Ask Dr. Drew - Medical Board of CA Called Me About AB 2098: Discussing Their Response & YOUR Calls – Ask Dr. Drew – Episode 124

Episode Date: September 17, 2022

This weekend, Dr. Drew spoke with the President of the Medical Board of California regarding concerns about California's AB 2098, a bill that is intended to fight misinformation but could be misused to silence physicians and interfere with their treatment of patients on an individual level. Dr. Drew discusses the conversation and answers viewer calls on any topic. 「 MEDICAL NOTE 」 The CDC states that COVID-19 vaccines are safe, effective, and reduce your risk of severe illness. You should always consult your personal physician before making any decisions about your health.  「 SPONSORED BY 」 • GENUCEL - Using a proprietary base formulated by a pharmacist, Genucel has created skincare that can dramatically improve the appearance of facial redness and under-eye puffiness. Genucel uses clinical levels of botanical extracts in their cruelty-free, natural, made-in-the-USA line of products. Get 10% off with promo code DREW at https://genucel.com/drew 「 ABOUT the SHOW 」 Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation (https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/firstladyoflove). This show is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only, and is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. 「 GEAR PROVIDED BY 」 • BLUE MICS - After more than 30 years in broadcasting, Dr. Drew's iconic voice has reached pristine clarity through Blue Microphones. But you don't need a fancy studio to sound great with Blue's lineup: ranging from high-quality USB mics like the Yeti, to studio-grade XLR mics like Dr. Drew's Blueberry. Find your best sound at https://drdrew.com/blue • ELGATO - Every week, Dr. Drew broadcasts live shows from his home studio under soft, clean lighting from Elgato's Key Lights. From the control room, the producers manage Dr. Drew's streams with a Stream Deck XL, and ingest HD video with a Camlink 4K. Add a professional touch to your streams or Zoom calls with Elgato. See how Elgato's lights transformed Dr. Drew's set: https://drdrew.com/sponsors/elgato/ 「 ABOUT DR. DREW 」 For over 30 years, Dr. Drew has answered questions and offered guidance to millions through popular shows like Celebrity Rehab (VH1), Dr. Drew On Call (HLN), Teen Mom OG (MTV), and the iconic radio show Loveline. Now, Dr. Drew is opening his phone lines to the world by streaming LIVE from his home studio. Watch all of Dr. Drew's latest shows at https://drdrew.tv Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joining us today, a special Monday episode, and kind of pertinent because I had a very interesting conversation yesterday with the president of the Board of Medical Quality Assurance here in California. And I will sort of walk you through all my concerns. I will just say it was a reassuring conversation and sort of a model for maybe how people should manage differences. I mean, this is always my instinct when I see particularly professional peers out there disagreeing with me to reach out with them and just try to have a conversation. Now,

some of the cowards will not come on the phone, which I find astonishing. And those people sort of declare themselves. But this young attorney came right on the phone and she was quite reasonable. And I will detail for you my concerns. And of course, we will take your calls. We were out on Twitter spaces. You just raise your hand there and you'll be streaming out on multiple different platforms. And when I bring you up, you are consenting to do so. I'm watching you all over on the Rumble rant as well as on the restream. So with that said, let's get right to it. Our laws as it pertained to substances are draconian and bizarre. A psychopath started this.

He was an alcoholic because of social media and pornography, PTSD, love addiction, fentanyl and heroin. Ridiculous. I'm a doctor for f*** sake. Where the hell do you think I learned that? I'm just saying. You go to treatment before you kill people. I am a clinician. I observe things about these chemicals.

Let's just deal with what's real. We used to get these calls on Loveline all the time. Educate adolescents and to prevent and to treat. If you have trouble, you can't stop and you want to help stop it, I can help. I got a lot to say. I got a lot more to say. We'll be right back. your team, your favorite player, or your style. There's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM. A sportsbook worth a slam dunk. An authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions.

Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. So I would argue that the way we manage our relationship with YouTube was another example of reaching out, trying to get people to be reasonable.

And it's often the case that people will be reasonable if you're reasonable. So we are still trying to get a closer relationship with YouTube so we can be very clear about what parameters. This has been the one thing I've been asking for, both from the medical board and from YouTube and anybody else that wants to have so much control over medical information is please either let me check in with you to make sure we're in the right zone so we can talk about it or be very explicit with me what that corridor is so I can

try to stay there. I may bounce on the parameters somewhat, but I'll happily try to comply. My job is to, my desire is to do good, not to cause a problem. And that was one of the common grounds that the president of the medical board and I got to, which is she is very interested in physicians doing good. And let me get her name for you. I feel, I'm sorry, I did not come prepared with that because that's unfair. You know, something is interesting though. When we tried to be reasonable with YouTube at the very beginning during COVID-19, we didn't get through to anybody because nobody was at work. Well, two things. And it was just a big electronic clusterfuck over there. It was Christina Daniel Lawson.

She's an attorney. Her dad was an internist up in Santa Barbara. She's very sensitive. He's from my era, and she's very sensitive to what decisions she's making affects physicians. She's in an interesting position in that the medical board is—oh, this is interesting. So hold that up there for a second. The medical board is stuck between the patient advocacy groups and trying to protect or at least serve the community that they're actually supposed to be regulating, which is the physician community,

and keep the so-called good doctors empowered while the not so good ones are perhaps sanctioned or at least are schooled on how to improve their performance. So here's Christina Lawson. And she says, have you thought to do so? And I said, absolutely. I DMed her immediately. And I said, can we get on the phone? And she got on the phone like four hours later with me. It was Sunday afternoon. She spent 45 minutes with me and was a delight. She was a lovely person. And that's the thing is that most people are good people. Most people are trying to do a good job. And this is what followed up afterwards. So there we go. She's saying exactly, we should retweet that guys. I don't know that I saw that one. That is, can we do that, Susan? You see what's up there on the board? So retweet that. I don't think I caught that one yesterday. And she, yeah, oh, maybe I did. Did I?

Oh, yes. Yeah, you did. Yes, it looks like I did. Right there. Okay, and I remember I liked it also. That's the one you want to retweet? No, no, we did. I did it. It didn't look that familiar to me, but I guess I did. So let me kind of dig into what this was all about.

So I almost don't know where to start. Let me just say, Caleb and I, before this present stream started, we're talking about how people on YouTube say all kinds of extreme things, both politically and sexually and aggressively. Look at the world I live in at your mom's house. I mean, that is not even, that goes just fine.

And there are plenty of political YouTube channels out there that for the most part get by with some extreme positions. And yet as soon as physicians talk about disagreeing with one another in good faith, that immediately triggers everyone's anxiety. And that is what is insane frankly so here's what got me uh to the uh the board uh in this good faith conversation which was that 2098 was designed in fact i'm going to pull it up and read parts of it to you so you understand uh kind of where my concerns are and then i will sort of get into the details of it okay they say that uh unprofessional conduct for a physician, disseminate misinformation or disinformation related to COVID-19, including false or misleading information regarding the nature and risk of the virus. It's prevention and treatment and the development, safety, and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines. So just on that alone, the CDC put up there again what the CDC admits about the myocarditis thing.

