Dhru Purohit Show - Three Super Crazy Facts about Big Pharma

Episode Date: March 28, 2022

This episode is brought to you by Pendulum and Birch. I’m currently reading a book called Sickening. It’s a no-holds-barred exposé on the lies and deceptions of Big Pharma. In the book Dr. John Abramson, a physician, Harvard faculty member, and the world’s most notable expert on the drug industry’s deceptive tactics, reveals how the financial interests of Big Pharma have become the main factor that influences the way we practice medicine. Okay, so what? We all know that Big Pharma doesn’t always play by the rules and is primarily driven by profit. What’s new? Well, these three mind-blowing facts that I’m about to share are something that most people—including your family doctor—have no idea about. Links * Try This: Three Super Crazy Facts about Big Pharma: https://dhrupurohit.com/try-this-three-super-crazy-facts-about-big-pharma/ * Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It: https://www.amazon.com/Sickening-Pharma-American-Health-Repair/dp/1328957810/ * Newsletter: https://dhrupurohit.com/newsletter/ Sponsors: This episode is brought to you by Pendulum and Birch. This episode is brought to you by Pendulum: Pendulum is the first company to figure out how to harness the amazing benefits of Akkermansia in a probiotic capsule. To receive 20% off your first purchase of Pendulum’s Akkermansia probiotic supplement, go to Pendulumlife.com and use code DHRU20. I recently upgraded to a Birch mattress by Helix. The Birch is made right here in the US, out of 4 non-toxic, natural materials: organic latex, organic cotton, New Zealand wool, and American steel springs. If you’re looking for a new mattress, I highly recommend checking out the Birch. Right now they are giving my community $200 off all mattresses, plus 2 free eco-rest pillows. Just head over to https://birchliving.com/dhru. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi everyone, Drew Prode here. Today we're talking about three super crazy facts about big pharma. When I say super crazy, I mean actually like freaking nuts. Some of these facts are going to blow your mind. And by the way, your own doctor may not know that your doctor, well-intentioned doctor, who's there for you, looking out for you. They might not even know or have heard of these facts, which is why we're doing this episode.

we got to spread the word and make sure that the average person who's listening and is trying to live a healthier life. And by the way, drugs can be life-saving. Drugs are life-saving. Thank the Lord for all the incredible drugs that are out there like insulin and so many others that people depend on. And our pharmaceutical industry, particularly in America because of how we do things over here, we'll get to that in a second, has gotten,

out of control, out of check. And it's been that way for a while. And there's somebody that's speaking up about it, and it's Dr. John Abramson. A little bit about Dr. John Abramson. Before we break down these facts, he's a physician, a family physician. He's a member of Harvard's faculty

and a guest lecturer, and he's the world's most notable expert on the drug industry's deceptive tactics. And in this book, Sickening, where I pulled three, three really incredible facts. You can find the book, if you want to read it inside of the show notes, the link to it to order it on Amazon. He reveals how the financial interest of Big Pharma have become the main factor that influences the way that we truly practice medicine

in the United States. Again, there are fantastic doctors that are out there. My family members are many of those individuals that are out there. There are drug companies creating life-saving products that are out there, and those can all be true, and there's another layer. And that other layer is that financial interest of the drug companies are changing how we practice medicine by prioritizing profits. And by the way, that's bankrupting our country. And the thing about it is, okay, so a lot of people say, okay, so what? We know that. We all know that big farmer doesn't always play by the rules and isn't always primarily driven by good merit and it's okay sometimes companies are going to be driven by profit so what's new well the first mind-blowing fact that i want to

go into that i'm about to share is something that most people even if they understand that pharmaceutical companies are driven by profit and they should be right i'm an entrepreneur i run companies and you know the goal is to make a profit and hopefully you want to look after your customers as well too at least that's what I try to do as well. But this first fact that I'm going to break down is, again, something that even your own family doctor may not know about. Let me quote from Dr. Abramson's book, Sickening. Quote, one of the best kept secrets in all of health care,

understood by a few doctors, is that peer reviewers, medical journal editors, and the guideline writers who are assumed to be performing due diligence to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the data reported from a company's sponsored studies, aka clinical trials, here's the key, do not have, do not have access to the real data from these trials.

