Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Modern Day Snake Oil Salespeople

Episode Date: March 29, 2019

Often on Sawbones, we talk about pushers of false cures as if snake oil is a relic of a bygone era. This week on a special MaxFunDrive episode of Sawbones, a reminder that snake oil salespeople are just a present as ever. DONATE NOW! Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers

Sawbones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, time is about to books. One, two, one, two, three, four. We came across a pharmacy with a toy and that's lost it out. We saw through the broken glass and had ourselves a look around.

Some medicines, some medicines that escalate my cop for the mouth. Wow! Hello everybody and welcome to Saul Bones, a marital tour of Miss Guided Medicine. I'm your co-host Justin McElroy. And I'm Sydney McElroy. Our cat is a purring, very loudly. She's snoring. I mean, let's call what is?

She's snoring. And underneath the chair. So if you can hear that. I'm concerned she has sleep apnea. Apologies. Cat. Nia. Cat.

Cat. But how will we buy her? I don't remember. I don't remember. I. Nia. Kat. But how will we buy her or her special sleep, cat sleep apnea, clap, nea medicine? Well, it's thanks to you, beloved listener, because this is the last day, or at least on Friday, it's the last day of the maximum fun drive. That's right. That's right. This is we are on a pledge supported network. That means that our shows happen because of people like you that listen to these shows and say, this is worth supporting.

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And you'll get access to all that at $10. You can get a great pro Vax, sobbing's pin designed by Megalyn Cot. Just the best pen, best pen. I upgraded our donations this year, so I had a score one. But if you, if you like our show and you support it, statistically speaking, about nine out of 10 of you have not kicked in and that's fine. I get it. But if you're able to, please don't wait because this is the last day, it's just this

on Friday. Please don't wait. Go to maximumfund.org forth slash donate and help us out. Thank you. Thank you. So Sid, what are we talking about today other than raising money? So I thought we would do something a little, it's kind of special, I think. I think it's special.

You think it's special? Yes. Yeah. For our Max Fund Drive, our second episode of Max Fund Drive, we always talk about on this show, people in the past who have sold fake medicine or fake medical ideas or diagnostic tests or that kind of thing, like people who made a career off of pushing stuff that isn't necessarily supported by any evidence or science or maybe just plain ol' fake.

And we usually call them snake oil salesmen or women or people, snake oil sales people, if you will. And we talk about them like it's something that went away. Like it's just something that occurred, you know. From antiquity. Right, back when, before the FDA and before stuff was regulated and that nowadays, we don't have that anymore.

And it occurred to me that we do. We do have people who push ideas and therapies and treatments and diets and things that aren't necessarily supported by any scientific evidence. So I thought we could use this episode today to talk about a couple of those of those people. Modern age, snake oil salesman. Yes, people, sales people. Sales people. Oh, progressive. Bring the term into the modern era. That's right. That's the, hey, it's 2019. Women can sell snake oil too. Yeah, great, excellent, good, yes. But some of these, we've gotten a lot of emails about some of these, some of these people.

And so you probably have heard of them, you may already know some about them, but we're going to, we're going to get into them a little bit more. You can make the argument by the way that like I understand, I would understand if there's always a worry about like amplifying or elevating, you know, people like this, but I really do believe that like, the only cure for this stuff is to drag it out in the light. So when someone else mentioned something, you can just be the annoying person who's like, no, no, no, wait, wait, hold on. I know a lot about this. Well, and there are a lot of, there are a lot of people out there who are pushing suit

of scientific ideas, especially in the field in like nutrition. There are, lot of people out there who are pushing pseudoscientific ideas, especially in the field in like nutrition. There's lots of misinformation out there about nutrition, and I think that the reason is that we don't have a single answer for everybody right now. We can't give everybody, just do this, and you'll be healthy forever. We have some ideas of that, but people are different.

Of in drink water. Well, yeah, but you know what I mean. So anyway, I wanted to start off talking about Ben Greenfield. Okay. Justin, what do you know about Ben Greenfield? I know that he rose to our attention because he got on some anti-vax stuff and you kind of stuffed him in a trash can on Twitter.

I know that. If I tried to find, I found this very odd. There is no Wikipedia page about Ben Greenfield. You know, that has to be added by people. Well, I mean, he's worth like over a million dollars, like I thought. Yeah. I don't know.

