Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: The Black Panthers and Public Health

Episode Date: June 5, 2020

If you received the typical, white-centric education, you probably associate the Black Panthers only with violence and political protest. This week on Sawbones, we talk about their work in medical research advocacy and creating public health programs that sought to make life better for all black and oppressed people. Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers

Saw bones 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. Hello everybody and welcome to Saul Bones, a member of the sort of misguided medicine.

I'm Eric Cahose, Justin McRoy. And I'm Sydney McRoy. Justin, I wanted us to continue on Saul Bones this week to talk about things that are relevant to, you know, the issues of the day, to the protests that we're seeing, to the numbers, how many people are speaking out against police brutality, especially when it concerns the black community. And in that effort, in addition to protesting and donating and all of the other things that you're encouraged to do to help, one thing that I as a white person have been trying to do more of is learn. Listen and learn.

And in that pursuit of knowledge, which I will be the first to admit I have not done enough of you know, I have not I have not studied not just black history but All history the truth our history enough to really Really understand all of the context for the events of the day You know even if you feel like you do and, you already are on the right side of this issue or the right side of history, I guarantee you, if you're not a person of color, you have more learning to do. There's more reading you can do. And one thing in particular. Not, does it have to be reading is kind of what you said more read this have to be reading though.

I'm in for sure. The reading though. Wolf, you know know, I gotta say Justin actually in preparation for this episode not only have I done reading, but I did get to watch a movie. So that's kind of fun like that one day in class when you have this episode. He's like, anyway, here's Mr. Holland's Opus. I'll check back with you on an hour and a half. So I thought you would appreciate that. There's a movie you can watch to help learn this history much,, or a podcast you can listen to. There you go. Right now. I want to thank two people who alerted me to this. One, we got an email from Chloe who mentioned

this as a potential topic. Thank you. And two, I saw a Twitter thread from Claire Willett, who alerted me to an area of history that I didn't have much understanding of, and I think my vague impressions were, to say the least incomplete. And that's the history of the Black Panther Party. And specifically, the work that they did in the public health realm. It's been interesting to, as we go back and re-examine

stuff like this. At first, it's very scary to talk about something that you thought you understood about the world and how it works and your own history and have it completely dismantled in front of you. I'm now finding it kind of invigorating. Like I find like the more of this, I'm sort of trying to immerse myself in and learn.

Like when you mentioned the black panthers, like Justin, what do you think? When I say black panthers, you said when we first started this. And the stuff that popped into my head was the stuff that I had been shown told my entire life, which is a militant group of violent group of black people that were very angry and dangerous and the same.

You think of the image of the burrays and the guns? Yes. And to be fair, when I started to think, what was I taught in school? I don't know if I was taught anything. I don't know if this was discussed much, other than like a side mention in the, probably in a chapter about civil rights, probably in relation to Martin Luther King. Probably in February.

Probably in February. But I don't think, and I think that white people need to understand that knowing black history is knowing history. And if you think that that is a subsection, something separate, no, you don't know your own history. You don't know the history of this country. And only by understanding that, are you going to have a really good context for what is wrong today and what needs to change today and how much it needs to change the extent of the change that needs to happen?

So I had the same vague impressions. If you would ask me, I would have pictured somebody with a beret and a gun and I thought, well, they definitely were on the right side of the issues, civil rights. I would agree with that, but they they believed in violence and I wouldn't. So that was the whole impression I had. I knew almost nothing else. And I don't want to say, it's like a lot of things. History is complicated.

People are complicated. And at the same time that you have people ringing their hands over the protests right now saying, well, but not the looting, but we shouldn't be looting. And you have to understand that when people are angry and they've been oppressed and they're standing up for their freedoms and their rights, however they do that, I support that. And I know that's complicated. And I know that's not so clear cut as well but I don't believe in violence.

