin cancer being largely buried as they compete with the incredibly lucrative skin cancer surgeries.

•Since people can easily visualize fat clogging a pipe, I believe the PR industry chose to cement the idea cholesterol clogging the arteries was the cause of heart disease and that the cure for heart disease was to aggressively prescribe cholesterol lowering medications (e.g., statins). In reality, cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease, and since it is an essential nutrient, a variety of problems arise from it being lowered within the body (leading to statins becoming one of the most common drugs that cause severe injuries throughout the population), and similarly, there being a widespread reluctance in medicine to consider the actual causes of heart disease and the non-standard (but proven) treatments for heart disease.

•Stomach acid is vital for the health of the body, and many of the complications of aging are due to stomach acid secretion declining with age. One of the many complications of low stomach acid is acid reflux (because the acid-sensitive upper esophageal sphincter won’t close) so the pharmaceutical industry cleverly reframed stomach acid as something which only exists to give you heartburn, and hence must be fully suppressed within the body to prevent heartburn that does not exist (rather than giving supplemental stomach acid, which then amongst other things keeps the top of the stomach closed).

•That back and neck pain is primarily due to disc herniations that must be treated with spinal fusions. Beyond this often not being the case, these incredibly profitable surgeries frequently lead to a variety of severe complications for the patients.

•That osteoporosis and one’s risk of a fracture can be treated by giving drugs that aggressively increase bone density. Since the primary determinant of a fracture is how flexible a bone is, the bone density building drugs (which create very brittle bones) fail to prevent the fractures they are supposed to eliminate and instead have a wide range of significant side effects. Like many of the other things in this list (e.g., the spinal pain industry) these highly lucrative therapies have kept safe and effective treatments for the disease (e.g., effective ways to promote bone health) off the market.

•That depression is due to a chemical imbalance in the brain and that spiking serotonin levels creates “mental health.” This, like many beliefs, was concocted by a marketing team, and leads to much of the population being on addictive psychotropic drugs that don’t help most types of depression and create a wide range of significant psychiatric issues (which then require even more drugs to be treated). More remarkably, once these drugs were developed, a lot of money was spent both convincing much of the population the normal emotions of life were medical conditions that required these drugs, and to avoid the safe and effective things that prevent depression (e.g., sunlight).

•The choice to continually repeat the declaration that “vaccines are safe and effective” has led to the immense harm they create to the immunological and neurological systems of their recipients being ignored again and again and each disaster caused by a vaccination campaign quickly fading into memory and becoming forgotten.
Note: I compiled some of the previous (acknowledged) vaccine disasters here, and much of the evidence which demonstrates how damaging vaccines have been to society here.

6. One of the general lessons I believe PR has taught the corporate industries is that it is typically much easier to create the perception one is doing a good job than it is to actually do a good job. Because of this, medicine constantly uses a variety of scripted images to create the perception it can offer the most remarkable care possible, even when the actual expected outcome of a procedure being sold is quite poor. In reality, health and medicine are not exact sciences, and a lot of cases just are difficult to solve regardless of the approach you use (e.g., I’m not the type to give up, but I’ve had many patients I’ve done everything I could think of to help yet nothing worked, and had to refer them to other specialists and approaches. No one person or system has the all answers it is important to embody a spirit of humility when practicing a discipline as consequential as medicine).

7. Many approaches to medicine exist. One of them is using an external force (e.g., surgery or drugs) to force the body to assume a healthy state. Much of modern science revolves around using force to dominate nature, and while this sometimes works, it typically creates a lot of problems (e.g., collateral damage and the approach gradually becoming unsustainable in the long term). I believe one of the central issues with modern medicine is that since much of it fundamentally revolves around dominating the body, it can’t create health as health never emerges from an artificial state being propped up by an external force, certainly not in the long term. That said, dominating the body is often life-saving for acute illnesses, but that is typically not where medicine struggles (as we have remarkable acute care medicine).

