EPISODE 3
“Your Hunch is the Science,” a conversation with Dr. David Healy
Join Heather and Lee’s discussion with Dr. David Healy highlighting randomized controlled trials, why you can’t always trust the “science,” and the importance of your hunch or gut feeling when treatment goes wrong and how it’s your best guide to avoid unnecessary harm.
TRANSCRIPT
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LEE: Awareness is power.
HEATHER: And it can save your life.
LEE: Welcome to our podcast, “Know Risks.”
HEATHER: I’m Heather.
LEE: And I’m Lee. We’re two moms, a lawyer and a nurse, who were brought together by a misfortune. Both our children were harmed by adverse drug reactions.
HEATHER: The purpose of this podcast is to educate people on the risk of any health treatments you put in or on your body.
LEE: We feel if we’d been properly informed and been our own experts, our children would not have been harmed.
HEATHER: In today’s world, with medicines being incentivized for profits, you need to educate yourself. Know the risk of health treatments and it can protect yourself and your loved ones from being harmed.
LEE: Thank you for joining us today on our episode, “Your Hunch is the Science.” We are honored to have Dr. David Healy joining us to discuss issues with randomized control trials, why you can’t always trust the science, and how often your hunch or your gut feeling is a better guide to keeping you from being harmed.
Here’s Heather; she’s going to give a little bit more information about Dr. Healy before we get started.
HEATHER: Thanks, Lee.
Dr. David Healy; read his full biography
Dr. David Healy is a world-renowned psychiatrist, psychopharmacologist, neuropsycopharmacologist, scientist, and author. He undertook his doctoral research on the serotonin system on which antidepressants work, while qualifying in psychiatry. He moved to Cambridge University for higher training in psychiatry and to engage in post-doctoral research.
He has since been a Professor of Psychiatry in Cardiff University and Bangor University, working clinically in the NHS for 30 years, before recently being appointed as a professor of Psychiatry in the Department of Family Medicine at McMaster University in Canada.
His main area of research includes the contribution of psychotropic drugs to suicide, for which he was one of the very first researchers to make this link; the adverse effects of these drugs; the conflicts of interest between pharmaceutical companies and academic medicine; and the history of pharmacology.
He has published 25 books on medicine, primarily on physical treatments and the development of the pharmaceutical industry, including the standard histories of antidepressants, antipsychotics, and mood-stabilizers. He has authored over 60 chapters in books on similar issues, over 200 peer-reviewed articles, and over 250 other pieces, for the most part dealing with the impact of medicines on health care.
He has been involved in numerous legal cases, centered primarily on the harms of treatment. He has acted as an expert in numerous cases in the United States involving suicide and psychotropic drugs, and he has publicly and internally provided testimony and consultation to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regarding psychotropic drugs and their effects.
Dr. Healy was the leading expert in my son O’Shea’s wrongful death case. You can listen to his testimony and view other materials from the lawsuit on our website, knowrisks.org.
LEE: Today we are very honored to have Dr. David Healy joining us with our podcast, and Dr. Healy, maybe I’ll just let you give a quick intro for yourself before we get started on today’s chat.
DAVID: Well, I guess the first thing to say: I’m David. I don’t recognize “Dr. Healy” — (laughs) — all that much, so, yeah, so it’s David to you guys and to anyone who’s listening.
And as an intro, what hit me a while back, when you asked me first, was I had a younger brother. He’s dead. He died at the age of six months. And my mum felt that things weren’t quite right with him when he was born and she took him back to the hospital and they said, we’ve run all the test on him and he seems to be fine, you know, and she kept repeating no, no, he’s not fine, OK? And they ended up saying to my father that look, she’s neurotic; here are some pills to give her; she’s just being a mother who’s neurotic, OK? Turned out she was right and they were wrong. Now, 15 or 20 years later, or whatever it was, when I went on to do medicine, one of the things that I heard pretty early on was when a mother comes in with her child and even if all the tests say that he’s fine or she’s fine, you believe the mother. So there had been a big change there and my hunch was that was the way medicine was going to go from there on; there was going to be much more emphasis on the hunches that people, particularly women, particularly mothers, daughters of parents — the wives of husbands is a completely different matter, but anyway — yeah, that, you know, you needed to believe the hunches people had. But that’s not the way medicine has gone; it’s gone just the opposite way. So you’re asking me who am I, this is who I am, a person who has been heavily influenced by this event that happened way back and it looked like we’d turned a corner, were going in the right direction, but we haven’t turned a corner and gone the right direction; we’ve turned a corner and gone the wrong direction. And I think that’s why I’m actually meeting you guys here today because you’ve been in this kind of situation where people haven’t believed what seemed obvious to you; they’ve gone by the tests or gone by their training or whatever and, as a result, have harmed the people that you’ve been concerned about and the people that I’m concerned about.