Sometimes things aren't clear cut and we have to be comfortable with that. I think the Black Panther Party is a good example of that. Certainly when they started, they were founded in October of 1966 in Oakland, California by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton. And they were definite. There definitely was a, like an edge of violence to the beginnings, an intention that not an intention to do violence, but an understanding that if it is necessary, it is the action that will be taken. A willingness. Yes. And it was to be fair, it was based on the idea that they were watching their friends, their

family, their community, other people of color be beaten, killed, and unfairly incarcerated by the police. And they wanted to put a stop to it. And this was, and they knew at the time that the protests, the marches, the sit-ins, it wasn't changing. The system was so based in white supremacy that these actions important and meaningful they may be, were not going far enough. And so the original you know intention was what we're going to do is go to places, we will patrol the streets,

and when we see an arrest happening, we'll stop, we'll get out of our car and we'll watch, and we will be an intimidating presence because we'll have guns. That was very key to it. The being armed was very much part of it because the message was we're watching you and we can do something about it if you're not careful to the police officers who were involved in the arrest.

And if there was no evidence of police brutality, things could proceed without any sort of confrontation. But if there was, the Black Panther Party was willing to step in. And there certainly were conflicts that ensued from this. I am not going to lead you to believe that there were never shootouts and shoot-ins and all kinds of violent confrontations between various members of the Black Panther Party and law enforcement. However, that is not the entire story of the Black Panthers, which is, again, I think something a lot of people don't know. Within a few years of its inception, the party realized that it needed to do more than just protect people, then just be sort of the guardians.

They also needed to connect to the community, reach out to the community, and find ways of supporting the black community that their government wasn't doing. I mean, they saw that gap. One of the easy things that they said is, you know, research came out around this time that children do better in school, pay closer attention and have less fatigue if they get breakfast in the morning. A simple, I mean, this study was released. Simple idea, right? Well, known at this point, I think it raised. Yes.

And so the Black Panther Party said, well, we could feed kids breakfast. That's something we can do. Because in their community, a lot of children of color were not getting breakfast in the morning, usually related to socioeconomic issues. And again, the systemic racism that we talk about in housing, in access to healthy food and clean water and all that, for all those reasons, poverty as well, kids weren't getting breakfast.

And they said, you know what, we're going to fix this. So they began to set up free breakfast programs. It was very simple. They would buy all the ingredients. They had a place where they would advertise from these hours, bring your kids, breakfast is free. And they would serve breakfast to kids. And this was a really impactful program. At their height, they were providing up to 20,000 meals a week at various locations. It started with one site and then it spread throughout to different parts of the community. As the Black Panther Party spread throughout the United States,

and there were different chapters in different areas of the country, this program followed. This was a huge impact just feeding kids breakfast. It was a very direct way of the party connecting to the community, you know, saying like we're here. We're not just here to, you know, carry guns. We are here to serve our community. And it was a hugely impactful program they started. And from that, it began to be clear like this is one aspect. But, and we, you know, just like I think people are saying now, we had been focusing purely on the law enforcement, criminal justice, angle of this. But here's another area where racism needs to be addressed.

You know, black kids disproportionately weren't getting breakfast. Let's fix it. What other areas could we address, which is the same conversation if people aren't having, if white people, I should say, aren't having, they should be having today, which is this problem goes beyond police officers. This problem goes to every institution as we talked about last week, healthcare, everything in this country. And the Black Panther said, well, if the whole system is broken, we need to start addressing every bit of it we

can. And access to affordable healthcare and specifically a national health insurance plan was a big part of that. They believed, now part of that is that the black panthers were very anti-capitalist. And so it is not surprising that a capitalist medical program as we have in this country, a capitalist medical system would be one target. They very much saw that as broken. Many people living in the black community did not have insurance or didn't have access to a doctor. There were no offices nearby. There wasn't a hospital that would serve them. They couldn't afford the care.

So they saw that there was a disproportionate amount of lack of preventive services, lack of chronic disease management, lack of screening programs, all kinds of things for the communities of color. And so, in 1972, as part of their 10-point program, the Black Panther also added health. We want completely free healthcare for all Black and oppressed people Was added in 1972 and if you notice, I think it's really interesting. It's not just for all Black people The Black Panthers were advocating for completely free healthcare for everyone who is oppressed So other communities of color and even poor white people at this point in history. Well, it's one of those things that is so essential to us that no other part of the equation matters so much if the health is not addressed. It is the standard against which everything

else has to be judged. And they believed that the government should be providing it. And there were lots of, I mean, again, the idea, I think a lot of people have looked at in the recent elections and debates among various politicians talking about the way to fix healthcare in this country. People look at socialized medicine, single-payer healthcare as like a radical idea. There's nothing radical about this idea. It's an old idea. People have been advocating for it for a long time, especially people who are oppressed have been advocating for it for a long time. And throughout the world, it's not a radical idea. And so when the Black Panthers were looking to other places in the world where they had health care for all their citizens and saying