He seems like a prominent figure in the biohacker community. That is where he has risen to prominence. He's written like 13 books about largely about diet stuff, but also about exercise training. He's like an elite athlete and he's into high performance. Everything. If you read his bio from his site that I assume he either wrote or approved, he approved this message.

He it starts out, he was a complete nerd. Oh, man. Yeah. He, uh, he was president of the chess club and he played violin. Love all that. Yeah. He graduated at 15. He started college at 16.

Yes. Um, he's, he studied, huh? Do you do exactly? He studied all kinds of science stuff and anatomy, physiology, biomechanics from pseudoclids microbiology, biochemistry, nutrition. He rose to the top of his class. He graduated and he got into, what did he say, six different medical schools, but he decided not to attend any of them.

Yes. And instead got his masters in exercise physiology and biomechanics. That can we stop for a second there? You could draw 100% parallel between that and classic snake ozones. That is a classic. It's the exact like, I didn't study at the medical schools. I learned out here working with real people. You would hear that line all the time. I mean, I started from the people who just had the

reddoctors, but like, this is the next best thing, right? The implication is, I could have been. I could have been. I just had to mean big ideas. Well, and that's kind of where he lives is like this idea that he's beyond that. He has moved beyond what medical school may have had to offer. Right.

And you know what's hard is that when you get into like the early years of Ben Greenfield, he really, he's probably, I mean, it seems to be a very talented athlete. He's been in a bunch of triathlons and sounds like he's done very well. And initially he wrote books about training, you know, about how to train to do these really tough athletic competitions. And I'm not going to sit here and quibble about that because he got a master's in exercise physiology. I assume he knows something about that. I am a medical doctor. I am not an exercise physiologist. So I'm not gonna argue that. And I think if he had maybe stuck to that,

he wouldn't, well, he wouldn't be the subject of our podcast. He wouldn't be ours out. But the thing is he wasn't satisfied with just talking about exercise physiology. From there, he had to move into diet, which I think is a natural progression for a lot of these like athletic kind of people,

they start talking about what they ate, which I think is a natural progression for a lot of these athletic kind of people, they start talking about what they ate. Which, I mean, when you get into like his nutritional advice, it's not that radical. He recommends a wide variety of diets, honestly. Like if you look on his website, he will say like, maybe you want to try this, which is sort of a low carb thing, or maybe you want to try this paleo thing, or maybe you want to try. I mean, a lot of it is centered around limiting carbohydrates and increasing your protein and vegetables and stuff like that.

Which will probably work. Which is fine. Which is fine. Which is fine. Again, these are not things that I'm arguing with. And I think you can take somebody like this who's trained really hard and performed really well in athletic competitions and say like, well, they probably know a thing or two about maybe training or

maybe food. Right. But that wasn't enough. He's had to move past that. And the thing that, as Justin said, called him to our attention initially is that he has a website and he has a podcast and then he writes a lot of stuff. He's written about your books. But he has had anti-vax guests on his podcast and he's read some books about vaccine propaganda and now he has started to tweet about vaccines and how they cause autism.

Oh, no. Oh, really? He went on to try to defend those to say, like, well, I mean, they do save a lot of lives, but they have a lot of adverse effects, so we need to address that. Of course, these, first of all, it is a lie that vaccines cause autism. They do not. It's untrue. It's a lie, the lie period. And I don't think we should say anything like, no, he's spreading a false information. No, it's a lie. Uh, secondly, they don't have many adverse effects. They have incredibly rare adverse effects. And more importantly, they do save lives. He

is accurate about that. They save millions. So he's right about that part of vaccines. No, no, he's not right, because he said they have many adverse effects that we aren't talking enough about. No, I mean, we don't need to talk anymore about them than we do. They're incredibly rare, and they save millions of lives. So because he started talking about stuff that I would consider out of his wheelhouse,

he came into your house, right? Out of exercise land, the gym, if you accept in your house. I did not go into exercise land to discuss with Ben Greenfield, his exercise and diet. He came into medical world to tell me about vaccines. So I started looking into some of the stuff that Ben Greenfield sells. And by cells, I don't mean like necessarily literally cells. He sells ideas on his website and podcast. He is also

sponsored by a lot of the companies that do this stuff and working with doctors that are proponents of this stuff. So I'm not saying that he has like, he's not coming to your door with a carpet bag full of these things. But in essence, he's selling them. So he seems very into testosterone, which I would say a lot of these like athletic kind of people are, like pushing the idea. And part of this is true. There is a place in medicine for testosterone therapy. It is not nearly the cure all that a lot of people,