LEE: Yeah. So that’s exactly true. Both Heather and I have been affected in a similar way to your mom and I think we both can say that, at least for myself, I was treated like I was crazy, you know, with a daughter presenting with symptoms that, at the time, weren’t even all documented as warnings on that drug but subsequently have come out, and similar with Heather. One of the — so with that, so it hasn’t changed over all these years and —
DAVID: Well, I think it has changed.
LEE: OK.
DAVID: I think it has changed but got worse. It looked like it was changing in the way I would have hoped it would have changed, but things have actually gone backwards in that I think you’re even less likely to be believed now than you would have been 20, 30, 40 years ago.
LEE: Wow. Yeah, I hadn’t thought about it that way.
One of the things that I was wondering is specifically with the drug that my daughter, Charlie, got and Heather’s son Shea: Levaquin. The black box warning — and, you know, maybe we should give a little description of what that is — but over the years, for that drug, it’s changed; like, there was a new warning put on almost over six different time periods. Like, I think it was 2008, 2013, 2016, two more in 2018. So what is the process that that is kind of changing over those years? And it’s not that the drug has become necessarily more dangerous; it’s some sort of reporting. And is that enough? Obviously, maybe not.
DAVID: Yeah. No, it’s not. Part of the problem we’ve got, I think, we got around 1962, OK, when after the Thalidomide crisis, a bunch of people who are well meaning said, well, we’ve got to get industry to prove their drugs work before they bring them on the market and we’re going to get them to do that by using randomized control trials, RCTs as they’re called. And this is the evidence in evidence-based medicine; this is follow the science. When Joe Biden says follow the science, that’s what he’s talking about. The natural fact, it ended up turning out a completely different way. Industry realized they were being forced to run these trials and the job for them was to try and convert the trials into what you could call an assay system and it took them 20, 30 years to do this. What I mean by an assay system is this: For instance, there was a big fuss and it’s partly — not the whole reason but partly why the U.K. left the European Union. Shortly after it joined the European Union, the Europeans told the Brits that your chocolate can’t be called chocolate. It isn’t the same stuff as our chocolate. Our chocolate has a ratio of cocoa that’s much higher than yours and for things to really be called chocolate in Europe, you’ve got to meet this particular standard, OK? Now, how do you know that it meets this particular standard? Well, you’ve got a machine or whatever that will estimate how much cocoa is in the actual bar of chocolate, OK? So that’s an assay system and that’s what industry wanted to do with all the foods. For instance, if the regulator, the FDA or whatever, are asked, is this butter, it could be, for instance, lard colored to look like butter, but they’ll have a machine which estimates the proportion of different kinds of fats and the ones that you would normally have in butter, as opposed to lard, and they’ll say, well, yes, this is butter. And what industry are good at doing is saying well, they’ve put this new assay system in place we have to use, which is called control trials, and we want to make sure that the material we put in, whether it’s an antibiotic or an antidepressant or whatever, you know, that it meets criteria. We’re not doing science. We’re not trying to find out what this drug does; we’re not trying to find out the full range of things — might do good things in this person, bad things in that person. We’re not asking, is this drug good for you or not, you know, just the way that people who make butter aren’t asking, is butter good for you or is this a good butter; they’re not asking is chocolate good for you. In the same way, industry aren’t really looking at whether these drugs are good for you; they’re just running a system to show that they’ve hit the bull’s eye and they can call this chocolate or butter or an antibiotic or an antidepressant. I mean, there’s no actual science there. There’s no effort to explore what these things are really doing and could they be harmful or whatever, or if they are harmful, what is it they’re doing that actually causes the harm. And this leads —
HEATHER: Yeah, I was just going to say, I mean, that’s — is it butter or is it not butter, but what this all originates on and what I really thought was one of the foundations of science are our hunches, you know? You observe something.
DAVID: Yes, yes. No, of course. Absolutely.