We want the same thing here. Yeah, that's a thing the government should do. This is not a radical idea. It's a good idea Yeah, we just still haven't done it So they did it they began to establish free clinics in 1969 they were called the People's free health, the first one that they established was in Kansas City. And soon after that, they would mandate that every chapter, throughout the country, establish a free clinic. And a dozen were set up between then in 1973. And a quote, I found a quote from the Black Panther paper in a 1970 that sort of outlines

what most clinics were capable of providing. They were all a little different, but this was kind of the basic idea. The clinic will offer absolutely free the services of a family doctor, including checkups, immunizations, blood tests, and health education. A major emphasis of the clinic will be on preventive medicine. People will be encouraged to have regular checkups and to come to the clinic at the first sign of medical troubles. And they went a little bit even beyond, this sounds like kind of your routine primary

care office, right? Or urgent care plus primary care office, all the primary care does urgent care too. But all combined. But beyond that, they had classes in first aid, in lab techniques, teaching people skills that they could use. And it was all staffed with volunteers from hospitals in the area, from the community, people who wanted to be, I mean, because if you think about this period of time, people who wanted to be part of the civil rights movement, part of you think about this period of time, people who wanted to be part of

the civil rights movement, part of changing things in this country in a real fundamental way, but didn't know the best way their skills could serve that cause. If you were a medical student, if you were a physician, if you were a nurse, if you were lab tech, if you were able to learn that stuff, if you were, whoever, that this was a way you could serve the community. And I think that like the existence of a program like this, and you know, this is still happening today, the existence of programs like this should be proof of the problem. Like it, because there needs to be facilities like this,

like the gap is proven, like it's there. You know what I mean? Like the inequality and immorality of the medical system, I think is proven out every day when you see the existence of places like this. Attempting to, by hook or by crook, fill in the gaps gaps. It's I think that's a really important point you make Justin. I've seen people say it before say it again. Some lower I've seen people say it before you didn't say it again.

Yeah, just I think that's a really important point you make Justin. Can you do it one more time but hit the really like Justin? We have to move forward. Okay. You have fair. Uh, I think that when you see, and we all see this constantly, a family set up a GoFundMe page to pay for medical bills. Yes. When you see a jar for donations at the counter at a convenience store for a local fan, it's usually that. It's

usually to help pay medical bills or surgical bills or cancer treatment bills or whatever. When you see that, every time you see that, and I know you do, you see it on Facebook all the time, that is a failure of the American medical system every single time. Why? Why does that happen? And exactly, the panthers saw there was a need,

this was a failure, specifically was a failure specifically with their community, with the black community. But for all oppressed people, this was a failure. And they sought to correct it. We wanted to do something a little bit different this week for the billing department, which we're about to head into briefly. We're going to be donating all of our ad revenue this week to the Breonna Taylor Fund. Brown Taylor was a 26 year old African American

emergency room technician who in March police executing a search warrant incorrectly burst into her home and murdered her in her bed. Today as we're recording this June 5th would have been her 27th birthday. And no arrests have been made at this point in this case. So we're donating our ad revenue to a fund set up by her family. If you would like to donate to a fund at this time, or even if you can't do so with money,

there's ways to donate, even without money or education, whatever resources. If you go to blacklivesmatters.carrd.co, you can find everything that you need. Anyway, to the billing department, let's go. that I still live my God for the mouth. So as I was saying, the clinics were, they were staffed by volunteers, they were supplied by donations. I was reading one article that was really interesting. One of the volunteers at the Boston Clinic wrote about their experience and they were saying that when they first started like, okay, we're going to set up clinic here

they had to get, they got a trailer to service the building and then they had to like hook it up to electricity and they used like a street lamp to like feed the electricity off of. So it was really like a grassroots effort to like build these clinics, fill these clinics, staff these clinics, it was a really impressive, I mean, because that's a hard thing to do. That's a very difficult thing to do, and they were able to do it at multiple sites throughout the country to serve a local community of the underserved.