8. Many of the diagnostic frameworks doctors are taught to use are very binary (e.g., you have something or you don’t). Because of this, we frequently fail to recognize subtle issues that are not overtly there (e.g., partial cranial nerve dysfunction created by a vaccine adversely affecting the physiologic zeta potential). Similarly, we tend to assume that if a concrete symptom we have a label for is not present, then no issue exists, but in my own experience, the more subtle symptoms I continually observe in my patients are often what needs to be focused on to tangibly improve their quality of life. Likewise, most of the symptoms of pharmaceutical drug injuries aren’t overt, hence tend to get written off as unrelated or unimportant, when in reality they provide vital signs as to how a patient is reacting to a drug (e.g., I’ve lost count of how many times someone had a progressively severe reaction to a pharmaceutical but the doctor never stopped it because they believed it must have been something besides the drug—eventually leading to the person becoming permanently disabled by the pharmaceutical after further use of it).

9. Since medicine is very visually focused, doctors often will believe something doesn’t exist (or is psychosomatic) if it can’t be seen on imaging or in labs. This is unfortunate because many chronic conditions (e.g., COVID-19 vaccine injuries) can’t be detected with those tools (e.g., zeta potential induced micro-clots are too small to see with an MRI and labs simply don’t exist for many of the pathologic changes they create within the body).

R.A: Why is Integrative Medicine the future path to healing our complex mind-body problems that the establishment system is failing to solve? Or are there other alternate medical systems that are just as holistic and effective at preventative care?

M.D: The exact label one uses to describe a “healthier” system of medicine is a very tricky business, as once one begins to catch on, everyone will start associating their own practice with the current buzzword. I’ve discussed this topic with Dr. Mercola, and we both agree “Natural Medicine” is the term which gets closest to the spirit of what we are trying to describe (e.g., I believe that fundamentally you cannot create health in the body unless you find a way to allow the natural processes there to produce that health) however I’ve personally avoided using the “Natural Medicine” label because people typically associate it with using a random assortment of botanical medicines which may or may not do anything.

“Integrative medicine” has its own set of issues (which I won’t go into), but I often use it because I agree with the fundamental idea behind the term (that you need to view the body, mind, and sprit as an integrated system rather than a set of disconnected parts) and it’s the most familiar term for many who have an inkling there is a lot more to medicine than the standard system acknowledges.

At the same time, each person’s interpretation of “integrative medicine” often differs. Some view it as a largely botanical based medical practice, some view it as primarily homeopathy, some view it as medical care that also utilizes body work and structural manipulation, and some view it as including the Eastern medical systems (e.g., Ayurveda or Chinese Medicine) and some view it as being much more focused on the psychological aspects of disease (and hence incorporate a wide range of variety of emotional release techniques).

I think all of these can be applicable for patients, but at the same time, each modality is very much practitioner dependent, so you often see dramatically different results between two people doing a similar style of integrative medicine (e.g., I know a few conventionally trained doctors who integrative Chinese medicine into their practices, with some becoming well-known for the extraordinary results they got, but others not accomplishing much).

I thus hesitate to say any system is best (although I admit I am biased towards Chinese Medicine) because it often ends up being so much more about the individual practitioner than the model they use. At the same time however, I think the underlying truth behind integrative medicine (that treating most medical conditions requires seeing a broader picture than the narrow lens that conventional medicine provides) is necessary for healing—it just often isn’t sufficient to achieve that result and needs something more too.

Note: while the majority of integrative doctors (likely out of fear) default to using relatively noncontroversial integrative therapies (e.g., herbs), a subset of integrative practitioners are willing to use the more controversial ones. Provided these physicians can remain integrated with their patients as they administer the therapies (which many do not do), they often get remarkable results.

Similar to the first question, what are the most harmful medical myths specifically pertaining to mental health?

1. Many psychiatric conditions are actually neurologic in nature (they are a result of brain damage). Because of this, trying to treat them psychologically or with psychiatric medications is often futile (and frequently quite damaging to them). Unfortunately, while a variety of effective methods have been developed to treat the biological causes of mental illness, they are rarely utilized because it is so much more profitable to just sell a large number of psychiatric medications (especially since many psychiatric conditions are the result of neurotoxic pharmaceuticals). Fortunately, it appears a renaissance is beginning to emerge within psychiatry that recognizes other things that need to be taken into account when treating mental illness (which is known as the biopsychosocial model).

2. As mentioned above, antidepressants typically do not treat depression and frequently have a variety of severe side effects which require the patients to start a variety of even more toxic psychiatric drugs.