we could do a whole show on that. That a lot of people say it is that all your lacking is testosterone and that if you take it, you're going to have incredibly huge muscles and all the energy in the world and the best sex of your life and all the things that people kind of pin on testosterone. That's not true. And I would talk to a doctor before you ever consider testosterone replacement. And I always think that that's like on the, that's in the gray zone. You're pushing a medical treatment, like as if it's, this is the most wonderful thing in

the world and you all need to go to your doctor and ask about it that can have severe side effects and is not appropriate for everybody. So I think he's not, that's not necessarily all the way over into like, don't do this territory, but he's straddling the line with that. Right, well the hope would be that the person's doctor would be like, no. You don't need it. Well, I mean, that's the thing.

Like if you're, if I check your testosterone levels and they're appropriate, then you don't need it and taking it won't do anything for you. Right. And I don't see him saying that, but that's a lot of people on the internet. He thinks nicotine is a great cognitive stimulant. Correct.

He recommends that. Now it's good. It's a good appetite, surprisingly. But. Do you, would you recommend it? I would not, because of the other parts. What's the other part, Justin? I can't say that.

Well, the addiction. The addiction. And just for nicotine, you're talking about some heart disease to be right. It's a side effect of using it to be dangerous. The addiction is a big problem. Right. Yeah, it's addictive substance.

Yes. So I don't think I would go on record recommending that myself. I saw that he likes to endorse a lot of, there are labs, we're gonna get into this in the second part of our show a lot more, where you can go order, like you can send a company some of your blood and get your own panels of various labs back.

And he has various ones that he endorses. I'm sure he has like deals with some of these people. I would imagine. I would imagine. And he endorses this idea. And some of these labs that they do are like food allergy panels and sensitivities and all kinds of that kind of thing. I'm looking for whatever the cause is like looking for something that isn't there. And a lot of these labs can be very expensive and they some of them are not very reliable like their labs that as a physician, I wouldn't necessarily order because I know without all of the other data to support it. This lab could be easily misinterpreted and it has a high

false positive rate and all this stuff and this isn't and you know if you don't have all of these signs and symptoms you shouldn't order this anyway because it's gonna waste your money and your time and you got blood drawn for a reason and anyway he endorses that and I think there's a lot of problems with that idea. The idea of just getting random labs on yourself and then you get the results and then what do you do with them? You try to like make sense of that information. And you end up googling it and you find lots of misinformation on the internet or you take them to your doctor who like half the time I'm looking at them going where what are the

reference ranges where these from what are the values who what is this lab is this lab legit I don't know. So it's really hard for your doctor to interpret sometimes so I would say that's not again. This isn't in the range of like he's gonna kill people with this information, but it's not good medical advice. He does push the idea that vitamin C is a cancer treatment or preventative that one way or another vitamin C will kill cancer cells in your body. So I believe his plan was just get like a vitamin C infusion. Like that was the tweet. Sunny day.

Yeah, just drink just chug some sunny day. Chug some sunny day and cure your cancer. Uh-huh. This has never been supported by any evidence as as like a cure for cancer in the body or treatment. Wait, they're not preventative. Because these are all pseudo-scientific ideas that you can find pushed by various people who sell things and will treat you with things, but they're not true. But if somebody's going to get paid for them, you're going gonna find somebody who will say it's...

Well, there's also, if you have like, this is the goop thing too, right? Well, part of the goop thing, if you have a lifestyle blog, which, look at this guy's site, that's what we're talking about here. It's like a health and wellness destination. He can call it biohacking, but it's...

Wellness. Wellness. You gotta fill it up with something, right? Like, you gotta have an article every day that that is their generating content. It doesn't necessarily matter if it's true. Right. And he gets and he'll get the guests on his podcast are a wide variety of people who say their experts and things, but either don't have their credentials or they do have their credentials, but they're pushing ideas. I mean, that are totally pseudoscientific. I mean, that's the other thing is like, just because somebody is a doctor on your show

saying something doesn't make them right. Right. I mean, I don't, I don't say all this stuff off the top of my head. I go and look stuff up again and research it again and make sure that I'm up to date and know the latest stuff. For instance, I saw that he was pushing Kava, which is an... What is that? That's like the, oh man, we've talked about it before.