If I had said that a month ago or two months ago, that could have been misinformation because the CDC had not yet admitted that they were seeing a signal. So first of all, anyone that looks at data aggressively could potentially put themselves in harm's way. I'm guessing, having spoke to Christina Lawson, that there will be a way to do it, to frame it, so they won't have an issue with that. So I'm hoping for that. Disinformation means misinformation that the licensee, where'd it go? Oh, shoot, that the licensee deliberately disseminated with malicious intent. So malicious intent is part of this thing. So I don't know many people that are saying things that I disagree with. I mean, like for instance, I think you all know that I'm not just skeptical. I just know that the hydroxychloroquine and the ivermectin, these things just don't really work. They may do something, but they're not worth continuing

to talk about and struggle with compared to things like molnupiravir and monoclonal antibodies and Paxivit and these things. And I'm telling you, it's the difference between somebody, and I've seen now hundreds of cases of COVID, bad COVID, mild COVID, I've seen everything, and I've treated a lot of it. And it is a very big difference between giving somebody a medication and going, maybe that did something. They kind of got better anyway. It took a while, whatever. And also, by the way, seeing it not work and somebody's get very sick versus giving somebody a medication and within 24 hours, they're significantly better. I mean, like dramatically better every time I give it, every time I give it. So that's just different clinically. So that's been my clinical

experience. So what was I saying? Oh, so I don't believe that anyone who pushes early treatment has malicious intent. This is just a clinical disagreement. Now, I don't know if they haven't seen as much COVID as I have or what. Susan, you're leaning into your mic there. So Stacey Anderson on Facebook said, ivermectin saved my dad. Did or didn't? I can only tell you. It worked for some people. That's a disagreement. And all I can tell you is there is such a marked difference between something that maybe might've worked and something that just stops this thing right away. Yeah, of course. And that's the difference between what we have now. I mean, I personally benefited from the monoclonal antibodies

where I, in an hour of the infusion, was feeling dramatically better. Literally, I told the nurse who gave me the infusion in my home, which they were giving for free. The government bought everything, and they will give it to everyone for free. He said, I said, look, the colors are getting brighter in the room. It's uncanny.

And he said, I hear that all day long. People feel better. Okay, so misinformation means false information. This is the part that bothers me. So this is what I want to get into. That is contradicted by contemporary science, contrary to the standard of care. So this measuring stick of the standard of care being the standard against which misinformation will be measured is what I expressed to her for a good 30 minutes was my gravest concern. And she listened very carefully and diligently and heard me and is thoughtful about it.

So I appreciate that. What more do we want from one another but an attempt to kind of reach a consensus about how to do things best for patients? Now, I know there are people on a rampage against her and against Board of Medical Quality Assurance. That is not me. I wasn't there when all that happened. I don't know what happened. I'm sorry that that conflict is underway for all parties involved. And maybe we can do better going forward.

That's what I'm going to try to do. So here's my concern about standard of care. When I first arrived at Las Encinas Hospital in, is this, what are you putting up there, Caleb? That's the quote from the bill. What I just read, yeah. Okay, so when I arrived at Las Encinas Hospital in 1985, I was an internist and I was sort of,

I got all the medical stuff that was laying around the hospital in the chronic units and the unit, you know, people had been there for many years. And amongst those patients were people treated with the standard of care of 20 years previously or 30 years previously. And that standard of care included something called psychosurgery. One of those psychosurgeries you know as frontal lobotomy. The guys that got, that invented that got a Nobel Prize for it. It became such a standard of care. These wild people literally carried the spikes in their coat pocket and would push it up, hammer it into the skull above the eye here in patients' bedsides and sweep the spike around to dislocate the frontal lobe.

The really sad part of that story is the neurosurgeons were so freaked out by what they were doing, they became silent, which is what physicians tend to do when they get scared. We get quiet. We just freeze in place. Those guys became the standard of care. That is what people were doing, standard of care. Now, I acquired all those patients when I arrived, and they were a disaster. It's not just the immediate aftermath. The brain developed something called gliosis,

and it forms a massively expanding scar that eventually replaces parts of their brain. It's a disaster. It's a catastrophe. That was the standard of care. If the neurosurgeons had stood up at the time and said, hey man, this is not okay, guess what?

Misinformation as compared to the standard of care. Then now fast forward, it's the 1990s, and I'm fighting hard to treat the opioid addiction, particularly the chronic pain patients that were getting poly drug addicted and just were a mess. A few cases were adjudicated where physicians were found civilly or criminally guilty. This was in North Carolina, Florida, and California. Civilly or criminally guilty, not malpractice, personally, civilly or criminally guilty of inadequate, of patient abuse by not adequately treating pain. Now, as I said, physicians, we freeze when we see stuff like that. We all froze, including myself, and we became unwilling to treat pain.

We sent all of our pain to the pain management team. The pain management world at the time, I actually gave a one-hour lecture on this, had determined that it felt like they were a white hat. They were a heroic profession that were going to do away with all pain in the United States. Nobody should ever have pain of any sorts. And we needed to fight against something called opiophobia, fear of opiates. Now, at the time, they were killing my patients one after another. Many continue to do so today, but back then it was ridiculous. They would give them, the standard of care by that community became pain is the fifth vital sign. Think about that. Your pulse is only as important as your pain assessment. Pain is what the patient says it is,

and pain control is what the patient says it is. And that's it. You don't even really need a doctor. The patient could just say, I need that Dilaudid, I need that Oxycontin, I need some Demerol. And that's the way in Florida a lot of the pain teams functioned. Now, my patients, addicts, were profoundly harmed by this. Some of them have never recovered. Many of them are still in the streets. So this was a catastrophe, and I fought against it for 15 years and was told, and by the way, the standard of care got adopted by the Joint Commission of Hospital Accreditation, the California Medical Association, and the Board of Medical Quality Assurance, and the Department of Mental Health.

So I was attacked by all of these organizations when I stood up and said, this is not good. This is bad. We need a different approach. And the way they found a way to come after me, imagine this. My heroin addict patients, when they were in withdrawal, we obviously have better ways to do this now, but then there would be three days of discomfort that they mostly didn't even remember. It was not that bad. We had ways we could manage it. I never once did these words come out of my mouth. How are we going to treat these opiate addicts? I can't get them off heroin.

No, easy, no problem. Off in five days, three days of discomfort, but tolerable. In any event, because they were uncomfortable, literally the Department of Mental Health and the Joint Commission of Hospital Accreditation came after me because I wouldn't give a heroin addict opiates when they were uncomfortable in heroin withdrawal. That's how insane the standard of care was. And it killed untold thousands and caused the opioid epidemic we're in right now. And then when finally people started taking legal action against the physicians that were

overprescribing and against the drug companies that were duplicitous in all this. The doctors again froze in place and told the patients whom they had rendered addicted, get out of here, you're a bad patient, I can't prescribe to you anymore. And when you do that, that was the standard of care. And when you do that to opiate addicts, they have to get the opiate somewhere and they go to the street,

they get heroin and fentanyl, and then they die. And that was the standard of care. So I think you're going to understand why a threshold of standard of care concerns me greatly. So a few weeks ago, standard of care would have been, you can't talk about myocarditis in young males because there's no evidence for that. It's not the standard of care. Standard of care is 12 and above vaccinated period as a story. For instance, even right now, they're saying that three months after Omicron is when you should get the vaccine. My experience has been people are highly immunologically effectively not, you know, they don't get reinfected within six months. That's been my experience. Unless you took Paxlovid my experience. Unless you took Paxlovid,

interestingly, if you took Paxlovid, I've been seeing people get it again at six weeks and eight weeks. I'm wondering if Paxlovid affects our immune response to Omicron a little bit. But the average patient that just goes through Omicron, I've been seeing them essentially have no recurrences for six months. So why three months? The standard of care is three months. Where did we come up with that? We've done no studies on humans. All the studies were done on mice. Where did we get that three months from? Why? Why?

And so we have all these things, especially now in the aftermath of COVID, where a lot of things have been determined by fiat to be the standard of care. You've heard Dr. Alexander tell us about how the six feet distance and social distancing, which Dr. Kelly Victory has been telling us forever, was made up. Dr. Alexander was there in the NIH when it was made up, and it became the standard of care. Standard of care has got to have adequate science behind it, or it needs to be something that we discuss in vigorous debate publicly and that people are free to do so. So these were my concerns.