3. While psychotherapy is heavily promoted to treat mental illness, it typically doesn’t work (and in some cases makes patients much worse). In my eyes, this is largely due to emotional traumas being viewed as abstract ideas which can be defeated mentally, rather than concrete energetic entities which need to be resolved and dispersed. Because of this, I’ve lost count of how many people I know who spent years in therapy without it going anywhere who then got better once they saw someone who knew how to remove the root of their trauma.
Note: for certain conditions psychotherapy can be very helpful, and likewise, some therapists are very good—unfortunately people like that are hard to come by.

R.A: Roughly speaking, what percentage of physical illnesses do you think are primarily or largely caused by unresolved traumas or adverse impressions on the mind (causing symptomatic conditions such as anxiety, OCD, and depression)? For context, what I've concluded so far: when it comes to chronic conditions that have no clear cause (digestive, muscular, urinary, etc), I know a very large percentage are caused by fear and anxiety (which are representations of a constellation of psychological and other factors). I personally have long struggled with chronic digestion issues, such as GERD, spending years stuck in the reductionist physical model ("something's wrong with my digestion"), only to later realize the cause - sole or primary - was my fear and anxiety. Dr. Howard Schubiner, Alan Gordin, and originally John Sarno's work brilliantly explain this.

M.D: I think most chronic illnesses have an emotional component that worsens the disease (e.g., due to sympathetic activation triggering changes which exacerbate it), so since someone’s emotional health will always fluctuate, you will see the related illnesses fluctuate somewhat in tandem with the illness.

At the same time, while I’ve seen miraculous cures occur, it’s fairly rare for me to find complex conditions that completely resolve once the emotional component of the illnesses is addressed. Similarly, while I know numerous practitioners who believe emotions are the root cause of all illnesses (and hence what they always focus on treating) when you track their results, you typically find that they get enough miracles to really believe in their work, but they also get a lot of marginal results, and don’t really help the majority of people they see.

For example, I’ve met quite a few people who immensely benefitted from Dr. Sarno’s work and then subsequently developed a new case of back pain which did not respond to Sarno’s approaches and they eventually realized needed to be looked at in a different way. Likewise, while I think Sarno’s general idea was on target, I’ve had quite a few times where found his approach of resolving emotional issues (which was largely Freudian in nature) wasn’t actually what was needed to fix the emotional component of the back pain.

Typically, I find emotions are tied to very specific component of a disease (e.g., a recurring muscle spasm in one part of the body) or are not so much the cause of a disease as a barrier to healing (as when the individual is trapped within a chronic state of anxiety or distress, a lot of treatments just won’t work on them until the psychological aspects of the disease are addressed). In turn, in my clinical practice, sometimes a specific problem jumps out at me as being emotional in nature, but typically, I find myself focusing on the psychiatric aspects of an illness when I feel those aspects are preventing what I am trying to implement from working (which unfortunately is often quite a tricky balance to strike as patient’s with complex illnesses do not like being gaslighted and told the illnesses is in their head and thus their fault).

That said, other than trying to create a safe and therapeutic atmosphere, for the majority of my patients I don’t focus on the emotional component of their illnesses because I don’t think it’s a very productive use of our time and I think it’s exploitative to have people pay you a lot just to talk to them (which is also an issue I’ve seen throughout the integrative medical field since doctors so rarely take the time to talk to their patients people will often pay a lot for doctors that do).

R.A: How significant of health risk do you think EMF radiation is? Specifically, smartphones, Bluetooth devices, airpods etc. Something I'm thinking a lot of and unable to find clear answers other than some solid data Huberman has discussed (on men putting phones in pockets likely contributing to lower sperm counts.

M.D: It’s been on my to-do list to write a post about EMFs, and the primary reason I have not gotten to it is because it’s another controversial subject that really needs to be presented in the right light (with the substantiating evidence) to support it.

Briefly, two of the most detailed books I know of which have been written on this topic were Disconnect by Devra Davis and The Invisible Rainbow by Arthur Fristenberg. While I have a few disagreements with bits of their content (e.g., I feel Fristenberg makes certain claims he doesn’t have the evidence to support), I feel those books jointly show that there is significant evidence that EMFs adversely affect the heart, brain, and testicles (additionally I also suspect they also affect babies in utero). Likewise, there is quite a bit of evidence showing they adversely affect animals (e.g., the ones that wear tracking tags or the ones in the vicinity of cell phone towers). Unfortunately, because of how much money is behind so many technologies that require EMFs, science in this area has been deliberately suppressed (and as a result, most of the critical data that exists actually comes from fairly old research that occurred before those political pressures entered the picture).