Is it something that you like chew? It's an alternative, it's an herbal thing that can be used for anxiety. Right, yeah, yeah, that's what we're talking about. It's an alternative. It's an herbal thing that can be used for anxiety. Right. Yeah. And then it is in some cultures, it's a very popular like kind of like we would use alcohol like something to chill you out, relax you or actually to treat anxiety. And Kava for a long time was thought to be linked to severe liver disease. As we have done more studies on it, we found that it actually probably is not hugely responsible for severe liver disease. As we have done more studies on it, we found that it actually probably is not hugely responsible for severe liver disease, unless you're getting stuff that's not prepared correctly,

or you're drinking a lot of alcohol with it, and you're using a whole lot of it. So it's not nearly as dangerous as we used to think it is. I'm still not saying everybody should just go take a vow all they want. Right. But I don't think it should be maybe criminalized over alcohol,

you know? I would say that that's not a fair distinction to make. So like I'm not going to take him to task on that because I know better now, you know, Sydney from 10 years ago may have, but Sydney knows better now. But that's because I look at science and studies and research and evidence and not just what sounds good and buzzy. He sells a lot of supplements, of course, through Keon is his product line. Among them, a lot of them are the usual stuff that protein and things that fitness nutrition people sell. Among them, one that I found interesting was goat colostrum. Oh, interesting.

Justin, do you remember what colostrum is? It ain't good. It ain't good. No, it's great. Oh, interesting. Justin, do you remember what colostrum is? Any good. Any good. No, it's great. What is it? Colostrum. It's the first milk. The first breast milk.

The first breast milk. Yes. The first stuff that comes out. The really nutritionally dense, concentrated stuff that comes out of breasts in the very beginning of the breastfeeding journey. Just that good choice goat stuff. Except for he sells goat colostrum. It's $50 a bottle. You can just buy that. Or baby goats. I don't know why.

Why baby goats? I know. Save that for the baby goats. Again, evidence, just I mean colostrum is good for babies. It's great for babies. If you imagine, are you a baby? I'd better you a baby. If you imagine a world in which our bodies have evolved, I mean, okay, I think you believe our bodies were intelligently created or you believe that they evolved over time. Either way, can you imagine a creator or a evolutionary effect that would make it so that we're supposed to look at goats that give birth and immediately think like, I gotta get in there. I gotta get some of that stuff and just wheeze it straight from the mama goat because that's what my body needs.

My body needs that colostum from that goat right now. It probably doesn't need that. Like it probably needs all the plants and lettuce all over the ground and all that stuff and it may need the goat like itself maybe but like you probably are intended to get in there and just like pull out that first, first weas of goat milk.

He, uh, he, he does something. He got live, he got stem cell injections. So just, um, they were adult. There, there's a whole new thing. A lot of studies have been done. It's not new. It's been since the 90s, uh, where we're, they're trying to find alternative sources of stem cells because of all of the ethical concerns surrounding the use of fetal stem cells. So there have been a lot of scientists trying to find their ways to get them from adults and we found that there are cells within adult bodies throughout the human body that do have the potential to turn into different tissues. They're not necessarily as

plastic as like real as like stem, stem cells that can turn into any tissue, but they can turn into a variety of tissue. So there's been a lot of research into this. Like, are there ways to take these stem cells, sort of stem cells, these cells with some potential from adults and put them into heart tissue or along tissue or pancreatic tissue in the case of diabetics or, you know, is there a way to use these to regrow tissue? And so this is captured the imagination of a lot of people who want to stop aging and just generally like fill their body with new cells. That's really the idea is like I'm just going to get these stem cells and fill my body with new cells and be young again. It's like a death becomes her kind of thing, just like regenerate your whole body. So he

had stem cell injections done live, like on, it was a Canadian sports network. But he got so much, they got so much feedback from the scientific community on this episode saying this is dangerous. There is no evidence for this. This is unsupported. Injecting stem cells in your body, unregulated, we don't know what all that's going to do to people. There's still, like I said, this is still an area of active research. So we don't know that there are any benefits or if there are what exactly they would be,

but we're worried about the possibility that if you inject these cells that they could be, they could cause tumors to form, that there is, is there a possibility that these could cause cancers? We don't know. We don't know all the reactions to these stem cells that you might have. There's still a lot of concern about how safe it is just to inject cells into the body period. And I found like the place that he advocates for the US stem cell clinic and like among

on their website, you can find like their retal letters to the FDA, where the FDA has written them with concerns about their practices, but here's our rebuttals to them, so you can see these two, which all sounds a little sketchy to me. Again, this is not an area where I'm saying we just don't know. We have no idea. None of the science backs this up at this point. Certainly not just random, just give me a big, big old shot full of stem cells, and I'll be young again.