And John Abramson continues, he says, the published reports that doctors accept as fully vetted, scientific evidence can be more accurately described as, unverified data summaries prepared largely by or for the sponsoring drug companies. I don't know if you guys heard that. But what Dr. Abramson is basically saying here is that when we see these studies or our family physician, again, great doctors that are out there, they're trying to figure

out how to do right by their patients. They're reading the journals. They're getting education on the clinical trials that are out there. Dr. Abramson is saying that the peer reviewers, you've heard that phrase before, right, peer-reviewed study. Those peer-reviewed studies should be reviewed by colleagues, which include medical journal editors, guideline writers, and other doctors. Those are all part of the peer reviewers. The peer reviewers do not have access to the real data.

from these trials. They only have access to the unverified data summaries prepared by the drug companies or the groups that they end up hiring to put these trials together. So essentially, the people who are supposed to be protecting us, the editors, the peer reviewers, and the journals don't actually have access to the real data from the pharmaceutical clinical trials. Like, is that not mind-blowing? Is that not like crazy? Now, what?

We're just supposed to take the drug company's word for it? Now, before we go further down this rabbit hole, let's first understand this. How could that possibly be? Well, the drug companies say that the real data, the source data, aka the raw data from their clinical trials, is considered intellectual property.

And it might have trade secrets in there, There could be other drug derivatives that could be extracted from those clinical trials. So their primary thing is they're trying to keep that private. But the fact that the medical journal editors can't see it, the guideline writers can't see it, the fellow peer reviewers can't see it, that leaves so much room for misrepresenting a study and what it actually meant. And in fact, that is often what happens. And in the book, Dr. John Abramson starts off with this super crazy fact because he's trying to set the stage and have everybody understand how do we have situations like Vioxx end up happening.

Do you know about Vioxx? Let me tell you a little bit about Vioxx. But before we do, a quick word from today's sponsor, Pendulum. I want to talk to you about a groundbreaking flagship bacterial strain that's a. been linked in thousands of scientific publications from everything from weight loss and better blood sugar control to lowering overall levels of inflammation. So what's this strain called? It's called Acrimancia and it's made by the company Pendulum. So why the heck do we want acrimandcia and what does it do for our overall gut health and microbiome? So Acromansia feeds on our intestinal

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All you have to do is go to their website, pendulumlife.com. That's pendulum, P-E-L-U-L-U-M-L-L-E-D-E-D-O-E-com, and use the code Drew-20, D-H-R-U-20 for 20% off your first purchase. Viox was a drug that came out in the late 90s by Merck & Co, pharmaceutical company, and it was approved for the use of treating acute pain that people had, especially from things like osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis,

and other things like that. And the whole idea around it, from my understanding and recollection, was that Vioxx was a better option or was marked as such around acute pain because it didn't give as strong of gastrointestinal reactions and things like ulcers. But it turned out that in the clinical trials, and Dr. Abramson breaks this down inside of his book, The Sickening, great book, by the way. If you have an open-minded doctor, it's a great gift for them to really understand how deep the deception runs that it's considered as normal. and most people do not understand that the peer reviewers don't have access to this raw data.

Anyways, going back to Vioxx is it was kept on the market for many years and then finally in September of 2004, it turned out that Merck voluntarily withdrew the product from the market because of its risk of heart attack and stroke. And by the way, since May 1999, when the drug first came out, thousands of people. had died. Thousands and thousands of people had died from heart attack and stroke that was

directly connected to the drug. But here's the crazy part. In the clinical trials, and again, Dr. Abramson breaks this down in the book, in the clinical trials, they knew, they actually knew that there was a subset of people that showed that they had more likely to develop an increased risk for heart attack or stroke. But when the trials were published, and one of them was in the New England Journal of Medicine, they presented the data on Vioxx in a way that minimized and literally left out the increased events of cardiovascular disease and heart attacks that were associated with the drug. Now, the story is very complex and there's a lot of layers to it, but ultimately it was a group of pharmacist and a doctor,

and also Dr. John Abramson himself was involved in this whole process and ended up writing about it, and then ended up becoming an expert witness in their trial that ended up taking Merck and their presentation of the data to task, and it resulted in one of the largest finds in the history of the pharmaceutical industry on Merck for the misrepresentation and the false presentation of the data that literally got buried. Now, for this misrepresentation, Merck and Co. agreed to pay $321 million

as a criminal fine for improperly marketing Vioxx as a painkiller that didn't have all these side effects that were led to increased risk of heart attack and stroke. And just to reiterate, when I said thousands and thousands of people, I literally meant it. The estimations are between 40 and 60,000 people. About the same amount of people, you know, there was 58,000 people that died in the Vietnam War,