I raised all of this with Christina and she heard me. She heard me and I said, look, the one thing that would make things a lot better is if we could just have somebody to call or someplace to go to to check in and are we okay do you need to talk about this or am i am i out allowing can i correct something so so we're not later addressing a complaint and by the way when you have to address a complaint to the medical board of quality assurance it is dealt like a police action. I mean, you have to, it's as though you're often hiring an attorney, and it's as though you have had a criminal accusation. Takes hours and hours of your time.

Remember, Kelly says like 80 hours of her time. Yes. And I used to have... I mean, you can't save lives with those 80 hours. You have to chase paper. It makes people want to get out of the profession is what it also does um but the um the other thing about these these these situations the complaints she was telling me that i you know i was i would get spurious nonsensical

um ridiculous you know unfounded complaints when i worked at the psychiatric hospital. I would just happen to be someone in the room with a patient that was terribly unhappy or something, and boom, you would get the complaint. And it's horrifying. You literally think to yourself, this could be it. My license is going to be gone now. And you have no people there, no one to talk to. They don't respond. You're just sending paperwork back and forth. Now the reality is, as the president pointed out to me, that only about three percent of them are really a problem. But that's what my fear right now is that's with her at the helm. What about the next person that comes in? Maybe that person has an entirely different personality or different axe to grind or who knows what, a political agenda. And it could be an entirely different experience now with this expanded capacity to attack people that take issue with

a standard of care. Standard of care, generally speaking, is the standard because it's the best. You know, I always tell people that one of the terrible problems with celebrities is they go after special care, the better care, special doctor, all this kind of stuff. All special things mean is that they're not sustained at the standard of care and they are almost always substandard. But to say that somebody is publicly addressing the shortcomings of the standard of care is different than advertising yourself that somebody who gives provides so-called special treatment. Whenever you see special treatment that's way outside, the standard of care is standard of care

because we can prove it and it's the best. Now, the problem right now with the standard of care, a lot of it is based on non-science, spurious science, fiat and made-up stuff. And so that is why I am very, very cautious about this situation. But I am persuaded that it will be used in good faith. I will tell you. Describe why.

Well, one of the reasons is, as the president pointed out to me, is that they already have the authority to do whatever they want when somebody is harming patients in any way. They have full authority to do that. This is just sort of laying it out in a little more detail. So in a weird way, that was reassuring. What was the other thing, Susan, you were saying? What? What was the other thing you were, did you mean? No, I meant like, what did she say exactly that, you know, made you believe that, be persuaded? That she listened to all of this that I've shared with you and took it in and gave some good feedback and said she would, you know, contemplate all this and she understood. Just having somebody say, I understand why you're afraid and why this, why this would be bothersome to you is massively impactful.

Is there a way for you or the public to go and listen to hearings on this and have a voice? Yes. I believe, let me look up something right now that somebody sent me. You would have to send letters to the governor, essentially, to get him not to sign the bill. Let's see. Let me look here. I mean, if it's done for the right reason, it doesn't turn into a censorship ploy

to stop people from talking about how bad the vaccine is or doctors have to be able to look at their information and make their own judgment. They say particularly medical professionals should write veto letters and call the governor's office. So that's what people can do. There's no hearings. It's already done.

What specifically is in it that we need to know as well? Like, you know, you get these propositions when you read them on the ballot and they're so confusing and they always try to trick you. I mean, can't we get information on exactly what it's going to do and how it's going to affect all doctors and people in the media that are doctors? Or is it going to affect anybody in the media? You know, are we suddenly not going to be able to speak freely about using? I don't think so.

I don't think there's going to be a problem that way. Judging by. But shouldn't they put something in writing and then let us decide if we need to write a letter to veto? Say that again. Shouldn't what? They should let us see what they're going to be, what's being put in writing so we know what. I've seen it. I just showed it.

Caleb just put it up. He put the bill up on the screen. And does it scare you? It did before I talked to them. And for the very reasons I just spent the last 30 minutes explaining. But it's also a lawyer you're talking to. You know, they're very persuasive. Yeah. And sometimes full of shit. So I don to them. And for the very reasons I just spent the last 30 minutes explaining. But it's also a lawyer you're talking to. They're very persuasive and sometimes full of shit. So I don't know.

Yeah, but she had a doctor, a physician, a father, and she was volunteering this job and was very interested in medicine. Yeah, but who's to say somebody's not going to take over? Well, that's what worries me, that somebody's going to come in after her and start using this standard of care measures. And then become an authoritative dictator in the medical community that's going to screw everybody. Judging by what she was telling me, she was like,

we could already do that if we wanted to. No, true. But I think also having a voice and getting people behind you will maybe direct it in the right direction so that we don't have to fight to have a voice in this country. I think you're getting a little paranoid. No, I think that you, I didn't realize the power of Twitter this week. I was really proud of the fact that we didn't just have a bunch of people yelling at you into the wind in caps.

But I love the fact that you got concerned about something and somebody responded to you so um as a citizen but also as a leader of a community of people that want good medical care right and information without being horrified by panic porn or whatever we don't want misinformation. We don't want people going out and killing people with bad drugs or whatever, of course. Or giving, you know, there's a lot of reasons to have this bill, good reasons. But not everybody should be affected by it

if they're just doing the right thing. That was what I was assured from the president. That would certainly be the case. Well. We'll see. It's already passed. There's nothing you can do to unpass it. Oh, he signed it?

No, he didn't sign it yet as far as I know. I mean, you can try to get him not to sign it. He's never responded to anything ever. Once they put stuff on it, if it's more laws, he signs it. You're talking about Gavin Newsom. What I told her was that physicians are so beat down and so miserable and so powerless that it's just more. It's just more of this.

Anything to do with an attorney, we're scared. We don't want to hear about it. We're trying to help people. We're trying to do good. And to be crushed by insurance companies and regulators and the state and the board and anybody else, it's disgusting. It's disgusting. And she did not disagree. She did not disagree. And I used that language essentially. So somebody wants to know how you talk without your mouth moving.

I know, but Jerry said I'm smart because I ask all the right questions. Thank you, Jerry. No, no, no. It was good. Well, I was listening to you the other day and I said, what can we do to get the word out and make change? And it's not, we have a voice, which on Twitter, apparently, we do. And this has changed in the last couple of years. So I'm very proud of the fact that you're willing to stick your neck out there and not just spend the weekend with your wife and your kids and your

dogs and and ignore it so i'm glad that you had it i'm glad she called i'm excited yeah and i i heard the conversation briefly and i it just i understand that you're trying to i'm trying to create a collaborative community which is how medicine for the 40 years that i've been a doctor has it always has been. And the fact that it's breaking down into camps, much like everything else political, is insanity. It's insanity. It's not how it works.

It's not how our things work. That's why I speak to people that have been silenced. That's my immediate impulse to hear them out. And it's why I also will talk to people on the regular, the regulatory side as well. So let's do this. Um, I want to take calls. I mean, this is something you know about. Yes. If you're going to go into politics, you know about this. Yeah. This is your forte. So you, you should have a voice, but you shouldn't be in politics. If I can say, I think that it's, you know, drew coming from the medical side, it's also, it's such a very collaborative environment

that he's always looking for something positive that he can pull from this. Whereas it's Susan, as you know, someone that studies history and government for a very, very long time, has a great interest in it, is probably thinking about the Patriot Act and how the Patriot Act was used under the guise of, well, this is for the good of everyone. And then now we're kind of dealing

with it. And so people like Susan and I, we don't, we haven't seen that collaborative thing where they don't end up, we give you an inch and they, they always take a mile in our minds. That's, that's what I'm thinking. I don't disagree with that. I don't disagree with it. I have hope. That's what it is. I don't disagree that, you I'm glad you still have hope. I don't disagree with it. I have hope. That's what it is. I don't disagree. California legislators never found a law they didn't love. I mean, they just want to law us up with everything until we can't walk around anymore. So this is not an unfamiliar experience. But the fact that there is an opportunity to sort of have a human contact and be reasonable in how these things are, are brought to life.

