TrueLife - Disrupting Medicine - Decentralised Clinical Trials

Episode Date: December 9, 2022

Clinical trials are right for disruption. In modern science, clinical trials are the gatekeeper that keep great, affordable medical products, and services out of Reach for every day people.

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear, furious through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, check, check. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. I hope your day is going beautiful. Hope the birds are singing. I hope the sun is shining in the world.

wind is at your back. I hope you have something beautiful plan coming up. I wanted to take a quick moment or two just to talk about this new idea that's not so much my idea as it is an idea that belonged to the community and something that I look forward to exploring more. And it's this idea of clinical trials and science. Doesn't it seem odd to you these ideas of clinical trials? Like when I think of clinical trials, I think of, you know, a selling point. I think of this. Whenever you think of clinical trials, in my mind, I see a bag of chips at a grocery store that says clinically tested. And it's sad because when we look at clinical trials in the world today, it seems to me they've become corrupted.

The same way science has been bought, the same way the FDA can have an emergency approval for something. silly, but when we look at science and drugs and medicine today, clinical trials seems to be a sort of gatekeeper. It seems to me that we have found a way to not allow anybody or everybody to participate in medicine. And on some levels, I guess it's good. You want to keep some bad ideas around, but the only way clinical trials can be done is with millions of dollars. And the rub is that once a clinical trial has been done, now the insurance companies can jump in and it can be put out to medicine. And it just becomes this giant cash cow. And so, you know, on the topic of clinical trials, would it be possible to circumvent the pharmaceutical industry or maybe compete

with or even complement it by using the expert opinions of a large group of well-trained, experienced users? You know what I mean by that? So when you have a clinical trial, you try to isolate all these different variables so you can find out what's going on. But I want you to think about the way clinical trials are done. They're done like in a lab. They're done in this isolated environment. And when you test something in an isolated environment, are you really testing it? Let me give you an example. Everyone knows about these rat studies that scientists do on rats. There was a very famous study where they put this rat, they put these rats in a cage and they gave them one bar to press for like cocaine and another bar to press that didn't give them. And what they found is that over a period of time, the rats

would all of a sudden start pressing this bar for Coke and they'd get all coked up and they became crackheads. I know I'm kind of simplifying the experiment, but that's kind of what happened there. And the way the study was written up is like, oh, well, look, this is what happens. You put, you put a rat in an environment and you give them this drug and that they're going to just do drugs until they die. But what you fail to understand is that this rat was put in a cage. It was taken from its environment. It was put in this isolated environment where nobody around it, of course, it's going to end up doing drugs. So what are you really testing in these things? What kind of variables are being put up? That's what I'm, that's what I think is happening in medicine today is that

we take people and we put them in these labs and we test stuff on them. But what are you really testing? Are you, are you accounting for the isolated environment? Are you accounting for these other variables. So let's say you take a drug and you test out like an SSRI on these people and you put them in a lab setting. The problem with that is that you're not going to give later when the drug is approved, you're not going to give a person these SSRIs and are going to be in an isolated environment. Why not test it out in the open? And let's let's talk about psychedelics because I think that what we're seeing on the front of psychedelics is something that we could be used to, to, to, modernized medicine. So in today's world, we see a lot of psychedelics, be it ketamine, be it

mushrooms, be it LSD. We're beginning to see money flow into the psychedelic environment and they're setting up these trials. But the same way they test rats in isolated environments, so too are they testing drugs on people in isolated environments. I think it's a bad way to go. And I know a lot of people are not going to be happy with that because they have a lot of money invested in it, but it's kind of a shitty way to do it if you really think about it. So might it be better? This is just, I'm just throwing this out here. And mind, I'm not a scientist. I'm not a doctor, but I'm an experienced user of psychedelics. And I'm an experienced reader. And I've read a lot of clinical trials and I've read a lot of books. And it just seems to me there's a better way to do it. Let's think about, let me just

go on this tangent for a moment. Who's doing the trials? Well, it's usually big pharma. It's usually people that want to get patents. So when they want to get patents, if the scientist paycheck is dependent upon a desired result, don't you think that that scientist is going to probably lean a certain way? Are you really impartial if the guy that's funding the study wants a result to be a certain way? I think of tobacco, big tobacco and how they figured out smoking isn't bad for you. I think it's some climate scientists who have found incredible links. Whoever's funding the study is probably going to get the results they want. And if you're a scientist who's being funded by Big Pharma

and they're telling you we want these results and you don't get those results, you're probably going to get fired. So you see that there's a conflict of interest when it comes to clinical trials. Okay, so let me get to some things that I think are exciting. Why not take the money out of clinical trials? Why not crowdfunded?