There's no evidence for that right now. And he's just advocating like, yeah, go do it. He tells you, as of like yesterday, he was telling people where clinics are that they could get this done. I mean, this is, he's still advocating this. The big thing is that I found that he is involved in the fake cancer cure, arena. He advocates things like metal detox and metal chelation where you get metals removed

from your body to try to treat cancer. All of this is fake. This is nothing. This is nothing. This is nothing. And this is true to add a clinic that he recommends there. So you can go to what was called the Paracelsus clinic, Alronk, but it's name, thank goodness, it's changed its name because I felt like that was a betrayal to Paracelsus that was named after him. I love Parasels. So he has this two week detox retreat in Switzerland at this clinic.

And you can go and you can get, I mean, here, let me tell you some of the things you can get at this clinic before I get into the fake cancer protocol. So he's going to give you a liver detox, which if you haven't heard it on the show before, you don't need to detox your liver, your liver, and kidneys detox your body. That's what they do. Please don't do the detox of any kind. You'll get things like massages and nutritional advice, and that's fine. You'll also get hyperberecoseontreatments. Bad. Nothing. Nutrient IVs. Just eat. That's nothing. And they'll do live blood analysis, which we've talked about before, is not recognized

by any legitimate labs as a real thing that you do. And they'll look at your blood and tell you that you have all these problems, and then they'll do this two week thing, and then they'll look at your blood and tell you that you have all these problems, and then they'll do this two-week thing, and then they'll look at your blood again and tell you that they fixed it. That's how this works. They do colon hydrotherapy. They will do reflexology. Good, nothing. It's only $9,000 a person. Dang, a bargain. Yeah. Now, if you want to do the three weeks day, that's going to be $20,000. He does it in conjunction with Robin Openshaw, who is green smoothie girl.

Who? Yeah. Cured asthma with raw food, plant-based diets, alkaline foods, and vibrational energy. She had 21 chronic diseases and she cured them with her cities. And you can go to this retreat. Those are good smoothies. And have all this done. In addition, they have a whole cancer treatment protocol.

That's right. So if you have cancer, they recommend you can come here and they have a diet that you can go on, which includes avoiding hazelnuts. Well, no, it's not really out. I love this little guy. And then a lot of the same stuff we already talked about like vitamin C is in their ozone colon hydrotherapy all about colon hydrotherapy got to get water up the colon gotta get water on that butt Come on guys. Don't be healthy Cumping this is greatest hits And then so this clinic will do all this for lots of your money

You won't be any better off again, and a lot of these therapies, it's like we've talked about before. They're pushing stuff that maybe it won't kill you. Maybe it's not like inherently the most dangerous thing in the world, but they're having you come spend your money on that instead of traditional therapies would be the worry. Like that if you're going to spend all this money on that, you're not going to go get chemo or radiation or surgery or see an actual oncologist for your cancer diagnosis. So I feel like he's, I feel like that he's fair game is a snake oil salesman because of his association was stuff like this.

And he also has a bit about water on his website, his thoughts on water, his thoughts on water. There are hundreds of toxic chemicals lurking in municipal water supplies. He believes that the chlorine that's in our water is causing asthma and dementia. And that fluoride is an endocrine disruptor that can affect your bones, thyroid gland, pineal gland, blood sugar levels and have major adverse effects on your brain. What an absolute gun. Can I just, we are running like, incredibly long

on this segment, but I do need you, no, no, I do need you to go back up and address something. You talk about his podcast. Did he legitimately have a breatherianism supporter on his podcast? Yes he did. Are you kidding me? Beyond fasting, can human survive on air and breath?

An introduction to biohacking the body with breatherianism by Pranic Brewery and Ray. Oh my God, this dude, there's never been so hard a curse on this show. Are you kidding me? I didn't listen to the whole episode. I don't, I know he had him on there. I'm not gonna say that like,

maybe at the end he goes, this is all fake. I'm just kidding. Anyway, you do need third party.. This is absolute. Oh, my Sydney. The thing is like he's he's putting all this. You're painting all this with the same brush. Here's how to exercise really well. Look at me. I'm very fit. Do you want to look like me? Here's what I do. Okay. Okay. Sure. Here's a diet that I follow that works for me and I feel good and I'm healthy

and I'm in the shape I want to be in it. Okay. But then he, all this other stuff he just throws on there as if it's the same as if Bredarianism and which means you don't eat food or you just live on air. It's absolutely. Hey, can we not talk about this guy anymore? Are you done? Yeah, I don't have anything else to say about him other than like again

Wow, he's he's selling he's pushing the idea that vaccines cause autism that makes him a public health threat and In addition to the past see also read above the past half hour. Yes, like Okay, and he's very popular Well, he's like that's the wild thing. This isn't from a hundred and fifty years ago. This dude's on Twitter right now. Yeah. Like he's just doing his thing out there. Yeah, this anti-vax stuff was from last month.