U.S. military, 58,000 people. And that's the same amount around the estimate. They don't know exactly, but it's about 40 to 60,000 people, died from taking Vioxx. That's the magnitude of what this trickery and deception led to. in the case of Vioxx. Now in his book, Dr. Abramson isn't just taking Merck and co to task. He's also, and he got punished for doing this by the dean of Harvard, I believe at the time.

I think the story goes in the book. He's also taking the New England Journal of Medicine to task as well, because there was many papers that came in letting the New England Journal of Medicine know that there's no way that the risk of heart attack and stroke could be as low as it was as they were representing. And a lot of those papers weren't published, and their answer was that they didn't have a lot of room to publish all the papers

that were questioning their summary of the data, but they really didn't allow for an open conversation to happen. And to the New England Journal of Medicine's Defense, they didn't have access to the full data. So they were kind of reliant on the summary from Merck & Co. And that gets to the crux of the book by Dr. Abramson. Before we get into fact number two and number three, is his whole message here is that if our peer reviewers themselves don't have access to the data, sometimes they're even intimidated to question the drug company's presentation of their own data and results. They just have to take the drug company's word for it.

So if they don't have access to it and they're having a hard time in some instances, Viox being a big example of that, but there's many other examples. is it a fair playing field? Imagine you're playing sports. This was the analogy that Dr. John Abrasen shared when I interviewed him for the podcast. He said, imagine you're playing a sport like football. And there's team A, which is the public. And there's team B, which is the drug companies.

And traditionally there would be referees to make sure the sport is fair. But imagine that there were no referees or even worse. Imagine that there's the perception of referees, but the referees actually work for Team B, the drug companies. That's how wild and crazy this whole world is. And another thing that was talked about inside of the book, before we get to fact number two and number three, is that there was a point in time

where the journals, rather, excuse me, tried to all get together and say, this needs to change. They published an open letter in September of 2001. 2001, think to back then. That's almost 22. years ago, 20 years ago. And in 2001, they published a letter, a joint letter, joint consortium letter of a lot of the major journals saying that we need to change how the industry works. We need to change how the drug companies present data and how much data is given.

And they really took the drug companies to task and said that we need to change how this happens. Unfortunately, a few weeks later, September 11th happened. And the world changed and was immediately focused on terrorism. And that paper never really got any attention or the credit that it deserved. And everybody just went on business as normal. And that's why we're in this big, fat mess that we're in. All right. Now, that fact set the stage.

Now, let's go a little bit further when it comes to these two other crazy facts that we have from Dr. John Abrams's book, The Sickening. Fact number two. one of the ways that pharmaceutical companies trick doctors into recommending new and expensive drugs is by running very large studies that are looking for even the tiniest of improvements, the tiniest improvements. And as long as they can show, the drug companies, that is, as long as they can show some statistical significance, the FDA will generally let them say what they want to say,

even if their drug doesn't really make us. any healthier compared to cheaper options that might already be available on the market, like generic drugs. Here's a great story about an expensive diabetes drug called Trulicity from Dr. Abramsub's book. So I quote from the book, a recent ad for Trulicity, a non-insulin injectable drug to treat type 2 diabetes discussed in his book in a previous chapter provides an excellent example. Ad makes three claims. Claim number one, most people taking Trulicity reached an hemoglobin A1C under 7%.

But the FDA approved label shows that glucose control is no better than that achieved with metformin, another drug that's on the market that already exists. And Trulicity cost as much as 170 times more than metformin. Trulicity may help you lose up to 10 pounds. That's the second claim that's there. But the FDA approved label shows weight loss is no greater with trulicity than with metformin. This is now me talking, taking a step out of Dr. Abramson's book. Can you start to see what's happening now that these trials are largely being run as a marketing promotion?