Well, and then I don't want to see New York follow suit. You know, I don't want them to suddenly say doctors can't do anything. People are kind of waking up to how insane California is. So as soon as Newsom went out to say, I'm going to bring California to the rest of the country, he was rejected. So that I saw was a very positive thing. We are not in good shape in this state. Okay, let me take a little break.

And after this break, I will start taking your calls. And I'll ask Susan if she has any more questions before we get to those calls right after this. I think we have found the holy grail of skincare. GenuCell has absolutely changed certainly my skincare regimen. I like that vitamin C serum, the under eye creams, skin nourishing primer. Susan loves the eyelash enhancers, uses it on her eyebrows as well. GenuCell has everything to make us both feel and look amazing. Best part, the quality of the products. Using pure ingredients like antioxidants, copper peptides, and a proprietary calendula flower base, GenuCell knows how to

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skin all the time and I'm so excited because it's actually working. Right now, you can try GenuCell's most popular collection of products and see what I'm talking about for yourself. Go to GenuCell.com and enter code Drew for 10% off. That is G-E-N-U-C-E-L.com, and the code is D-R-E-W. So I just saw something on the Rumble Rants where Lucas Ficari said, if Drew pushes vax, then Drew is on the wrong side of history. So I want to be super clear. Hey, Lucas. Yeah.

What does pushing vaccine mean, right? So the vaccines have had a very substantial impact on the population that we should have been protecting from the beginning in this pandemic. We should have been doing focused protection on people that are very elderly, for sure over the age of 75. And in that population, whatever untoward risks there are from this vaccine, it is worth that risk to prevent the serious complications of COVID in that population. And although it doesn't prevent infection, it clearly helps cause milder disease. Now, Dr. Victory will argue with me about that.

And maybe the, I don't see that. I see my vaccinated patients having much milder disease and I have therapeutics to throw at them on top of that. So things have been going very, very well for my elderly patients with COVID. Over the age of 65, I would say it's about the same thing, about the same risk-benefit ratio. Now, when you get down into the 40s, it is much less clear. And I am categorically against mandating vaccines of young people where the risk-benefit

analysis is not clear. I don't see it. The probability of serious outcome from the disease is remote, and there is yet some concerns about the vaccine itself, particularly as it pertains to young males, Moderna, and myocarditis. So, hmm, maybe we ought to just hold. Dr. Paul Offit, one of the very most aggressive vaccinologists and virologists, went on the record a couple of days ago and said, we should not be vaccinating young males with the Omicron vaccine. The risk-reward is not there.

I agree with that. That's not the standard of care. Standard of care was issued by the CDC, who said that 12 and above should all be vaccinated. Why? When Dr. Walensky, the head of the CDC, was asked about Dr. Offit's position, why was there a difference? Her response was staggering. Her response was, well, we had to simplify our messaging, so we're just going to keep it 12 and above to keep it simple. That is not medicine, everybody. Medicine is about making individual decisions

for the given risk reward of that given individual patient made usually, though these days it has not been so, with a physician who has the best interest of that patient in mind as he or she makes that decision. This sweeping to keep messaging simple, we might put males at some risk. That's insane. That's insane. So that's, again, another, that's, I want to be very clear that I'm not hushing vaccine. I have a somewhat nuanced approach to vaccine. Still could be wrong. There still could be higher risks than we know.

I mean, you talk to the Steve Kirsch's and the Robert Malone's and even Dr. Victory, they're seeing more risk than I am. But I tend to rely a lot on my clinical experience. I've been practicing long enough that I've seen A, the standard of care change dramatically, as I've told you, and B, things that I see clinically that doesn't fit with the so-called data. Look at the Women's Health Initiative, the WHI. Because of that, women were torn off hormones. I've never seen so much misery as the women we took off hormone therapies, hormone replacement therapy, back, I guess it was 20 years ago now,

because the Women's Health Initiative was the final answer. And we were no better than witch doctors if we kept people on hormones. Turned out that was categorically wrong. Categorically wrong, and that was the standard of care. And if I addressed that standard of care back then, I could have run afoul of AB 2098. So these are why I worry about these things. And just know that it has been my experience that my clinical impressions are more accurate than the data in everything I've seen. So when clinically I see things, I'll rely on it.

Now, it doesn't mean I couldn't be wrong next go around. It could be. But things like the risk reward for a 75-year-old plus, I'm seeing it clearly there. The things like what's happening to some 20 and 30-year-old plus, I'm seeing it clearly there. The things like what's happening to some 20 and 30-year-olds making me nervous. I've seen some bad reactions. They've all resolved. They've all been okay. But I've seen some very disturbing things, some frightening things in otherwise healthy people at very limited risk. Now, how pervasive? What's the real data? We're still trying to work. I think it's going to be another year before we really know.

And it's probably going to be not that bad. It's probably going to be not that bad. That doesn't mean there aren't people who are severely harmed by this. There will be people. When you do a treatment or a vaccine on billions of people, there will be some bad outcomes. There just will be. Susan, what's up?

Sucks. Yeah, it's awful. It's awful. But we can't let, you know, it's very much what worries me. The doctors that have seen some horrible catastrophes in COVID in young people are biased by their clinical experience much the way people that have seen horrible vaccine reactions are biased by their experience we've got to really kind of look at you got to look also at the data it's what

reinforces your clinical impressions and the data evolves and it usually gets to the right place but it doesn't always start at the right place okay let me take some calls i think lucas ficari lost both his grandparents after the booster that i've not seen old people have bad what was the what was the reaction that's what that's what yeah but he doesn't say of the booster he said shortly after the booster how old were they and what were the causes of death yeah so i'm sorry for your loss though yeah it's awful but you know you you have to remember that the average life expectancy of a male admitted to a nursing home is six months you have to remember that and in terms of years in terms of years so

hard but in terms of years of lost life what happens to a 17 year old is a different decision than what happens to an 85 year old it's just maybe it was related but we don't know i mean that's why we're questioning it now. Yeah, that's right. We want people to have consent and know what's going on. We'll see if you can see what his answer is. I can't quite see it there. All right, let me go to some calls in the meantime. This is Wheezy.

We've got Wheezy a chance to come up here. Wheezy. Wheezy, yeah. Wheezy. I heard a bloop. Maybe that was a Wheezy bloop. That's Wheezy coming up, but he's got to unmute himself. Need to do.

Hello. Hey. Hey there. What's happening? Hey, how's it going? Good. So first I just wanted to say I've been watching you since Celebrity Rehab, and I think that's really cool.

It shows a lot of longevity. I can't think of many things in my life that I can still point back from that long ago besides maybe like Pepsi or Coke. That's good to know. Thank you. That's interesting. Yeah. So I just think that's really cool. My question basically is like, I wonder if there's this bias, you know, that people have with the vaccine, you know, because I'm unvaccinated and I feel like it's much easier to convince me that the vaccines are harmful, you know, and like, you know, all those things. And I feel like- Let's examine it. Let's examine it. Let's try to break it down from a sort of a number. And if I do something wrong, please, those of you on the restream, set me straight here.

So you're how old now? I'm 33. Okay. So the probability of severe COVID needing hospitalization, let's say, is remote, particularly with Omicron, particularly with the therapeutics we have, right? Like really like way less than 1%. And the probability of death is substantially less than that, right? So it's a very, very very it's nasty i'm not gonna tell you it's not nasty but it's it's not a high risk proposition for you otherwise you're otherwise healthy right yeah definitely and i've had covid twice yeah how'd you do with it um the first time it was literally nothing i just felt really hot the whole time

um and then the second time was about a month ago. I guess it was the newer variant. And it was a little harder. I didn't feel good and I'd lost my smell and taste, but it was nothing. I was never concerned. Right. So the question is, A, what further immunity do you need? Which is a viable question. We don't know. You might be very immune for a sustained period of time, at least six months for sure, maybe a year. Then at what risk should you be vaccinated? What is that risk? And what should that number be? You're a healthy person.