In establishing these clinics, they also identified an under researchedresearched area of medicine that they thought they could make a difference, sickle selenemia. So as you may already know, I don't think we've ever done a full show on sickle cell. I don't think so. But this is a condition that primarily affects the black community. And although it had been first described, as in they saw the sickle-shape shells under a microscope and talked about it back in 1910, there was very little effort

to screen for it, to develop treatments for it. Even to this day, I would say it's an underfunded area of medicine under developed in terms of treatment. And so the Panthers thought, you know, the first thing, if we're going to learn more about this, we need to figure out who has it and like help people get into medical care if they have this condition and don't know. And so they developed a national screening program for sickle salinemia. They would recruit people like medical students from different communities to go into the community, two people's homes, or to a location within the community, and perform the test there.

Initially, they were getting kits like donated for this purpose, but eventually they ran out test kits to perform the screening. And so there was a Harvard graduate student in biology, Bill Wallace, who made his own. Wow. Made his own screening test with his skills as a graduate student in biology. And they would use these tests the night before the screening. The panthers would basically go

out into the community, put up a ton of flyers, let everybody know, hey, look, tomorrow, we're going to have this screening program. you know, this is really important. You need to get checked for this. And then they would the next day send out the students, the doctors, whoever in their white coats would go out into the streets and find people who needed to be tested, who wanted to be tested and screen them for sickle cell anemia. And they had a whole process in place once they located people who tested positive to refer them to willing doctors within the community to hospitals for further treatment and for genetic counseling and everything. So they did it from front to back. Because that's always the concern, right? If you have a screening program, once you get those results, you better have people, I mean, these are the uninsured in a lot of cases.

We better have somebody who's willing to take care of these people and the black panthers organized all of that so that they got these people into treatment and to see doctors and all that too. So it was an incredibly effective program. It led to eventually in 1972, the National Sickle Cell Anemia Control Act. This was like the one thing that eventually, like Nixon would get on board with. Yeah.

Was the Sickle Cell Program. Maybe he wasn't such a bad guy, Sid? No, he was. Bad guy. But this actually, the actions of the Black Panther Party really increased the national focus on research, funding, and treatment for this at the time. Now again, I would say this effort was on, and once it was handed off to the United States government and the powers that existed was inadequate in the long run because there still has not been enough research or effort in this area.

But the reason it started at all was this effort from the Black Panther Party. In addition to all these services and their screening programs and everything else, they also, depending on which location would provide things like drug and alcohol rehabilitation. They gave away food. They gave away clothing. They would do things like, we'll take you to your doctor's appointments if you're elderly and you need an escort. They opened a school at one point that offered classes and things like first aid and economics.

There were lots of other services that the Black Panther Party provided to the communities, like survival programs, that they would provide to say, your government is failing you. And until they'll change, we're going to try to fill that gap. And so they did a lot of these programs. Now eventually, as we're going to get into it, the Panthers would their party would start to decline. And the clinics would close as the Black Panther Party had fewer members and resources and everything. But and it's hard if you want to say like what impact, what lasting impact did that have on healthcare today. I don't think

you can deny that when you look at something like a federally qualified healthcare center today, something that is like funded by the government to provide care to the underserved, to provide care to the uninsured, to or to the underinsured, I don't think you can deny that there is at least some impact from these free health clinics, from these people's free health clinics in that, in these FQHCs that we see tons of in places like West Virginia today serving underserved populations of all colors. So I definitely think that in addition to, as I was reading the accounts from some of the doctors and medical students and people who volunteered in this, this feeling that our healthcare system is so broken and that the disparities that exist part of it is the fact that it's a free market healthcare system which makes absolutely no sense.

And these free clinics and a national healthcare system, I think that that spirit definitely exists even though it has not been able to become the status quo. Yeah. I think that those ideas and the idea that universal healthcare is a social justice issue, I definitely think you can find roots of that in these people's free health clinics, as well as, I mean, they were not the only ones with these ideas, certainly. Sure. But I think you have to draw some parallels there.