They're less so research-enabled trials that are trying to better the public, but they're really being run to see how we can push more expensive drugs in a fancier way on the American public. All right. Now, back to the book. And number three, trulicity may also help you lower your risk of cardiovascular events. But as Dr. John Abramson is saying inside of the book, this doesn't inform viewers that the FDA-approved labels show the benefit is so, small that 99.7%, 99.7%, almost 100% of the people treated with trulicity each year will not

receive this benefit. Ninety-nine percent of the people treated with trulicity each year will not receive the benefit benefit. None of the claims in the trulicity ad are false, but all are misleading. They create an exaggerated appearance of superiority for the expense. new drug. Now, this is coming back to me. And our doctors, who of course have the best intentions are working so hard, really want to make a difference, the vast majority, they see these ads and they read the clinical trials and the guidelines that often follow these drugs and they think they're doing right by their patients by recommending expensive treatment options that are supposedly better for them, but they often aren't. And you can't talk about the drug

companies without talking about advertising. I believe it's America and New Zealand are the only two countries that allow drug companies to advertise directly to patients on TV. And drug companies started being able to do that, I believe in the late 70s, early 80s. And since that time, prescribing has completely changed. People, the consumer, the average person who's just trying to live a healthy life, is watching the Super Bowl, is watching the Oscars, is watching whatever show they're watching the news and is constantly being bombarded by all these ads by pharmaceutical companies and is going to their doctor. Why? Because the ads literally say, ask your doctor if trulicity is a right fit for you. Their doctor is busy as heck, doesn't have the time to read all these things and basically

gets these cheat sheet notes, maybe sometimes the attachment of the clinical trial, which by the way is published in these journals, which by the way don't have access to the raw data and don't know and aren't necessarily there to comment because they're being often sponsored by the drug companies or have deep ties in relationships with them. The drug companies are only going to publish these trials in journals that are going to be favorable to them. So if there's not a direct sponsorship,

there's an indirect sponsorship. And by the way, the FDA, a huge percentage of their budget comes from company fees. I think it's almost 40% of the entire FDA budget It comes from pharmaceutical company fees that are being paid for the regulation of that same industry. No wonder it's often a revolving door of you work at the FDA for a little while and then what's the next step? You go on to the for-profit market. No shade against that.

People have to make money. But it's this revolving door between the FDA and the drug companies that are out there. So now the plot thickens even further and sets us up for our third super crazy fact about. Big Farmer that we're pulling from Dr. Abramson's book, which by the way, link of the show notes, please support Dr. Abramson in his work. He's a fantastic guy and just really appreciated meeting him. And, you know, the fact that he is graduate, I believe, of Dartmouth and Harvard, and he's a guest lecturer. He's not a full-time professor, but he's a guest lecturer. He's on the faculty of Harvard. It takes somebody like him, you know, that looks the right way and sounds the right way and has

the right pedigree to be able to criticize the pharmaceutical industry and also offer specific thoughts on how we can change the game, which I'll be sharing a little bit more, and Dr. Abramson goes deeper into his book. Now, before we go into this next super crazy fact about Big Pharma, a quick word from our sponsor, Birch by Helix. So the other day, I was with a doctor who specializes in environmental toxins, and they told me that the most toxic item in our home is actually our mattress. I'm sure many of you were shocked to hear that as I was. This is especially scary when the average person spends more than 26 years of their life sleeping. We spend so much time in bed, but it's crazy that we're more likely to splurge on an expensive

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Have you ever got a new mattress and you open it up and it smells like crap? That's called off-gassing. The birch mattress doesn't do that. So now I can sleep a lot. better knowing that I'm not exposing myself to harmful chemicals day in and day out. And the best part is, this mattress is crazy comfortable. You don't have to give up comfort when you choose the non-toxic option. I've honestly never slept better. So if you're looking for a new mattress, I highly recommend checking out the birch. Right now, they're giving my community $200 off all mattresses plus two eco reset pillows. Just head over to birchliving.com. slash Drew. Again, that's $200 off and two free eco-reset pillows at Birch, B-I-R-C-H-L-L-I-N-G-G-com,