HEATHER: OK, so I can — you can tell me that’s butter and I can accept that’s butter, but I have the capacity to observe what’s going on either with my body, my child’s body, my loved one’s body, and I can say this all fits. And wasn’t it initially, I would hope, the impetus for these clinical trials would be that very component, the observation to see the effect that whatever they identified as butter or chocolate or an antibiotic would have on our bodies, to ensure the safety of those drugs or those —
DAVID: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure. Sure. And when the people put it in place, when they put control trials in place as a hoop that industry had to jump through, they were acting as doctors and actually clinical scientists. They were doing just what you’re saying. They wanted people to look at the full range of things that these drugs do, OK? But industry are very good at saying, well, you know, to do the statistics that go with control trials, you’ve got to focus on just one thing, OK, which is the primary thing the drug does, OK, and you’ve got to have all the attention — the way industry run control trials is an act of hypnosis; they’re getting you to focus on one thing and there can be an elephant in the room but you’re not going to spot it, OK? And every drug, unlike butter and chocolate probably, every drug does maybe a hundred things, maybe even much, much more than that, but let’s say they do at least a hundred things; industry are just getting you to focus in on the one thing and they sell the idea that, well, this is the thing the drug does most often, you know, and there may be other things that could go wrong, but they’re rare, or maybe they happen when you’ve been on the drug for months and our trials only ran for two or three months. But in fact, that’s not the case. What industry are getting you to focus on is the thing that’s going to be commercially good for you — well, not for you, for them.
HEATHER: Or profitable.
DAVID: Well, yes, yes.
HEATHER: (Laughs.)
DAVID: Yeah, that’s going to be profitable for them. And the case of the antidepressants, that brings the thing out best, which is they’ve got a very weak effect on your mood, but this is where industry are going to make money, and they want you to believe that well, there may be other things that could but they’re rare; you know, they just happen to the odd person, but the mood change happens to most people. In fact, the mood change is not all that common, and the single thing that happens to most people when they take an SSRI antidepressant, for instance, is within half an hour of the first pill, pretty well everyone will have numb genitals. But the way industry run their trials, getting you to focus on the mood change, people miss that. You know, I think that was happening to everyone within half an hour of their first pill got missed.
LEE: Wow.
HEATHER: And I’m sure they were talking about it, correct?
DAVID: Not especially, no. I mean, first of all — I mean, it might have been missed completely by the people on the pill. They may have been aware — ooh, this is a bit different, you know.
LEE: (Laughs.)
DAVID: But the doctors didn’t ask the questions because even though industry knew this could happen, there was nothing in the questions they asked the doctors to ask that linked back to this at all. And there was no room for people to say, well, yeah, Doctor, my mood’s a bit better but funny things are happening [to] my intimate life; could the pills be causing this, you know?
LEE: Yeah. If that’s not on the side effect questionnaire —
DAVID: It’s not going to be —
LEE: I’m sure they might observe it but quite often with these medications you’re told to continue them and not stop.
DAVID: Yeah.
LEE: And I think sometimes they’ll tell you the side effects might go away over time. And so I agree with you that the focus is on the main action or, you know, the main benefit, but nobody’s taking into account all the risks, the other side effects of risks.
DAVID: Just to pick up on that, Lee, just to pick up on that, which is — and the issue was actually asked by Heather, which was, wouldn’t the people on the pills know this was happening and the answer is yes, they do, but the story becomes one of well, the clinical trials, the science has only shown this; this is all we know for sure, right?
LEE: Oh, yeah, and that is the most frustrating part. Yeah, sorry, I cut you off.
DAVID: No, no, no, sure. But on the issue of the antidepressants and kind of sex, well, I can vividly recall a lady that came into see me once, 20 years ago or so, and — I mean, I can see her still and she came in and talked to me about, you know, she couldn’t actually make love the way she used to be able to make love while she was on this antidepressant. And I said, well, yes, it’s known that these drugs can do this, but, you know, if you need to go away for the weekend, you can just halt your pills and everything will be fine. And she said, nope. I said, really? And she said, yes, I’ve been off this pill for three months, OK, and I can take a hard bristled brush and rub it up and down my genitals and feel nothing. So you can see why I remember this lady. (Laughs.) This was not the kind of conversation you easily forget. But it was interesting. I mean, she didn’t just — I mean, this comes back to the point you both made which is she’s making an observation that has to be right, you know. Nothing causes you to be able to rub a hard bristle brush up and down your genitals — you know, there isn’t anything that we know that does this other than pasting an anesthetic, actually, on the genitals, OK? So you look at (the other thing ?): What’s different in her life, and it’s the pill. OK?