At what risk should we risk making you unhealthy? Should it be a 1% vaccine adverse event rate? Should it be 1, 1 hundredth of a percent? You know, people that look at it more on the sort of 1 to 3% zone will point out that all of that's reversible too. It's for the most part not serious, which is true. This is all kind of true. So it's a really hard decision to make. I think

most physicians would sort of make that decision with you. If you were super motivated to get the vaccine, you wanted to do the best you could with immunity, you wanted to travel, you'd probably go ahead and do it and take those risks because they're small. But you're wondering, should I put myself at any added risk given how well I've done with COVID? It's a very viable question. It's a reasonable question, right? I think I'm pretty dead set that I'm not going to get it, but I was just kind of wondering what's the, like, is there a bias that I'm holding when I take in information? Yes. You know what I'm saying?

Yes, yes. Compared to somebody that's not, compared to someone that is vaccinated, if there's this, you know what I'm saying? Yes. Yes. Compared to somebody that's, that's not compared to someone that is vaccinated. If you showed them, Hey, the vaccines might be kind of dangerous. Maybe they might not listen to it as much because they got it. So they're like, Oh, I don't want to hear any of that. Correct. Or, or they are, they see, they have a perspective that that is strictly epidemiological and they're worried about, you know, large scale, you know,

spreading and what might happen in a spread. And so, yeah, yeah. that is strictly epidemiological and they're worried about large scale spreading and what might happen in a spread. And so, yeah, yeah, we all have biases. I was thinking about my own bias. I mean, I get biased by these conversations we have and I have to step outside of them and go, okay, just try to look at all the perspectives, try to read all the literature there is.

And you're doing the job. You're doing what you're supposed to do, Weezy. You're thinking clearly, and you're trying to think it through, and you're watching your bias. But we all have biases. We all do. That's just the way it is. Again, you guys raise your hand if you want to request them up here. I found out what happened to Lucas's grandparent. Okay, what happened? They both had the vaccine and had a stroke. Okay, so we don't, you know, hard to know. Hard to know. And how old they were? No. to Lucas's grandparent they both had the vaccine and had a stroke okay so

we don't you know hard to know hard to know and how old they were no I don't know that yet and we don't know

the time frame I didn't do a complete I didn't do a medical evaluation on it yeah so who knows I suck as a nurse I've always told you that I know

oh I'm aware of it but and that is and that is the that is the problem with observation. Okay, so I've told you how enthusiastic I am about my clinical experience. My clinical experience includes hundreds of cases, right? Lots and lots of cases.

You haven't heard me through most of the early part of the pandemic, I didn't talk about my clinical experience because none of us had any yet, or at least it was in isolated settings like in the hospital or whatever, or in the ER, whatever it might be. And you had some dying. It was really sad. Yeah. Yeah. It happens. Absolutely. It's a terrible illness. And particularly for certain older subsets. I mean, it's right under the bus, but. People with, and I've seen young people get Omicron with the pulmonary emboli and clots and all kinds of things.

And there are people wondering about strokes and heart attacks. But here's the thing, association, you know, temporal association is not causation. So, you know, somebody has a vaccine and then a few weeks later they die that may or may not have something to do with it.

I've not seen anything like that, nothing like that. And I have vaccinated hundreds of elderly patients, hundreds. And they have all benefited because a lot of them got COVID subsequently. And the COVID has been not that big a deal. And we've used Plaxlovid, et cetera. And they've certainly all stayed out of the hospital. But it's a question.

I'm not telling you you're wrong. I think your concerns need to be actively addressed. And we have to look at this data very, very carefully to see what is that number. In other words, had your grandparents gotten COVID, they were debilitated at advanced age. The probability of bad outcome was high. The probability of vaccine giving them bad outcome, I can tell you again just from clinical experience, is low. And if they had a bad outcome, you know, one of the things you've got to – Maybe they had a bad batch.

Here's something that we've got to all understand, and this is really hard, which is that if we have a probability – listen to me very carefully let me say let me uh let's say i say there's a three out of five chance that they i'm just making up numbers uh that they would die of covid and they get covid and do fine my numbers weren't necessarily wrong they might have been i'm not but the fact that they didn't die doesn't make my numbers wrong they were just in that 40 that didn't get it some same thing with vaccine if we say one percent of vaccine therapy and this again i'm making up numbers are likely They were just in that 40% that didn't get it. Same thing with vaccine. If we say 1% of vaccine therapy, and this again, I'm making up numbers, are likely to have an adverse event,

that means 99% are not, which means everybody's not. But somebody is, again, wasn't necessarily the wrong thing to vaccinate to put people at risk of a 1% complication rate. This is the hard part that people can't get, is how to make that risk assessment. And that 1% of adverse event in an 80-year-old generally seems to be milder and of less consequence

and definitely cause less years of life lost than the risk to a 24-year-old who would have 75 years of life lost and change the trajectory of an entire life and the adverse experiences there have been a little more concerning. So it's a complicated question. These are complicated questions. And let me keep taking some questions here. Okay. Thank you, guys. Wendy in Costa Rica Four Seasons, which is one of my favorite hotels, said,

has anyone's health or immune system improved since getting the mRNA vaccines? Where is that study? Great question. I don't know how you would measure that, right? Mine's gotten worse. We think, maybe. How would you measure that? I don't know how would you measure that?

I don't know how you'd measure that. I don't even know how you would do that study. Are you people prone to bacterial infections or would you look at skin infections or would you look at number of upper respiratory infections? I guess you could. I mean, you could look at number of upper respiratory infections in a vaccinated versus non-vaccinated group

and see who has more. That's kind of a simple study. Again, that's not a very, they know, they're going to learn much from that study. But it would be interesting. I agree with you. Let's get Shannon up here. Shannon, what's up? Hi.

Hi. How are you guys? Good. Okay. So, um, I, uh, did, I came off an airplane in, um, February of 2020. Um, and about seven days later, um, I had diarrhea, diarrhea, fever, fatigue just lasted for three weeks. I was kind of in denial at that point. You could not get tested. Um, and I know I did not get an antibody test. However, in the summer, I started to get an irregular heartbeat. And I also had, which I believe is COVID toes, just, you know, the feeling of numbness in my toes. Those were the only things that I feel that, you know, were odd, you know, that it just popped up out of nowhere.

Um, and then I, of course mentioned this to my doctor, I did get an EKG, but at that point, my heart was acting properly. So, um, my question is now I have been, um, I did get vaxxed the following year in March and then the booster 30 days later and then another booster in November. And the craziest thing is that the irregular heartbeat actually ceased in October of last year. But I believe I probably got COVID again. And there's so many layers to this, but I don't think I had the right antibodies. Let's get right to you. What is the question exactly?

The question is, how are the doctors diagnosing long COVID? I'm sorry to tell you, we don't have categorical agreement on what long COVID even is, let alone diagnostic criteria for long COVID. It's kind of a mess. I understand how frustrating that can be. Most people are looking at things like fatigue and fog, but there certainly are other things for sure. And cardiac stuff is definitely one of them.

And really the reality probably is that it's mostly the spike protein doing all this and whether it's the vaccine or the COVID itself, you're kind of getting some of the same stuff. I've seen long COVID from the vaccine. I've certainly seen long COVID from COVID. And that may be what you have. People talk about persistent spike protein

in the myocardium and all this stuff. As long as structurally the performance of your heart is okay, I want to just sort of emphasize that the body has tremendous healing abilities and generally speaking i expect stuff to heal the the question in the meantime is how much misery do you have to go through how much disability and misery and that's a very serious question uh and and, again, I would refer you to covidlonghaulers.com where Dr. Yogendra and Dr. Patterson are really working on some treatments there and have had some good outcomes. I spoke to Dr. Yogendra yesterday. I spoke to everybody yesterday. Suddenly he was on the phone all day. And he was talking about, telling me about updating me on some of the successes they're having.