slash Drew, spelled differently, D-H-R-U. If you're worried about trying a new mattress, by the way, they have a 25-year warranty and you can try it risk-free for 100 nights. Birch also ships directly to your door for free with no contact required, and they'll pick it up for free if you don't love it. Check out the Birch mattress today by Helix. Back to our episode and the third super crazy fact about Big Pharma. Now, one of the questions that's being left out of the conversation when it comes to pharmaceutical research is, how does this drug intervention compare to lifestyle recommendations? because the FDA doesn't require drug companies to explore this question, I understand it would be

expensive and often tough to do. Many doctors walk away with the notion that drug intervention is often the best option and that soft, quote unquote, soft interventions like eating healthy and exercises do not work. That's the impression that doctors are left with from these clinical trials and research that drug companies do. Many doctors also develop the false belief that patients have zero interest. Again, this is a false belief, but many doctors have it. Many doctors develop the false belief that patients have zero interest in doing the hard work and are only interested in quick fixes. But this may not be the case, according to Dr. Abramson. I'm going to quote from his book again, the definitive study showing how best to

reduce the incidences of diabetes was done in the 1990s. The diabetes prevention program research group publicly, rather than commercially funded, randomly assigned more than 3,000 people at high risk of developing diabetes to one of three groups. The first one was a standard lifestyle recommendations plus placebo. The next one was standard lifestyle recommendations plus metformin, a blood sugar lowering medication. Number three, or intensive counseling about healthy diet exercise and behavior modification plus placebo. The primary outcome was the difference in the percentage of people who developed diabetes

in each group after three years. The study was highly unusual that its goal was to determine the best way, the best way to reduce the risk of diabetes instead of just trying to prove the efficacy of a particular drug, which by the way, because this trial, this is Drew talking, I'm stepping out of his book for a second, because this research was done by the Diabetes Prevention Program Research Group and it was publicly funded, again, there's a role for government out there. That's why they were even willing to answer this question in the first place. This is often why sometimes when people say, well, what's the research around integrative medicine and functional medicine and other things?

These research studies are hard. They're tough. They're expensive to do. It's why we rely on the NIH to really fund these things. and many people would argue that have been on the podcast that there's not enough funding around these areas. Okay, jumping back into the book. So the study was highly unusual

that its goal was determined the best way to decrease the risk of diabetes instead of just trying to prove the efficacy of a particular drug. It's unusual design tested the widely held belief that people can't be helped to adopt and sustain lifestyle habits. Indeed, the particular, all of whom had pre-diabetes and two-thirds of whom were obese would have been expected.

They would have been expected because they were obese and had pre-diabetes to have significant difficulty with making lasting lifestyle changes. Continuing to quote from the book, the results were stunning. First, they resoundingly debunk the conventional wisdom that people won't change their habits and that physicians' efforts to get them to do so are a way. waste of time. And at the end of three years, the people assigned to the intensive lifestyle modification group had lost an average of 12 pounds and significantly increased their physical exercise compared to the two other groups. Wild. That's super wild. This is from the intense

lifestyle modification group, just for everybody who was following along. Now, back to the quote. And second, the study showed that by far the best way to prevent diabetes is through positive lifestyle change. Intensive counseling on lifestyle modification reduced the risk of developing diabetes by 58% compared to the placebo group and by 39% compared to the group treated with metformin. Dr. Abrison continues by sharing. Looked at another way, the lifestyle modification program delayed diabetes by an average of 11 years in this high risk population and the cost of each year of healthy life gain was only $1,100. So the cost of implementing this healthy lifestyle program was only $1,100. Back to the quote, compared to what other therapeutic inventions

typically cost in America to provide a year of healthy life, those are up to $150,000 or more for each year gain. The cost of the health benefit, the cost of the health benefit, rather, of intensive lifestyle modification is an enormous bargain, 1,100 compared to a typical amount of $150,000 or more a year. Imagine the savings. This is mean now talking. Imagine the savings that could be passed on to the American public. By the way, did you know? A lot of people don't know this. The number one cause of bankruptcy in America is what? Medical bills. Medical bills is the number one cause of bankruptcy in America. Not in other countries. Other countries have universal health care. And many people also don't know this for the amount that we spend here