HEATHER: Well, you’re one of the rare doctors, though, who would actually listen to that complaint and contemplate it. That is a real anomaly. I know in our country you just — that doesn’t happen and I think that’s how I ended up where I did; Lee fortunately did not have to face as much of that because she was able to connect sooner with others, not so much experts but a lot of laypeople who had gone through this and had mobilized through having access to each other, I think through social media and other forms, but to really encounter a doctor such as yourself unfortunately is just not the norm.
DAVID: Hold on a second.
HEATHER: (Laughs.)
DAVID: Yeah, the thing is, most doctors are probably doing the same thing as I’ve done with this lady and with a whole bunch of people, just to listen to people when they say things that are pretty obvious. It’s a bit like going back to the 1960s when the oral contraceptives came out first and women went along to their hairdressers and either the woman said, or maybe the hairdresser said, look, you know, those pills that you were actually talking to me about a few weeks ago when you were here last, you know, your hair looks a bit different since you started taking them. It was — you know, it was obvious. This is obvious stuff. It wasn’t doctors who could have spotted this. You went to the doctor and said, look, I think it’s made a difference to my hair and, you know, most doctors at the time probably listened to you. What’s happened since is changes to your hair — you’re told they’re not in the control trials that we did so it was just coincidence; these things happen but nothing to do with our pill. And doctors have been brainwashed into listening to what they think is actually the science when you, when you noticed the change in your hair, or you when you noticed the change in Shea or whoever, you’re the people who are actually doing the science and I’m doing the science when I listen to you, not when I say to you, “the science says.”
HEATHER: So if we go back to these trials, though, when did that shift take place that the — it sounds like the negative shift happened when whatever that drug was going to be marketed for those effects were the ones that were highlighted while they were in the trial stage. So that was the primary item that was being looked at in these trials? Is that what you’re saying or — allowing it to miss potential side effects?
LEE: They don’t want to document the side effects.
HEATHER: I understand that, but what was the shift in these trials?
LEE: I think she’s saying in general — are you saying in general, like, just —
HEATHER: I mean, at one point were they — is it because they’re highlighting so much what the drug company wants to market them for that it really eliminates any identification of potential negative effects they might have? I mean, how does that — how did roll out? You know, I’ve done a lot of interviews about my son and what happened and one of the questions I just always have at the end is, how did we get here? You know, how did we get here?
DAVID: OK, well, it’s the job of industry to stop doing science. They don’t want to find out anything out about this drug that’s going to interfere with the marketing. They simply don’t want to know about it, OK? So they’re looking at the fact they have to do control trials. Now, one thing about control trials that I’ve tried to emphasize to you is they’re an act of hypnosis, so rather than doing science normally, they fit very well with the industry’s plans. And even Thalidomide, when put into a control trial, there was no sign of any problems, OK? But the next step is this: In the 1960s, when people began doing control trials, when industry handed over the pills and said, look, can you do some control trials for us, it was doctors doing the trials. And maybe they’re only happening in one hospital and the professor of medicine had all of the data in his filing cabinet. It was a him then, OK? So he had all of the data in his filing cabinet. But industry began to outsource trials so that the big pharmaceutical companies don’t run the trials; there’s clinical trial companies that run the trials in a load of different centers, so any doctor in one particular hospital may have a bit of the data from, you know, the trial that he or she helped run in that hospital, but the clinical research company has all of the data from all of the different hospitals, and they’re the only ones that get to see the big picture, OK? If even the person who entered all the patients into the actual trial and met them and things like that, OK, you’d have a good feel for what the pill did, but if you’re a person who only ran the trial in one hospital and maybe just recruited 10 patients and all of the hospitals also recruited 10 patients, or whatever, then you don’t know what the picture really looks like. Maybe there was something odd that happened to one person, but you’re not confident that you really know — in particular these days because the professor of medicine doesn’t actually meet the patients anymore; it’s one of the junior doctors maybe that actually runs the trial. So all of the data ends up back with the clinical research company and if any of the professors linked in to the trial ask to see the data, they don’t get to see it. They’re told sorry, no. Once upon a time they had all the data there and they could go and check — you know, I’ve got this hunch about what might have happened; I can check through all of the records and see. Now they don’t have the data.