As just a kind of an ending to this story, and I think that, again, this is one of those areas where I remember one time my grandfather gave me a book called Lies, My Teachers Told Me, and I thought it was a very daring book for my grandfather to give me when I was young. And it was based on the idea that the history you think you know is not the truth. There are lots of things that have been filtered, especially in this case, through the lens of white supremacy and taught to you as if it is the only truth. And you don't know the whole story. And I think that in that spirit, learning more about the Black Panthers

organization was part of what I wanted to do, to do the show. The film that I watched, in addition to reading, was the Black Panthers Vanguard of the Revolution, which, if you're interested in learning more about the Black Panther Party, I would highly recommend you watch this documentary. There are lots of interviews from some of the key players in the party at the time to kind of give you a better understanding of, you know, not just the organization as an abstract, but the people who were in it and what they did and what they were able to accomplish

and what their goals were, more on an individual personal level. I would really highly recommend it. As the Panthers grew and expanded their goals as they were achieving all of these things that the government was failing to achieve on community levels, they got more support from the public at large. They began to work with other liberation movements. They began, there were international chapters. They spoke out against the Vietnam War. It initially was a very male movement. It was a very kind of macho typically male thing, but at its peak, the majority of members would be female. And so even though that was still a struggle at the time,

there were definitely the beginnings of like some women's liberation within this movement as well. Females taking some of the more what you would consider like masculine roles, caring guns, you know, guarding the party and men taking over some more traditionally female roles, feminine roles of like cooking breakfast for kids. You definitely saw those beginnings. What would eventually be lead to kind of the fall of the party? In part was largely due to FBI interference, J. Edgar Hoover, and then eventually Nixon. They used something called, they used a counterintelligence program that was called coin tell pro.

And this is something that any of our listeners of color probably already know all about, but I bet a lot of our white listeners do not know much about. I mean, I obviously fairly well versed in what that is, but I would love a recap for the listeners. So this counterintelligence program, where it was basically made up of FBI agents, finding ways to dismantle the Black Panther Party from the inside, because they saw them not necessarily as a violent threat, although they may have said that, that it was really a threat to the status quo and a white power. They, their ideas were garnering widespread support, and they didn't like that.

And so they found a number of ways to vilify the Black Panthers. They would, in some communities, spread rumors that they were snitching to the police, to turn public support against them. In some communities, they would accuse them of conspiracies. There's the documentary covers well. There were 21 leaders who were all arrested and accused of a fake bombing plot at one point. They would, to the American public, to all the white people, they would paint the black panthers as scary, and the very racially loaded racist term aggressive was often used, to

make the average white person watching the news at home afraid of the black panthers and try to prevent them from supporting them. They declared them at one point the biggest threat to America. And of course America was in war at the time. So to say the biggest threat to American citizens, the black panther party was again another way the government was trying to turn public support against them. They even did things like sent letters to prominent party members spouses to say, hey, just so you know, your husband or wife, whatever is cheating on you and accusing them of infidelity and trying to create even like marital discord. So like at a very personal level, they tried to destroy the party and the party members. There is a, and as Claire Willett points out in the Twitter thread that first

led me to start investigating some of this, when you hear today, like a lot of, again, like pearl clutching from politicians about like, it's not that I don't support peaceful protest, of course I do, but do you have to be so violent about it? When you hear that, that is the rotten fruit from the seeds of coin-tell pro. That's what you're hearing. You're hearing the, I mean, J. Edgar Hoover would love that

because that mentality, that idea, has permeated our power structures and the American public and our understanding of our history to this day. And of course, the culmination of this movement was Fred Hampton. And I would encourage you, if you are a white person who doesn't know much about Fred Hampton, please, please read, please study, please, please search out more than just a podcast episode about Fred Hampton. He was young, he was charismatic, he was the activist that the moment needed because not only was he an incredibly powerful speaker and well versed on the issues and able to,

you know, kind of coalesce all of the frustration and anger into action, into like, here are the things we want and need and speak to the people, to the power structures that existed to try to get them to understand. But he had, he could build that coalition between the NAACP, between the Panthers, between the church community, between activists from the Latino community. There was a group even called the young patriots who were a group of poor Southern white people who had migrated to Chicago to look for work. And again, they were mainly from the Appalachian area and he was able to build this coalition between all these disparate groups

who really had common goals to fight racism, to fight for civil rights, to fight for equality, and then fight for all these other things that would help all oppressed people. And I mean, he really, again, was the leader of the moment needed, but somebody who can change things like that is really dangerous. And the government knew that, the FBI knew that, the police knew that. And so in early December 1969,