So I think a good idea is to head over to there. And it's still kind of a mess, still sort of a mess there, though. So thank you, Shannon. I think it was Shannon. And let's get Dan up here as a speaker, a questioner. Dan, go ahead. Let me look at the restream while Dan is getting up here. Yes, Minnesota nurses went on strike today no brainwashed liberal dumb cunt says whoa that's somebody's name whoa um

i know i had to read it it was okay kind of funny okay you could have left off the dumb c part but okay thank you for sharing that with us that this is sure going to really make Caleb's conversation with YouTube tomorrow more comfortable. Thank you for doing that. It's real on Rumble. It's real on Rumble over there. Okay, good. Okay. How to obtain informed consent when the FDA wants 75 years to release the data.

Yeah, I know. This is why I talk to lots of different people. Informed consent is an issue in all of this, of course. It should be not so dumpsy. And that's another thing, by the way, I told Christina, the president of the medical board. I said, look, here's how I would have talked to a 24-year-old. And I told her all these kinds of concerns

and things we're bringing up today. And I said, that's how I would talk to a 24 year old. That is not standard of care. And she went, yeah, but that's good medical practice. And we're not certainly not going after anybody for good medical practice. So Dan, you can unmute your speaker there and have at it. I see your hand up. Hello. Right. So I am completely unvaccinated and completely unboosted and i have one question for you and i really hope you can answer it for me may not but let's see let's see what it is because of your profession so the question that i've got is how long did the nih use ivermectin on clinical trial patients before it was suppressed before it was suppressed well i

we've been using this medication forever on patients it's been a you know it's an anti-helminthic medication we use for worms and and and the uh the cdc has had and still has a mandate that anyone who comes into this country who is from a refugee country and they have a list of 100 countries there uh you are required to take a week of ivermectin so I'm not quite sure what you're asking well it's the reason I'm asking it is because if the bombardment that Joe Rogan faced nationally and globally for defeating his own Dan let. Dan, let me tell you something. So I talked to Joe. I talked to Joe about this very issue.

And I said, look, I told him my experience, which is that this drug doesn't really seem to do much, but your doctor did something completely outside the box, which no one commented on, which was they gave him two... Oh, crap, I'm blanking on the, I just do this once in a while, these infusions. Monoclonal.

No, no, no, no, no. The true niagen activates the same system. NAD. NAD infusions. Thank you, Susan. Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide. He gave two NAD infusions. That's crazy aggressive and completely outside the box.

And I said, and I asked Joe, how did you, how did that make you feel? He goes, that really helped me. I go, God, that is fascinating. That's a fascinating intervention that was the, was the most outside of the standard of care that anything that Joe got yet Yet because the press is preoccupied with a drug or a couple of drugs that they just learned how to pronounce, that's why they put their focus there. And that's insane. That's insane. So I am with you on your sort of, yeah, I'm striking back.

I'm with you on raising this issue. Because if you want to take issue with what Joe Rogan's doctor did, you would go, NAD infusion? That is crazy. That's not a standard of care anywhere. How did you get to that? Why did you do that? And Joe, it worked.

Have you tried it elsewhere? What's going on? We didn't even address the other thing because there's no big downside. It doesn't really work, but whatever. So I'm so tired. I'm so tired of people having opinions about, not you, sir, but the world, the press world, just because they learned how to pronounce the name of a medication. By the way, both medications I've used for years.

I worked a lot with the El Salvador Civil War. And so people were coming up with worms all the time. Those little ivermectin came in right on the heels of that and uh hydroxychloroquine i've been using susan you have a friend who's been on it for years do you know that who i can't i don't know oh she too we have two friends that have been on it for years but let's not out people's medical stuff right i'm just saying that that's how that's how common this stuff is you have two friends i guess if you have lupus it's but anyways thank you for the beach angel. Thank you for the super chat.

Oh, I didn't see that. Where was that? I'm going to go on my extern as pharmacy tech in hospital. They're allowing one with spiritual beliefs to be exempt from having to get the vaccine. Oh, that's interesting. I think she's asking us a question. I think she said, are they allowing one with spiritual beliefs? Yeah.

Oh, boy. has a question i think she said are they allowing one with spiritual abuse yeah oh boy i have talked to people who've tried to get spiritual exemptions and you literally have to oh are they sorry i can't read you literally it it exists people can get it but you literally have to document your spiritual practices and clergy and have testimonials. And have a COVID test every week or something. Including when it started and what churches you've attended. And you get ready for a four-page document. Oh, God. But people do get that.

So it's out there. Nadine, we see you there. What's going on? Hi there, Dr. Drew. I'm Nadine Ness. I'm from Canada, so not california good my husband i don't know if i'm lucky or not we do have a bit of a tyrant running the country but um i know i don't have anything regarding california but my husband's a family physician

oh good i run one of the biggest kind of against mandate group in the province. We're not against vaccine. We're just against the segregation and division. Yeah. Yeah. The mandates. I get that. And my husband came under fire when we kind of became public and grew really big, really fast because of the things that I was saying, not necessarily things he was saying. But as a medical professional, when you're speaking outside the box, do you have any

advice for doctors who start speaking outside the box on how to handle all that pressure and not letting it get to you? And how do you fight back? You can't really. You can't. You can only sort of stay safe. And you have to really follow your compass, your moral compass and your clinical compass. You have to be very clear where due north is.

And if you can't see it, check yourself. Check yourself. Qualify anything you say. Contextualize anything you say. Try to not take too... My mistake, the thing I learned more than anything else during this pandemic, is how aggression and hubris can make you sound silly. And I was really fighting against the panic at the beginning.

And I did it. I could see what was coming. And it made me angry. And everything we're talking about here made me really upset and angry. And it came out in ways that not right, not good. I learned how to, as a result of that, I learned how to never become hubristic. And that's sort of what we're trained in medicine. Never say always or never. Just don't do that. Always try to qualify things and have some equanimity in everything you do. That's it. I learned that. And even though I was right in terms of my intention and my instinct about what was happening, the form it took because of hubris was wrong. And so make sure the compass is straight on. And if you're clear and sure, do what is right, but do what you can to protect yourself, which

means getting supportive peers where you can. I'm sure you have something like the medical board, contacting them ahead of time to sort of say, okay, my intentions are good here, but I have a difference of opinion and see what you can do. Do you want to tell us what happened? So maybe I can tell you a little more specifically. Yeah, I live in Saskatchewan. The College of Physicians actually did a mandate

where every doctor in the province who weren't fully vaccinated had to disclose to their patients prior to their patients coming in. So they had to have like a big flyer in their office if they weren't fully vaccinated. And I think when I kind of spoke out, I had some videos that went viral. I had a lot of influence in the province with the premier and stuff so is are they now given that vaccine vaccinated individuals don't change the risk to the patients uh we don't think maybe if he were sick he really doesn't change the risk of the patients because once he gets sick he pulls himself out i'm sure so the there's no there's really all essentially no such thing as asymptomatic spread, and vaccinated

patients are as likely to spread as unvaccinated patients. So did you get an apology from the powers that be? No, the policies is still in place. Of course not. But the point is, and this is another lesson in how long bureaucracies take to change direction. It's insane. They can't change direction. Physicians change direction, their opinions, ideas right away. Bureaucracies, oh, my God. That's another thing I've learned during this pandemic.