It's wild. It's wild. Anyway, so you see that kind of attached to anything. He's absolutely do do. But you know what's not the max fund drive. That's right folks. This, $9,000 for a week at a fake clinic or $5, $10, $20 a month to support great podcasts to help push back against the darkness.

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Every other week, at least from researching this program. And I think that that kind of hard work is worth your money. Not everybody can donate. I completely get that. But if you are able to, by donating, you keep the show free for everybody who can't. And I mean, I think that that's,

and you help it keep existing, you know, more than anything else. Um, said, do you have anything to add? I feel like I'm embellviating. Well, I mean, I think I think you've said everything, everything I would. I just, we really appreciate it. If you are somebody who who donates the network, we really appreciate it. You, you are helping us continue to make this show that we really care about all of our shows, but this is the one you're listening to. That we really care about. We really think has some value to to put out into the world and make available to everybody. And I think it's nice that if you think something is is valuable and worthwhile and you are in a position to help support it,

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So the other the other snake oil sales person that I want to talk about this week is Elizabeth Holmes now She is the subject of movies and documentaries and podcasts and books and all kinds of stuff So I don't think I need to belabor the story because you probably are familiar with it But just in case you aren't because actually Justin you weren't no, I had seen our new of it I just wanted to get into a little bit of of medicine side of this, like what she actually did. So in case you're not familiar, she homes is from a line of successful wealthy people, and initially she seemed poised to be another successful wealthy person. Her father was VP at Enron, And then he had positions at like the EPA

and USAID and all kinds of places. Her mother was a congressional staffer. Her grandfather was a physician who established Cincinnati General Hospital in the University of Cincinnati Med School. And her grandmother was aress to the freshman East. Fortunately. Yeah, what a diverse background.

I mean, not diverse, but you know. You know, she went to Stanford. She was all into the School of Engineering. She was already to change the world. She dropped out to pursue her own company and started when she was 19. So a parodigy is by all outward appearances, a parodigy. She started her company, Theranos,

which is a portmanteau of therapy and diagnosis. Theranos. Theranos, it sounds Greek. And her goal was a worthy one. Her idea was that healthcare needs to be more available to everybody. It needs to, she wanted to democratize healthcare that she wanted to democratize healthcare more so by providing a quick, cheap blood test for like everything essentially. She said her fear of needles help motivate this idea that she could create a machine and a process by which you could do a finger stick.

So just a teeny little prick contained that would collect a nano containers. This is what she called it, nano container, nano tainer, sorry, nano tainers, worth of blood. Make on the pork command toes, huh? Yeah. That's what our daughter Charlie calls us. She calls them pork command toes. But anyway, she, it was a half inch little container, nano tainer. And she would use it to collect a finger-sick worth of blood. Just a couple drops of blood, and then you could run like 70 different studies on this

single little drop of blood. Now, when she initially pitched this idea to some physicians at her school, some lab people and experts, they all said the same thing. That's not possible. You can't do that. That's not a thing that can, it's a great idea. You can't do that. And not in the way where it's like, oh, but nobody could ever do that. It's more like, well, no, that's just not how it works. But she wasn't buying it. She decided she was going to do it. And she made something called the Edison machine, which was a secret piece of machinery, secret piece of technology that nobody to this day is quite certain how

it was supposed to have worked or what it was. But even people who read the patent said like they still didn't understand what it was supposed to do. Or I mean, like, I gave you the general idea, but how it was going to accomplish. Or, I mean, like, I gave you the general idea, but how it was going to accomplish this goal. And that this machine was going to use was going to do this. She created this company, Theranos, it was based around this machine, and they came up with this whole website with