And the other thing is that back in the ’60s, if I was linked to a clinical trial, it was me that wrote the results up, but as of the 1980s, the industry also outsourced that to medical writing companies, so you’ve got very clever women, usually, with Ph.D.s who are awfully good at being able to write stuff up and who write up the data that they get from the clinical research company, which is tables of data. They don’t see the data either. They don’t analyze it. They just say, OK, this is the table that has been handed to me and I’m going to write the article around this and I know that, you know, the company wants some important commercial messages put in there as well, but between one thing and the other you end up with an article — as the vaccine articles in The New England Journal of Medicine right at the moment now all clearly state they’ve been ghostwritten and the lead authors say, we have never seen the data. So you’ve got a situation — (laughs) — you’ve got these articles in The New England Journal of Medicine —
LEE: Where they’re outsourcing this clinical data analysis, what is the incentive? Like, who funds them and, like, do they have an incentive to sort of — you know, I’ve kind of worked in research. You’re looking for a certain answer; you’re always looking for the answer that you want that’s going to be that your drug is successful at treating whatever condition you’re hoping that it treats. But like you said, you’re not necessarily —
DAVID: No, you don’t —
LEE: Sorry?
DAVID: You don’t want to be successful at treating anything. If you’re industry, you only want to be able to legally claim “my drug is an antibiotic” or an antidepressant, and then doctors use it; if things go wrong, well, you just blame the doctor.
LEE: Right.
DAVID: It’s all about marketing claims. Industry can’t say our drug is going to save your life and ensure that you go to heaven. But if some academic says that in an article, industry can cite it. The FDA otherwise will say that the industry can only directly claim this drug is antidepressant. They don’t particularly want to cure you of anything; in fact, if anything, they want to give you more illnesses so you’ll use more drugs.
LEE: Yeah, more drugs.
DAVID: They just don’t want to kill you too early — (laughs) — but other than that, they’re not in the business of trying to cure you.
HEATHER: (Laughs.)
LEE: Well, you see that a lot. You see that a lot with, you know, there’s something that comes on the market that potentially causes blood clots; then miraculously the same company will come out with the medication that actually treats blood clots. (Laughs.) So, yeah, there is sort of a cycle that goes on.
HEATHER: Well, not only that, then all the sudden the symptom — I mean, it’s really the whole system has been co-opted. I don’t know how that happened. But, you know, then the reaction to the drug becomes not a reaction to the drug but an underlying health condition that maybe went with the original diagnosis, so they’ve really locked in any way to — you know, when you’re trying to navigate the system, it’s very hard to really not fall into the trap such as what happened in my situation with my son of kind of subscribing to some of this, because it’s like, oh, my god, there’s this underlying condition, there’s this, there’s that, and it really diverts your focus, especially when you’re completely unaware of all this and just subject to the marketing and the stuff that we have access through more mainstream channels that, you know, it’s really this — an effect to a drug and potentially you’re healthy — (laughs) — underneath that all. You know? I mean, it’s just the whole system has been co-opted. And, you know, in hindsight, you know, I look back and think, how in the world — I worked in mental health for over 15 years; I was a high-level executive. My job was to get money, federal and state money, to promote mental health awareness, to make sure that if there was children or adults out there suffering that they had access to the treatment that they needed. I believed it. And then here I have my son, who never had mental health issues, who takes an antibiotic and starts having a lot of problems that he completely attributed to that drug, but, you know, you just have this whole system. You know, of course, we weren't familiar with all the clinical trial data but we were familiar with what the doctors were telling us, but the whole system that just really allows this type of disaster to occur because, you know, there’s just so many in the name of science — there’s so many other reasons why that patient might be suffering that it cannot be, you know, the treatment or the drug that they were given. And in my son’s case it proved fatal because I think of my involvement in the system, of my belief that, you know, he was being given the proper treatment; my advice to him was tell your doctors everything, tell them everything, which, you know, Dr. Healy was the expert, David, in my case and has seen all those records. He told them. You know, he told them about that, and I know the way that he told us so I know that that was something that, you know, came up often that was really disregarded even though he rapidly declined and it led to his death. So I mean, hearing stuff like this, it’s just overwhelming in terms of kind of just a hopelessness for how you navigate something like this. You’re either a victim or the loved one of a victim.