So they will change. It will change. You will be vindicated. I think, you know, having that, thankfully, it's not that intrusive of a thing that this flyer has to be put up i would i would put if i were him and had strong feelings i am vaccinated but if i really was a you know absolutely clear on what i was doing i would you know fine here's my here's my flyer but it is it is have you seen have you noticed what's going on in france i know canada is very connected to france have you noticed what's going on there? No, I have not. There was a youth uprising when we were there a year ago, and it was extremely inspiring. They were in the streets every Friday and Saturday night complaining, like really

complaining somewhat violently, that they were young and told that the risk of the illness was mild, and now they were going to be mandated to put something in their body, not a foundational principle of the republic in which they lived. And they really, they were, I mean, they were exercised. This is important. Whenever I'd bring it up, they'd come out from wherever they were behind a ticket counter and go, this is important. Vive la liberté. This is a violation of basic principle of this country. And now France looks pretty reasonable to me, by the way. And France, by the way, has always relied heavily on testing

as opposed to mandates on vaccines. Good for them. They found a reasonable way through. And I don't know. Maybe there's something to be learned there to keep an eye on it. You still there, Nadine? Yeah, yeah. There were several things they did, too. Some of the things that the complaints were were bogus, that he was anti-vax or...

I know. They just go... It wasn't even true. I know. What they do here is... This is the thing. This is one of the reasons, by the way, I want to stay temperate in my approach to all this and reach out to people that disagree and try to create consensus. It's because the weirdest thing in the world is if you go, hmm, I'm not sure a 17-year-old needs a vaccine. You voted for Trump. You're an anti-vaxxer. Where did that come from? What is that? What is that? That is the most insane thing ever. And people should be ashamed of themselves for that kind of ridiculousness. So that's how the form it takes down here. So good.

Just keep explaining yourself, adjusting course. Keep that compass right in front of you all the time. Keep your head high. Keep your head high. Let it go off your shoulders. And know this, Nadine, Susan, you bear me up on this. You will get attacked from both sides, right? So I get attacked from both sides, right?

I'm called somebody that pushes the vaccine and somebody who's anti-vax. At the same time, so anybody that has a nuanced approach to anything is not somebody participating in this, frankly, borderline process that we have in these countries now, which things are all one way and all the other. That is the most primitive psychology we have as human beings, black and white thinking. It is a manifestation of personality disorders, the worst ones. So stop doing it, everybody, and start to develop more nuanced approach to the thing.

Just because somebody disagrees with you doesn't mean they're all on the other side. Susan, bear me up. Right. Right. 50-50. That's our country. 50% is against, 50% is for. But you're going to get clobbered from all sides.

It's true. Okay, so one of our- And you've got to get used to it. One of our faithful females from Facebook who, who we, we love our ladies over there had a question. I think it's Ashley telling she's, she wanted to know,

first of all, how to call in. And I want to just let everybody know, since I have y'all here on the line, we're on Twitter spaces. So when we go live, if you go to Dr. Drew's Twitter, his, his headlights up in the corner of his icon. So you just click on that and then you can listen to the show and you can also ask your question if you raise your hand.

It's like Clubhouse, but it's free. Yeah. You don't have to be invited. But Ashley's question was she wanted to know if she should get every breast lump checked even if the last one was benign. Well, you know know you can have polycystic breasts you can have multi you can be a cyst former and there's different versions of that the biggest problem with the multiple cyst formation is it's hard to feel tumors it's hard to feel it's it can be difficult and you certainly will not be able to do that so the the lumpy breast problem is sort of a diagnostic issue and the way i normally have people deal with that is first

of all regular checkups by somebody who knows that what it feels like to find a tumor and all that and you might do more again depending on your family history and that kind of thing you might do more than the usual mammographic screening. You might do some ultrasounds on top of that or what's called a SINE ultrasound. But it's really about staying vigilant. It's not about you reacting to every cyst you feel. Don't do that. And by the way, the tender ones,

the ones that bother you, tend to be less likely to be the problem ones. So it's the little hard ones that are hard to find that that are the issue so yeah just make sure a physician is monitoring you very very carefully and you can easily stay on top of it that's a good question um i am sort of running out of steam here guys let me um see what you guys also i want to let everybody know on these platforms that if you go to the bio or the the blurb that we put up above the video there's always a link there to the twitter spaces or other platforms say that again some people so like you know when caleb puts together this beautiful bio like or informative blurb at the beginning of every video, and the link should be in there.

So if you just go to the Facebook and find it, you can click right through to the Twitter spaces. Okay. They're getting very cantankerous over on the Rumble Rant. That's my rumblers. Oh, shoot. I lost. Oh, there it is. What's going on over there? I was of the Dead. Oh, shoot. I lost. Oh, there it is.

What's going on over there? It's just I'm having trouble following it, actually. I can't tell. Yeah, well, you only see the bad ones. Look at all the good ones. I really can't even follow it. I'm trying to understand what their issue is. I know.

They love to rumble among themselves. Okay, let me get John up here. John, go ahead. John. John. He's there. Hey drew how's it going what's going on man what's up hey uh first time long time been listening since the uh old uh the uh 90s love life wow way back yeah yeah great to talk to you um kind of dovetailing off of the COVID stuff, my fiancee was diagnosed with for four hours doing all sorts of questions and sheets and seeing five different doctors. And long story short, what's hitting her the most is chronic fatigue.

Yeah, that's the big one. That's the big one. Yeah. Well, I guess my question is, they gave us some tips, but do you have anything to add to what she can do to shake that? Because I know it's kind of, my mom suffers from it too, and she had the Epstein-Barr virus in the 80s. That's how she thinks she got it. But I just want to kind of pick your brain out what you think we could do to maybe alleviate that with maybe. Yes. You know, I had it bad for several months. And for me, this is my experience, fluvoxamine worked amazingly. Now I've since prescribed it a number of times and have not really seen that good a result in other people. Certainly nothing like what I experienced, but that is one possibility.

I know that Dr. Yogendra over at the COVID Long Haulers organization are using a lot of Miravirac, but they don't have data yet to substantiate that. I also know that people are beginning to try Molnupiravir and Paxlovid also in Long Haulers. I don't have any off the top of my head knowledge of where those studies are being done, but I know that's being talked about. So those are really kind of the big three. Also, for a while, they were using statins.

I think they were using statin, like Pravastatin, and having good results with that, strangely. So that's the stuff. And in terms of order of safety, I mean fluvoxamine is such a safe medicine it doesn't do anything i i had i wasn't even aware i was taking it all i knew is that i had more energy in my ring and my ear stopped uh like within 30 minutes of the first dose it was very really quite striking and it's funny i had to do a television program um when I was in the middle of this long haul stuff. It was sort of the tail end of it.

It was after I kept trying to stop the fluvoxamine. And my co-host on the Teen Mom thing looked at me and went, you are not right. You're sinking. And I thought, oh, I got to take the fluvoxamine. And it helped. Write that again. So how would we go about even, because this kind of ties into the whole BS going on. Sometimes it's tough to bring this stuff up because, oh, you must be listening to those wacky crazies online that are trying to prescribe shit.

Aside from medication, is there anything that she can do also? They gave her some natural tips of trying to work up. I mean, long story short, she was an avid exerciser a couple of years before this, doing tons of Pilates, lots of working out. And it's just she can't do that stuff anymore. It just knocks her out. Even doing some bigger events, like if we go for, you know, do a little exercise and then we got to go to a family event or something like that, it just sometimes wipes her out the next day. It comes out of nowhere. I know it happened to me. Because or something like that. It just sometimes wipes her out the next day. It comes out of nowhere. I know it happened to me. It happened.

Because she feels totally normal. She feels totally normal when doing the activity and then wipes you out the next day. Well, people that are, how long ago did this start? Well, she had the COVID in last year, February. And then not long after was when she just noticed I don't have the stamina I used to. So it's been like six, seven months, something like that. That's crazy. No, no, no, no.