The two most important technical principles to understand about EMFs are that they decrease by the square (so they become exponentially weaker the further away you go from the source) and that while the effect of EMFs is generally strength dependent, much weaker microwaves fields are still highly disruptive to living organisms because they resonate with the components of living organisms and hence store in them rather passing through like other EMFs. This is unfortunate since many of the technologies we use (e.g., radar, wifi, cellular phones, baby monitors, and bluetooth) all use the microwave spectrum.

Many of the most experienced integrative practitioners I know came to the conclusion that EMF pollution was one of the most common route causes of disease in their patients, and I’ve heard numerous stories of well-regarded practitioners (e.g., Dietrich Klinghardt) finding that if patients were put in a true EMF dead zone, a variety of chronic illnesses resolved on their own. Unfortunately, places like these are very difficult to find, and in Klinghardt’s case, once it became known that he was using a spot for this purpose, as I recall, a cell phone tower was installed there which effectively ruined it.

On a more anecdotal level, people’s susceptibilities to EMFs vary greatly, and I hence know people who have to live in the mountains because being around any type of EMF makes them violently ill, while I also know lots of people who talk on high EMF cell phones all day and think anyone who complains about this is crazy. Additionally, I know quite a few people who don’t think they are EMF sensitive but find they sleep better in low EMF areas (and hence turn off their circuit breakers or wife routers at night).

I’m personally on the more sensitive end of the spectrum, where I find some EMFs are a bit irritating and that I just feel better and clearer in low EMF areas. Because of this, my house is wired (no wifi), I live in a rural area with fewer EMFs, and I avoid newer cars, especially electric cars or hybrids (as they all have more EMFs). I also use a low EMF cell phone (which are hard to find), use air-gapped headphones or speaker phone whenever possible (as it is a bit uncomfortable for me to be on a phone for a prolonged period), and avoid being close to people who are on high EMF phones. Ultimately, I’m still undecided on how much of a problem EMFs are, but I take the fact that I can feel them as a sign it’s worth following the precautionary principle. Additionally, I also find that other EMFs (e.g., those that come from dirty electricity) cause problems, but I haven’t done a deep dive on this topic, so I don’t feel qualified to talk about it.

Lastly, while the focus is always on talking on the phone, my own observation has been that data transfer (especially high ones like video chatting) generates much more palpable EMFs which is extremely frustrating for me whenever I end up in situations where I need to hot spot to write here (as I consistently “feel” the hot spot). Since noticing this, I’ve also confirmed it with meters that can detect the EMFs cell phones emit, which is unfortunate because most cells frequently track what you are doing and constantly send data back to the central servers.

R.A: How do you conceptualize treating patients holistically rather than in a crude reductionist model ("antidepressants" and "ADHD medications" - almost absurd terms which definitionally fail given the complexity of the conditions it seeks to remedy or alleviate)? Western allopathy has caused great harm in simplifying complex mind-body or bio-psycho-social problems to mere neurochemical and physical causes. In some philosophical sense (which Buddhism and it's Western communicators such as Alan Watts have explained), a problem cannot be reduced to a cause or set of causes. There are an infinite totality of factors undergirding any particular phenomenon. However, the point is not to induce cognitive paralysis, but to appreciate the multitude of causes behind someone coming into the ER room with GERD mistaken as a heart attack or even an alarming problem like a heart attack or stroke. While getting to the bottom of all the variables that could lead to such conditions - from the womb to what one ate for breakfast today - is practically impossible, is identifying and remedying more and more causes and variables the path towards human well-being and health?

M.D: I think I answered a lot of this question with my previous answers. However, to cut to the deeper level of what you are asking, it’s critical to be able to see the whole person without becoming overwhelmed by the complexity in front of you, but simultaneously, to not get too attached to any specific thing you are noticing in the patient or any specific medical model (e.g., being fully allopathic in your approach or being anti-allopathic and ignoring clear red flags which need conventional hospital care).