Right? There's enough people. There's enough people that want science. There's enough people, especially in psychedelics, There's enough people that would like to get legitimate results that would be willing to put up money to crowd fund a clinical trial. We could decentralize it. You know, we don't need a team of five scientists in lab coats and clipboards standing around some isolated individual in a lab. Let's take, let's say you were going to use mushrooms or LSD.

You could take that particular dosage of that particular strain and give it to 10 different people. Okay, we want you to use this particular drug at this particular time of day and we want you to film yourself doing it. Everybody signs off on it. They videotape it. Now, once that experiment is done, those 10 individuals that took that drug, they could upload their trip to the web. And then you could have a team of researchers. You could have 20 different teams and 20 different countries analyzing that data. People would be, you would have more variables, but you would have a lot.

you would have the money taken out of it. And you could have experienced people taking the time to go over the data because they want to, not because they have to. And then imagine these 20 different teams from 20 different places around the world interviewing the person that took the drug and then comparing notes with the other teams. I think it's a much better way of doing science. And let's say that a patent comes out of these clinical trials. That patent could now be opened up to the public.

So you would take the money out of it. There would be no need to have these giant pharmaceutical companies or money to interest or people that are purely rent seeking that patent. Instead, that patent would belong to the people the same way Jonas Salk provided patents to the people. And I think that you would have a more robust scientific community. I think you'd have a more robust results. In fact, there was a guy named James Fateman who wrote a book called The Psychedelic Explorers guy. And he did kind of the same thing. In his book, he talked about microdosing.

And then he set up a website where those people who wanted to share their results from their microdosing could do that. And he put together an incredibly extensive site where you can go and look at those results. And I think that those results are not only more rewarding, but they show much more scientific data than a controlled, isolated results. focused, profit-driven model. And so I think this is super exciting because not only could this extend to medicine, but this could be a way for us to continue to decentralize the regulatory capture that has happened not only in the medical community, but in the financial community. You know, this idea of decentralizing and crowdfunding is something that breaks down the

barriers between the guy that gets up and goes to work every day and the guy that has gone has been given everything, gone to med school, his parents are wealthy and he comes from a background in pharmacies. You know what I mean? It just breaks down the big club George Carlin talk to us about. You know, the big club that you're not in? Yeah, it breaks down those walls. I think that clinical trials for far too long have been a very narrow road that only a few people are allowed to travel. And it leads to these patents. It leads to these ideas that no one is allowed to have. And that's exactly why we have modern medicine in a giant shithole today. That's why people can't afford drugs. It's why people can't afford to have the procedures they need

is because it's a profit-driven model like that. But we could decentralize it. We could crowd fund it. I would love to hear people's ideas on it. I think decentralizing clinical trials and crowdfunding them and then nationalizing the patents or keeping those patents open is a great way for the world we live in to become better. And I think that clinical trials are ripe for disruption. You know, here's maybe some pushback that I could get. You know, when people say, when people say, no, George, you can't allow for this big open trials like that because the results you're going to get, George, are going to be subjective. Maybe they are subjective, but aren't, the same ideas done in a lab subjective?

Like we've already talked about, if you isolate a person in a lab into a clinical trial, are you counting for the variables of that lab? Are you counting for the variables of isolation? Like what effects to isolation have on the individual in that lab? And here's a point you might want to think about. Why is it that we,

when we do clinical trials of drugs on individuals, we put them in a solitary, confinement, right? That's kind of what it is. When you're a doctor and you're studying someone in a lab via clinical trials, they're kind of in solitary confinement. We test drugs on people in solitary. We also use solitary confinement for our criminals. Like those two things don't, those are incongruent. We use solitary confinement to, for our prisoners when we want to punish them. And we also use solitary confinement when we want to study drugs on people. It just doesn't seem like congruent to me. And I think there's a better way to do it.

I just wanted to kind of get this one out because it was fresh in my head. And, you know, I've always found that when you have an idea, it's best to get it on, get it on tape, get it on paper and get the idea out there. But I think it's worth thinking about. So think about disrupting clinical trials, crowdfunding them. And I think it's a good way to disrupt medicine. That's what I got for today. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm so excited that I can even talk to you. I'm so thankful for everybody taking a moment to listen to this.

And I think that every one of you out there has ideas that can change the world. So get them out on tape. Say what you have to say. Everything you do, you can make a difference in the world. You're a beautiful person. I love you. That's all I got for the day. I love.