in America on health care, which is more than any other country in the world, some countries by fivefold, we are ranked like somewhere around like 33 in outcomes. So we're the number one spender, but we're not even close to being in the top 10 or 20 for the best outcomes of actually making people healthier. And going back to this third fact that I had just shared, what a powerful reminder that not only are patients motivated when the right program is offered to them, but lifestyle modifications in many cases significantly outperform pharmaceutical interventions. And they can be cheaper too. So if you ever hear somebody saying the drug of X, Y, and Z gave this result, okay, let's hope that, you know, that's correct based on the clinical trial and that the peer

reviewers have enough information to validate that and see that that's true. Again, major trickery and fraud, outright fraud, which happened in the case of Vioxx is, again, super rare, right? It's very rare. It's rarer, rather, I should say. But light-level trickery. as we shared in fact number two, where the companies are touting something as being a better option, but not telling you that there's cheaper options that are on the market. That happens quite a bit. It happens in cancer drugs a lot. Happens in cancer drugs a lot. There was a cancer drug being offered to my mom. I'm not going to name the drug by name. My mom about 15 years ago was diagnosed with breast cancer, 13, 15 years ago. And luckily, she's doing well. She's amazing.

We put an incredible team together. One of the people on her team was a doctor. He's one of the doctors that I recommend, well, let me just clarify that. He's a PhD. He's not a physician. He's a PhD. His name is Ralph Moss, and he's a researcher on all things cancer. And he's written a few books that go into the trickery of the cancer industry and how expensive drugs that are super toxic are being recommended to cancer patients that barely, barely have any improvements on their health. Not all cancer drugs, just some. Some very, very expensive drugs. And he outlines a lot of them on his website.

He has a fantastic website called Cancer Decisions.org. And I was very luckily. We booked him for a consultation. It's a little pricey at the time. I think it was $400 to $400. I think it's now it's like $700 to $800. But I was very lucky that we could do that. And I know not everybody has the means to do that.

He has reports on his website too, some free, some books, other things like that. But definitely check them out. And we put together a plan with my mom's oncologist, as well as my mom's functional medicine doctor, Dr. Liz Boehm, who's also a cancer survivor. She's at the Ultra Wellness Center, a clinic that I am a partner at in Lenox, Massachusetts, started by Dr. Mark Hyman. And with his help, we understood and were able to navigate

by looking at the trials and all the data what drugs would give her the most impact and the biggest bang for the buck and what drugs would barely improve her life at all, but would significantly, would barely improve her likelihood of beating cancer, but would significantly take a toll on her immune system and maybe have other sorts of side effects

that would make her whole situation and her battle with breast cancer worse to begin with. And again, my point is that I had the resources. I knew the people to contact, but a lot of people don't. And so we need the help of the government to get more involved. And they're not going to do it if we don't speak up and spread the word as consumers

who, again, are trying to do our best. And even if you're not on a prescription drug, right? At the moment right now, I don't take any prescription drugs. Knock on wood, right? And my hope is that that'll continue that way with my lifestyle, et cetera, other stuff. But I wouldn't hesitate to take a drug if I felt that it was the right fit. And again, in functional medicine, you know, they focus on lifestyle factors first because those things are super upstream. And then if you need to bring in a drug and there's a lot of great ones that are on the market that help with different aspects. And it looks like there's a lot of new ones that are coming on the market that have less side effects and could play a role in

longevity and other stuff. But if you need to take a drug, you take a drug, right? So there's many people that are here that are listening today that may not even be taking a prescription medication, but you have a family member who does. Or you know somebody. You know somebody who does. And maybe that person isn't a person who's going to dive deep into the world of health. And they kind of need us to be their advocates to spread the word. Just even by sharing this podcast with one other person. That's one way. Or by supporting Dr. Abramson's book and by it link in the show notes that's one way that you could be a part of the solution and that pressure on the journals that pressure and that education that we put out there and getting to the government

will slowly start to build up and then we'll start practicing medicine in a different way it's an uphill battle i mean the pharmaceutical industry is one of the biggest lobbyers in america and they have both republicans and democrats and independents in their pocket right so i'm not saying this is going to be easy battle, but we have to be a part of the solution if we want things to change. You know, I'm not going to lie. I was a little pissed off reading Dr. Abramson's book, but I think it's okay to get a little pissed off as long as that energy turns into positive action. You know, what would the world look like if our society demanded that the FDA and