like 240 different diagnostic tests that they were going to run eventually. They're like a whole menu of diagnostic tests that you could go search and they were all listed by price. And they were, I will say looking at their prices much cheaper than those tests at like our lab, for instance, or most hospital labs, I would say. But you could go and you could buy whatever tests you want. The Edison was supposed to only do immunoscess, which are tests that look for antigens or antibodies. So there are tons of lab tests you would have done by a doctor that wouldn't that wouldn't fall into that range. But the Edison was supposedly

just the beginning of this. By the way, it was called the Edison machine because of Edison's famous quote, I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. She said this was their 10,000 and first. One. Great. So it worked. So the Edison machine. No. No, but hold on, hold on. You might want to know how is this different, this machine that can take a drop of blood. It's important to know that traditional lab tests need more blood because for one, there are different kinds of tubes. Have you ever noticed that they'd collect your blood in different tubes? If you ever had blood taken, and they have different colors on the top of them usually.

So, you have different things in there that help keep the sample in a certain condition to run it. So, like, sometimes we're looking for stuff that's just in the serum and we don't need like the blood, like the clotting factors and the blood cells and that kind of stuff. So we have stuff in there that will make your blood clot and we'll just take the serum. Sometimes we have something that we need to keep unclotted to check for certain things. So we have like anti-quagulants, anti-clotting things in there. So there are different tubes, have different things in it,

depending on what tests we need to run. So it's kind of wild to think that you could take a couple drops of blood and then run tests that need opposite preparations on it. In addition, you just need more to do most things. From those single drops of blood, it's really hard to run a lot of these tests that they're talking about. You just need more sample. You can dilute it to get, to like make it go further,

but you create more opportunities for error every time you dilute out of sample. So it's bad practice. She raised millions in venture capital though, millions, millions of dollars. She got people like Henry Kissinger was on her board. Again, five dollars a month. So five dollars a week.

She became friends with Chelsea Clinton. She was named a presidential ambassador for global entrepreneurship by president Obama. I mean, she was in with everybody, like everybody who is important in business, in technology and Silicon Valley and politics, everybody thought she was a genius. And everybody likes to talk about she modeled herself after Steve Jobs. She would like wear the black turtle neck. Sure. Me too.

There's nothing wrong with her. She got her company was estimated to be worth 10 billion at one point. Hot too much. She got a deal with Walgreens to put what we're called Theranos wellness centers and all the Walgreens where you could go get your blood collected in the nanotainer and get the tests run at the Walgreens. We'll get the, get it collected the Walgreens and sent to the lab. The thing is the machine didn't work.

Oh, well, that's less than ideal. Like, it didn't work spectacularly. Like, pieces of it fell off. Like, doors on it wouldn't shut when they needed to. That's not great. Like, it did not function. And all of the testing, all the data that she would show people to try to prove that it worked was only internal.

It was never verified by external sources. She wouldn't let anybody in to check it out and prove that it was working. Initially, people were investing without even seeing this thing or seeing evidence that it was working. When you sent your samples to Theranos initially, the people who used this service as it got out there, like through all greens and everything, it was being processed actually using traditional lab machines. So they were like just using Siemens as the big maker of a bunch of lab equipment. They were using Siemens equipment to run the labs.

They weren't even using any of their fancy supposed technology. The only test that the FDA approved using the nano-tainer, using the little finger stick method, was for a herpes test, which theoretically, because of the way you can do that test, you could use a small amount of blood because you can get some DNA from it and amplify it, so you don't need a lot of blood for that. So theoretically, that is possible. But that was the only test that they ever approved using the nanotainer.

The rest of the time, do you know what they were doing? Just drawing blood, just the regular way. They weren't doing the finger sticks. So you would go to these Theronos wellness centers sometimes and like just get blood drawn. And then sent to a lab that just did basic lab tests on you. You know, as wild, this kind of thing happens every time a field I think is moving quickly, too quickly for other people to like your obama's and your Chelsea Clinton's are going to go in the lab and see if the technology works.

Right. It's that it's the assumption is made. There's a guy named Michael Feene who's actually a fugitive named David Kim Stanley in the dot com bubble who created a technology called pixel on and it was going to be this is like the 90s and he was going to stream video when no one else was doing it and when and he got all this investment and when he streamed video, he was just like playing a video off a hard drive. And he wouldn't let anyone look at the technology, he wouldn't let anybody test it when anybody asked about it, he would fire him. So it's like that, the windows for this,

I think exist anytime that technology moves really fast. And I think that that's where we're at with health technology, right? Where it's moving so fast, who can verify if it is working or not, right? Well, and that's exactly what she would do. It like anybody who questioned any of her employees who would come to her and say, this isn't working, she'd fire them.