A year, a year and a half. A year and a half. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, boy. That's real. Yeah. Yeah, it's very real.

I dealt with a lot of chronic Epstein-Barr back in the day and attending to sleep, making sure sleep hygiene is proper. And, again, sometimes that's medication too. And exercising again, you know, forcing the issue, but finding some sort of happy medium where the day isn't ended because of the exercise you try to do. I don't have, I've not seen a lot of, you know, there are also, you know, there was, do you remember the beginning of all this? There was a lot of emphasis on the autonomic nervous system being affected by COVID. And there was a lot of breathing exercises being done. I don't know one breathing over another, whether you'd go with Wim Hof or go with some sort of yoga-type breathing.

But I think breathing for a long time was the focus of a lot of this treatment, so you can always try that. Yeah, that's good. So is this just kind of like, I mean, it sounds like the way COVID and the way the spike protein is still hanging around the body that's affecting the nervous system and the nerves, really? Is that what it is? That is the current theory, or triggering some immune thing. I mean, again, the COVID long haulers have found these persistent monocyte spike proteins, which are monocytes that are supposed to go through a normal life cycle and die. They aren't dying for some reason.

And the persistence of the spike protein is what's causing that for some reason. Yeah, the other thing I forgot to add was that her taste and smell is maybe 50%. And it's sometimes non-existent on one day. And sometimes she'll say, hey, I smelled this or whatever. So her taste and smell has maybe 50% and it's sometimes non-existent on one day. And sometimes she'll say, Hey, I smelled this or whatever it's. So her taste and smell has been going back and forth between almost nothing and kind of normal for the last year. And if, if my experience is any of any use,

I also, you know, started working my brain in certain ways, learning languages, and I was exercising and eventually I kind of broke through. Um, You know, I would talk to your, somebody's got to listen to you out there about the possibility of at least something simple like fluvoxamine. It's just such a simple intervention, you know, 50 milligrams or 100 milligrams. I wish Dr. Yeo wasn't so busy. I'd send people over to covidlonghaulers.com, but I think they're overwhelmed. They're overwhelmed. Because I texted him because I want to know how, um, our buddy, uh, Dave Navarro is doing.

And cause you know, cause Joe texted me and asked me, but, um, but nobody responded. So I'm sure that's all personal, you know, it's all,

I know, but I think there, no, I asked, I asked Dave how he's doing, but, um, he's just,

they're so overwhelmed because so many people have it. It's just ridiculous. I want to have him back on the show because maybe we can dive into it and help more people. Yeah, we'll get Jogender back? Yeah, I already said that. Okay, good. He's also an anesthesiologist.

Right, he's also working. Although mostly I talked to him yesterday, most of his time is spent doing this stuff now. So here's the deal. I want to wrap this up. We are going to talk to another significant figure on Wednesday. It's going to be Dr. Harvey Reich. I think it's pronounced the name.

He is an epidemiologist, and I am not, and so I'm anxious to get some of his wisdom and see what he has to tell us. There he is, Dr. Harvey Reich. Dr. Victor, of course, will be here with me on that. We will also be in here tomorrow. Is that correct? Yes, we'll be in here tomorrow.

Yes, doing calls again. And all right, we'll do more of this tomorrow. Traveling. You're going out of town Thursday, Friday, so it's going to be an early week. Correct. Right. We're going to end it on Wednesday. You're going to go do Tim Pool.

Yeah, Tim Pool. And I don't know what to expect. He wants to know about being censored, what it feels like. I am willing to do podcasts on any side of the spectrum. I just keep getting invited in a certain direction. I am a moderate. I'm right in the middle of everything. And so I can go hang out with both sides. I have no problem with that. The extremes on both sides are what I have issue with. Then, then, even then I would chat with people and I would sit and talk with them, but those are the people that are causing the problem. The rest of us are kind of hanging out in the middle. Uh, let me look quickly at the, um, somebody saying we

need more debate. Always NAC, the N-Astylcysteine is great for a lot of things. Deb, I agree with that. I take it every day. Let's see. Thanks, Adrienne Susan. You bet, Wendy. Thank you. I got wrong.

Long COVID, I think you mean. Wendy in Costa Rica, four seasons. She said she was with the raccoon, feeding the raccoon. Yeah. So, all right, let's tell that story real quick. So we were at dinner at the steakhouse there at that restaurant. Oh, what new mRNA paper, Caleb? I don't know what you're talking about.

I'll tell the story while you... I had emailed it to you and I didn't know for sure if you were going to talk about it tomorrow. There was possibly a preprint that came up, I think it's pronounced Elsevier, about serious adverse events of special interest following mRNA randomized trials in adults. I believe it's being published on the 22nd of September, but I didn't know if you saw it. That's not the one. I can show you this one. There was one that was just,

well, yeah, send it to me again. There it is. I'll send it to you, yeah. Special interest, yeah, let's do it. Let's check it out. I'll read it carefully and we'll talk about it tomorrow. But we were sitting having dinner and all of a sudden this like a monster walked up to us it looked like man bear

pig right out of it was a raccoon that looked that had a long tail look like a skinny tail like a look up cat look up caleb uh raccoon pointy nose costa rica and it looked like it looked like our dog racks it had kind of a cute face like racks and but it had this like i looked like a raccoon slash yes is it just a large costa rica raccoon essentially essentially it's i don't know what it's called i called it man bear pig they apparently are all over the place um they're so cute but we had a very very strange there it is uh no no no no no no no kind of like the one on the top left much bigger much bigger but it had a really long snout like a slough yeah it had like a really long snout like a like an anteater almost yes yeah it was cute so um any event we uh got it we, uh, got it. We went, uh,

oh yeah, that's it. That middle one. Yeah. If you ever want a nice vacation, go to the four seasons in Costa Rica. It's pretty fucking amazing. That's it.

We were there for two days. That's a small one. They are. They get big. Yeah. That's him. But imagine that about size of a great Dane. That's sort of what we were.

The tail. And they were just sitting there eating the fruit. Everybody was throwing them fruit. And to get down to that particular restaurant, we got in a van to drive down there. And we met a couple in there from Travers, Michigan. They took their hand as Michiganites do and said, oh, Travers.

And we started talking about what we were all doing down there and stuff. And then we went to dinner, didn't think anything of it. The next night was cast out. Two nights later, I had to go to Austin, Texas. I was cast out of the hotel that I was supposed to be at because they gave my room away. I ended up in another hotel.

It's now 1230 in the morning, and I walk into the lobby at this new hotel that I wasn't even supposed to be at, and this man walks up to me and goes, I was in a van with you two nights ago in Costa Rica. And of course, you didn't get his information. I'm like, that was kismet. You're supposed to get each other's info. Although he could find us anywhere.

But I know. I wasn't with him. So thank you, John. Thank you, everybody. I liked his wife, though. They wanted to come to dinner with us remember yes they went down to the marina yeah uh we'll be back again tomorrow those of you i did not get to today i apologize i'll get you tomorrow and for more questions and we'll

talk about wendy in costa rica first thing says posoto solo is what the waiters called it because he's he's all alone oh they know the very one posoto solo yeah that's what there is apparently one that was cast out by the community and they sort of feed them there at the steakhouse. Oh my God, that's too funny. Posoto Solo. So translate that for us, somebody. I don't know what Posoto means.

All right. Is that possum? I don't know. I'm posting a photo of it. Solo means alone. What's that? Say it again. I'm posting a photo of it at drdrew.com. that say it again i'm posting a photo of it

drdrew.com well all the stuff that you discussed today as usual next to camden right exactly that photo i've been writing it camden i should photo for the podcast listeners they can see the photos and stuff at drdrew. So 912-2022. Great. Thank you all. We'll see you tomorrow at three o'clock. Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Caleb Nation and Susan Pinsky. As a reminder, the discussions here are not a substitute for medical care, diagnosis, or treatment.

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