This is a bit challenging to do, and my own familiarity with navigating this challenge came from similar challenges existing throughout the meditation practices I do. So through struggling to figure it out in my own mind-body-spirit (where it was relatively low stakes as I wasn’t going to harm anyone by missing something important within me while practicing), it wasn’t a huge jump to apply that skillset to the practice of medicine.

Once people (e.g., quite a few of my colleagues) become proficient with this perceptual capacity (and have a lot of practice with patients), the root cause of a patient’s symptoms will often just jump out at them, in a manner not too different to what one experiences while meditating with something which is stuck within you. Since that’s not the easiest thing to teach, the most common alternative options are functional models and algorithms (which is what medicine is good at teaching you to memorize). Unfortunately, since so many complex illnesses can have a variety of different presentations which frequently overlap with presentations caused by other illnesses, making a workable model gets very challenging in complex illnesses, and for this reason, I’ve tried to lay out some of the simple principles I think make the picture a bit easier to understand (e.g., that the body rarely heals completely), and that areas of previous injuries are typically the first areas where symptoms of a chronic inflammatory disease show up). Likewise, I previously wrote an article describing the common processes I learned from meditation for interpreting an overwhelming amount of information and making sense of it (as that has played a large part in my ability to write here).

R.A: As you've written before, how significant of a role do you think psychedelic-assisted therapy (emphasis on "assisted," as I know you would agree rather than naive magic pill ideas) will play in the future of mental health treatment? As I've written about once before, MDMA-assisted therapy has greatly facilitated my journey over the past couple of years. Not exactly for PTSD -which is what the studies on this particular drug focus on (my podcast with Rick Doblin is coming soon!) - but in the pursuit of self-discovery and working on underlying patterns of fear and anxiety and obsessiveness. At the risk of sounding naively optimistic and painfully grandiose, I can't begin to comprehend the civilizational impact of *properly facilitated and therapeutically integrated* psychedelic experiences made accessible to the broader public.

M.D: For a variety of reasons, my personal experience with psychedelics is quite limited. However, quite a few of my colleagues (including psychiatrists) are extremely interested in their therapeutic potential as they’ve repeatedly seen them produce miraculous results for challenging mental illnesses. In turn, most of them have emphasized that the data for them is getting stronger and stronger and that since the FDA is now allowing clinical trials of the therapies it is inevitable that sooner or later they will enter the standard of care as they can treaty a variety issues no existing psychiatric therapy can address.

My own suspicion is that once this passes a certain point, it will start cutting into the psychiatric medication sales (as the majority of people taking psychiatric medications are perpetually on them to mitigate some of the symptoms of their mental illness and hence will stop taking the medications once they have a psychedelic induced cure). Once this happens, there will likely be some type of media onslaught to recast psychedelics as incredibly dangerous drugs (as this is the standard playbook) and my hope is that whenever that happens, there will be enough momentum behind the therapy (or enough distrust in the media) to prevent that campaign from derailing their use. For this reason, I (and many of my colleagues) feel it’s very important to only encourage psychedelic psychotherapy use within an appropriate professional setting, as it is likely incidents which occur in unofficial sessions will be what’s used to discredit the entire practice.

Overall, I believe that psychedelics have an incredible ability to rewire the patterning within the nervous system, so the main challenge is to make sure what you do results in a positive rather than negative repatterning. In turn, my general experience has been that they can be extremely helpful if used in the appropriate therapeutic setting, but unfortunately, that is not what most people do, and I periodically meet people who develop varying degrees of psychoses from them which often resemble what I’ve observed happen to people after unsafe spiritual practices. Generally speaking, I think the safest (and most likely to benefit) psychedelic is ketamine. Conversely, while I was initially quite intrigued by ayahuasca, over time I’ve seen it cause quite a bit of harm and not that much benefit, so I now often caution people against it and make sure that if they proceed it’s taken in a safe setting.

R.A: Thank you very much for providing your insights and given such thorough explanations for each topic. Your vast knowledge base greatly inspires me and I hope to one day understand some of these complex areas of illusory consensus as well as you.

M.D: Thanks for having me “on” here. I really respect people like you who are well established within an institution but nonetheless are willing to speak out. I hope this post helps you in all that you’re doing!

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