LEE: It’s proving that we need to definitely take, you know, do our own research and do our own learning because Charlie didn’t have the same fate as Shea, but could have gone that way because I must have seen probably about six different doctors that immediately wanted to put her on medication for the side effects, which I was fortunate enough to have steered a different direction. And I thank social media for that because I was thinking about it: If I didn’t have access to the internet and some people starting Facebook and just other people’s anecdotal comments of side effects, I wouldn’t have probably even connected her symptoms with the medication either because how many of us are actually going out and reading black box warnings or the drug packaging that comes in the package that only the pharmacist sees? And if you go to your doctor and you’re told these side effects are rare and it’s not — you know, even they’re not aware because the clinical trials aren’t highlighting every single other, you know, side effect, only really what its action is, we’re not taken seriously.
DAVID: OK, let me respond, OK —
LEE: Yes.
DAVID: — which is, there’s two key questions: one, when you go to the — at the doctors, why do you not believe me, and the other key question is, why do you not believe yourself? My mother had it right. You know, she — her hunch was absolutely right. Women with their hairdressers and the hairdresser’s hunch is absolutely right. You know, you don’t need to go and read black box labels, and in fact, if you start going reading those things, you may end up with bigger problems. Let me explain why I think it’s going on, which is men create gadgets, guns and bombs and computers and iPhones, sort of all the geeky stuff, and they improve on them; you know, the boys improve on these things from year to year. Not ideally — they don’t make the perfect gadgets that work as well for women as for men, but they kind of generally improve on these things from year to year because if you don’t, at least with guns and bombs, you’re going to be in a bad place if the other guy comes up with a better bomb or gun or whatever, so there’s an arms race, and it is the same, actually, in business, and we’ve got the expectation that, you know, that the gadgets are going to get better every year.
“ Most of the drugs we have now are weaker, are less effective than the ones we had 50 years ago, more dangerous, and more expensive. What’s happened, though, where the improvements have happened has not been in making better drugs but in making better propaganda. ”
In the case of health, drugs look like a gadget and the guys have been working at them; we have the expectation that they’re going to get better year by year, but they’re not. Most of the drugs we have now are weaker, are less effective than the ones we had 50 years ago, more dangerous, and more expensive. What’s happened, though, where the improvements have happened has not been in making better drugs but in making better propaganda. And we can now persuade you — they can now persuade you that the drugs we have today, which are weaker and more dangerous and more expensive than what we had 50 years ago, are actually better than what we had. It’s a bit like being able to explain to you that the guns are better, except trying to do that with guns is a bit tricky when it turns out that the other guy’s gun really is better than yours. (Laughs.) So but what’s got more powerful now is the propaganda. And even the level of cleverness that goes into writing a drugs label so that it throws you off course is incredible. You know, they really spent hours, ages on armies of lawyers and marketing people just working to treat the words so you’re thrown off course.
So this comes back to — what I said was the guys make gadgets, and it’s a bit gendered to say this, but women make people. Guys don’t. And this is where —
HEATHER: Well, they play a role, David. (Laughs.)
LEE: (Laughs.)
DAVID: Sure, sure, sure, but a minor role. But anyway, yeah, sure. (Laughter.) But the —
HEATHER: And according to the propaganda now, they do make people or they can or they will be soon. (Laughs.)
DAVID: Well, yeah, yeah, OK. Well, let’s worry about that when it happens. (Laughs.) But anyway —
HEATHER: That’s another episode. (Laughs.)