And so she created this like bubble of silence around it that she is the exact same thing. I mean, it's the exact same thing as the being greenfield thing, just the exact opposite approach, right? Yes. Like there is a window here to rip people off. I'm gonna go for it. It's like fire festival. It reminded me a lot of fire festival.

Yeah, yeah, that's not that far off actually. So she lied about it. She misled people. She created fake results for Walgreens to get them in on stuff. Like they were just fake results. Yeah. She lied to investors about the money stuff too.

So not only was the labs stuff, the medical stuff, the technical stuff, not really true, but there were all kinds of inflated projections and things, all the money stuff that I don't understand as well. She lied about all that too. So she came under fire from the FDA, from the SEC, from the Centers for Medicare

and Medicaid Services, and eventually the FBI. There was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, John Kerry Roo, who talked for a bunch of whistleblowers and did this huge undercover investigative report and that eventually published all the results in 2015 and everybody figured out what she was up to. And I'm sorry, are heroes? Yes, yes, he is the hero of the story. In 2016, she had to throw out two years worth of test results. So everybody would gotten test results from their company in throw out two years worth of test results. So

everybody would gotten test results from their company in the last two years. She threw them out and said they don't their fake. Well, they're unreliable. I don't know if they're real or not. The blood, you mean? No, she told everybody, if you've got any results from us in the last two years, you can't rely on her. I thought you were saying she threw out a lot of blood. I thought, man, Dracula is going to be stuck. But then she, you know, that same year she went to the American Association for Clinical Chemistry, annual meeting and announced that she was making a new machine called the Mini Lab.

Same idea, 160 microleaders of blood run up to 40 tests, including a Zika test, because it was so hot. Yeah, sure. It was so hot. Sure, I got to get it in there. But this wasn't going to be in stores. This one was going to be in places outside the lab, but in the hospital, sort of like a NICU,

like a neonatal intensive care unit. Great, great group to target there. That's really going to get the sympathy from people. But by this point, nobody was buying it. So thanks continued to crumble. Theranos came under fire, eventually like lost all of its money, lost all of its investors. I think it officially started dissolving this past winter, fall winter, September October,

something like that is when it started dissolving. She is now facing multiple charges of fraud, possibly 20 years in prison. And the company is defunct essentially. It's interesting, though, because part of it is, does this happen like you said where it's just amazing to me. It didn't work. Nothing worked and everybody just believed in millions of dollars into it. To it's probably best if you let somebody who knows something about medical science advise you on what lab tests you need. I mean, I do, I believe everything should be cheaper. It's all way too expensive.

The cost of these labs, there are no versus the cost at a hospital. I understand. It's a greegeous, the how much you're upcharged when you get labs done at any, not just a hospital, but hospitals, those are the highest. That's a great just how much they cost. They shouldn't.

But at the same time, it does not help you just to have giant panels of random labs ordered. Willing, Nellie, you're gonna get information that you can't necessarily use, or that you didn't need, or know what to do with, or might take you down a totally wrong road as to what's going on. Like I noticed among the tests, they had one for Lyme antibodies. Interpreting Lyme panels is incredibly difficult and they're often wrong. And so just ordering a test for Lyme disease randomly and from an unreliable lab and then just

getting the answer, even from a reliable lab, we don't know if it's right. I don't know. They're just, they're, they're really dangerous and you're huge risk for getting ripped off and misled. And it's really important that somebody who understands the implications of all this helps you decide what tests you need should be a joint decision. Well, this has been Graham. Has it been Graham?

At least Therna's, at least she's going to jail probably. That'll be nice. I don't think Ben Greenfield should go to jail, honey. I just think he should stop giving medical advice because he's not a doctor. Yeah. That's all I'm saying. I'm saying you're an exercise physiologist by all means talk to people about exercise. Yeah, stay in your lane. I guess he doesn't need the guy a jail. I just get back in his lane and delete your website

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Thank you. Thank you. And thank you to taxpayers for these sort of medicines as the intro and outro of our program. You know what I realized? The taxpayers website link that I've had on a Libson for a hundred thousand years hasn't worked for a while. So I have a new link that totally works now to their band camp so you can download songs there. Good job Justin. All right. That's going to do it for us. Thank you so much.

Until next time, my name is Justin McAroy. I'm Sydney McAroy. All right. Maximumfund.org. Comedy and culture. Artistone. Listener supported. reported.