Big Pharma actually focused on helping the population get healthier rather than prioritizing profits only. Now, profits will always be the goal of a for-profit company, and I have no issue with that, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't have some checks and balances to make sure that these organizations are serving the taxpayers who, by the way, are often paying for their drug research and development in the first place. Did you know that? Taxpayers are often paying for a lot of this initial research. Here's a great article in the Institute for New Economic Thinking. U.S. tax dollars funded every new pharmaceutical drug in the last decade, published in September 2nd, 2020. The taxpayers are funding the initial research, often in universities and other places,

that eventually leads to this drug development. So this idea that it's just the drug companies doing this on their own is kind of BS and bogus. We are paying for this. If you're in America where things are so out of whack, you're paying for this. and even if you're in other countries where a lot of these drugs are exported out to, even if you do have universal health care, there are still implications that are there.

There are a few other recommendations in Dr. Abramson's book. I'm not going to give them all the way because it's a great book and I really think you should read it, but one of the ones that he recommends is that we need to have a group of people, independent people, lay people and clergy and other stuff, just like hospitals have clinical review boards that are composed of everyday citizens and maybe a pastor at a local church and a school teacher and this person and that person, they have these boards

where people have to make the case. The people that want to do the trials want to go and make the case and say, hey, here's why we think this is safe. And everyday people get to hear them out and say, okay, does this make sense? Do we think this is safe? And then they say, yay or nay, and they take a vote. Well, maybe we need to have that for drug companies. Maybe there needs to be a group of people that are independent watchdogs and get a chance to look at this and say, you know, a few questions. Number one, if possible, how does this drug work or if this drug has been shown to work? How does it compare to other lifestyle interventions just so patients have the knowledge? And doctors especially have the knowledge.

Number two, is this drug option cheaper or more expensive compared to how it works? If there's something on the market that's equivalent to how this drug works, maybe that drug should come with a warning. And number three, is the data, is the raw data that's there? Is it actually indicating what the drug companies are saying? There's multiple examples. Viox is one of the biggest ones. I mean, imagine 60,000 deaths that came as a result of a drug being out there on the market

and being fraudulently presented. There's other examples. And there's a doctor who I'm a big fan of. His name is Dr. Vene Prasad. He's from University of San Francisco. And he's become very popular because he was talking a lot about COVID. During COVID, he was one of the doctors that was in the middle, really helping people understand that we need to have our head on our shoulders the right way

and that masking young kids below the age of two or that continuing to demand that schools mask children at all without doing randomized clinical control trials and instead touting and pushing trials that were not randomized control trials that the FDA was doing as a way to try to pressure people into masking and other stuff and even boosters and other things like that I felt like he handled the conversation really well. I've asked him to come on the podcast a few times. He hasn't reached back out but I'm hoping one day I'd have him back on. He did a really great job and he has a book and in that book I mean he's talked a lot about COVID. and some of the trickery of pharmaceutical and testing companies and some of the challenges that are there.

By the way, just going on record, you know, Vene is very much in the middle, right? He's happy that the vaccines are out there and he sees the place for pharmaceutical companies, but he understands that we need to have checks and balances. He wrote a really great book showcasing a lot of this called ending medical reversal, ending medical reversal. And you can find that on Amazon. and the subtitle is improving outcomes, saving lives. It's a little bit more for clinicians and practitioners,

but that's another book that's out there in addition to Dr. Abramson's. I hope you like this podcast, and I hope you learned a thing or two about the pharmaceutical industry and how their trickery can often lead to just really crazy outcomes here. Again, Dr. Abramson's book,

Sickening How Big Pharma Broke American Healthcare and how we can repair it, Shout out to a friend of mine, Sean Stevenson from the Model Health Show for introducing me to Dr. John Abramson's work. And I'll see you again next week on the Drew Perot podcast. By the way, if you like this, this was taken as an excerpt from our newsletter, try this. You can go to my website, drewproit.com and click on the tab that says, try this newsletter and sign up. Every week on Friday, I write a thoughtful, beautiful.

I think it's beautiful, but hey, it's all subjective. A thoughtful, in-depth newsletter with my co-writer Taylor. Shout out to Taylor. That's evidence-based that has links to all the research that I used to write these newsletters. And I present something that you can try on, something that you can think about, something that you can consider. You can sign up. If you want to sign up, I have the link in the show notes below. Thank you for tuning in.

Appreciate you.