the FBI in conjunction with the local police charged the apartment where he was staying and murdered him and murdered another member of the black panthers who was there. The criminal case against the police initially failed in 1970, but eventually a civil case would succeed in 1982 to benefit the families of those who were murdered. And it's only like with the understanding

more in more recent years of the FBI's complicity in the Quintel program, do we really know? I mean, he was assassinated. The government had him assassinated because his ideas were too dangerous for the white status quo. And if you don't know that history, again, I'm talking to fellow white people. This is a history you need to read because it is it is our history too and it's the history of a country that could have at many times gone in a better direction, but chose to continue to oppress, chose to continue to pursue white supremacy instead of equity and justice. After their peak in 1970, the Black Panther Party continually declined. They were targeted by police. There were lots of wrongful arrests and convictions. And so

they ended up spending a lot of time and energy and money trying to, in like court costs and lawyer fees and all this to try to get people, you know, back into the movement. There was a lot of infighting. There were splits among the leadership and eventually the party disbanded in 1982. The things that they fought for and I would really advise you to watch this documentary. You can see that a lot of the members talk about what we wanted was housing, health care, food, you know, clean water, education, jobs. I mean, and I'm not again, history is complex and people are complex, and this moment is complex. Yes, there was violence. Yes, there were guns, and I don't like guns.

Yes, there was shooting. That was part of it. But I think that and we've seen a lot of it right now with the protests that are going on. If you are a white person, you need to be very careful about criticizing the right way to protest. You don't get to decide the right way for a person to be angry, the right way for a person to demand justice. You don't get to decide that because the right way is the way that works. And I would be outraged about the reasons that people are protesting, not the protests. And I think the Black Panther Party is a good illustration of that idea.

I've been thinking a lot about racism, and I'm probably alone in that at this point in time, but I've been thinking a lot about it. And before all this started, and none of this brings me any joy to admit, but I would have considered myself a non-racist person. You know, I'm not a racist. I would say that pretty confidently. And then as you and I've done these episodes and as I've continued to like read and watch and listen, you think about why haven't I been told this story? Well, it's because my education was slanted towards the perspective of white people.

I have a racist education. Last week we talked about how this medical system, which is such a big part of our lives, is itself racist. It's self-racist and we know that capitalism and the the especially American capitalism is unjust towards black people. It is a racist system. Yes And you have to start to wonder or at least I have started to wonder and I hope to God the other people are having the same thought if I to God, the other people are having the same thought. If I grew up with a racist education in a racist capitalist structure benefiting from a racist medical system and all of the other racist institutions, one of the odds, one of the chances that I, even through inaction or ineptitude or naivete, don't have racist thoughts,

ideas, concepts, even through ignorance, which I would, I believe a lot of ignorance is, I'm sorry, a lot of racism is based in ignorance. If I go out myself to remain ignorant, then that in itself is racist. And like it has not, again, these revelations do not bring me joy, but I don't know. I hope other white people are having the same, or have the, you know, are willing to take that sort of long look in the deep dark truthful mirror

and see where some of these gaps are in their own sort of education and and hearts. It's uncomfortable. And I mean, it should be. It is uncomfortable. If you are a person who felt like you were also not racist and and on the naturally on the right side of this issue. And on the naturally on the right side of this issue, and right now some of the things people are saying to you about areas where you don't know enough or aren't helping enough or aren't doing enough. If it's making you uncomfortable, that's good. This is uncomfortable. It's something that we weren't doing enough of or any of, obviously, because things would be different.

So I would encourage, again, I think when I talk about these things, I think to myself, people of color know this history, people of color know these truths. White people don't. And when this history is put out there as black history, I think you need to understand white people that this is our history. It is the history of our country. It is a history of our grandfathers and grandmothers and great-grandfather, they were involved in these stories.

And we often would not like the roles they played. And so it is our duty to learn this history. And to make sure the history that is taught 100 years, 200 years from now is different. Thank you so much for listening to solbones. We hope you found the time well spent, I would say. Thank you, the taxpayers for these, their song medicines is the intro and outro of our program. Thank you, the taxpayers for using their song Medicines is the intro and outro of our program. And thanks to you for listening. We appreciate you. And we hope you'll join us again next week for another episode of Saw Bones. Until then, my name is Justin McRoy.

I'm Sydney McRoy. And as always, don't drill a hole in your head! Alright! Comedy and Culture. Artist-owned? Audience-supported.