DAVID: It is. It is. Absolutely. But so the key thing is it’s you listening to your children and your parents and things like that and seeing the change in them, noticing them and noticing, you know, the changes that are the key thing, and that’s what you’ve got to hang onto. Women, when it comes to these things, in terms of all the side effects of all these pills and making a difference, getting black box warnings there, this is, all across the board, being done by women, not men. The motivation women have is worth more than any expertise the guys have, at least in the health area, and the people that know this — what you’re up against is the fact that the people that know this are industry; that’s why they pitch the appeals to the latest drugs, the latest screening tests and things like that, to women, the mothers of children, the daughters of parents. That’s the pitch that they actually make and it’s going to take you guys to work out how to combat it, you know. How do you — I mean, we’ve got a kind of MeToo moment, but it’s more — what’s kind of needed is a kind of “WeToo” moment, you know. We are the people that keep people safe working together; why don’t you believe us? And you don’t need many experts on the spike protein or serotonin or things like that to be able to keep people safe. You just need to go by your hunches, stick by your hunches, listen to what the people may say to you, but increasingly be aware that doctors are like politicians; how do you know when they’re lying? It’s when they move their lips. And when it comes to politicians, you question them really fiercely. The same thing needs to happen with, you know, people who are working in health care as well. You know, when they begin to open the mouth and parrot things, you need to nail them down and, you know, say that this doesn’t seem to make sense to you.
LEE: Yeah.
DAVID: But anyway.
HEATHER: But I think that — I mean, I think the fact that there has been so many groups that have — groups of people who’ve been harmed are more aware of this — have really mobilized and had a voice. I think you can — it was obvious that that was having an impact, because now the messaging we get, whether it’s from industry or politicians or our government, is this real — this whole idea that an individual person could do their own research or, you know, just a real disregard for that, and almost an ignorance put on people who think without the proper training they can come to any type of conclusion. And that has been a strong media message. I think that this whole COVID issue has blown the lid off that, if you look at it, because there’s this real disregard. And it even turned into a bit of, you know, you even talk about those ideas, or talk about the experience I went through and why I might have concerns with putting other things in my body or my loved one’s body in the form of a treatment or a vaccine, that I want to know more, but that I’m selfish; that makes me selfish. You know what I mean? You’re not — “you don’t have the expertise, you are not capable, and all’s you’re doing is you’re hindering and scaring other people, so you’re not doing something noble in warning someone, you’re actually making someone — exposing them to either the harm of a pandemic or the harm of not being properly treated the way our health system says you should be.” And I think that has just been — it’s been fascinating for me to watch because I’m just like, how are people, you know, just buying into this? I can’t judge because I was in a similar situation before I became more aware, but it took the death of my son to get there.
So I just think that, you know, watching this, highly educated people, you know, highly — you know, whether it’s through formal education or life experiences that I’ve talked to, there’s just this idea that, you know, how dare you even think that you could come up with any type of accurate assessment, you know, of how this might affect you. Like, there’s just this huge promotion of expertise, which is really just being used to, I believe, silence anyone who has the hunches that we’re talking about.
LEE: Well, I think that what I’ve found is that anybody that kind of is more on the side of, like, really needing the full information and are doing their research they’ve had some sort of an encounter with an adverse drug reaction or their loved one or someone they know. Those are the people. And sadly, that group is growing, and I think that there’s a whole realm of those people that probably have had an adverse drug reaction that aren’t even aware that it was linked because they’ve been told that it was rare and it wasn’t related. But those — people are becoming more aware and I think people are starting to, like — it’s good to go with a hunch and it’s good to go with what you think, but both, I think — Heather and I, you know, our hunches after the fact, that would have saved probably Shea, and it definitely helped Charlie. But really we would have been better off knowing that information and doing our due diligence before our kids were harmed. You know?
HEATHER: Yeah, but, I mean, according to what David Healy is telling us today, even if you do do your research, the whole system is so screwed — the data’s screwed. Even if you do do it, it’s very possible that you don’t — you can’t get the type of information that would be, you know, helpful in even making a decision because you’re going to be combatted with, “well, look at all these studies.” Show me a peer-review article. When we were doing my son’s case, that was — the other side, these doctors who chose to insist my son had bipolar instead of an adverse reaction to this Levaquin, where’s the peer-reviewed articles? You can’t show us any, so you’re — you know, David sent articles but they were for a lay jury or someone not familiar with the jargon and the, you know, the components of these medications. It’s hard to connect. It’s easy to break that apart and really, in the name of science, just eviscerate your whole premise that the drug did it, you know? It was just very, very frustrating.
So, you know, I think that’s kind of the issue I grapple with. Like, how do you — not having experienced what we have, Lee, how do you get there? There’s a few very brave doctors out there — you’ve seen it with the vaccines — who are willing to speak up. David’s one of them, you know, and with other medications. But it just seems like without the —
DAVID: OK, hang on, hang on. Let me come back, Heather.
HEATHER: Oh, I’m sorry.
DAVID: Yeah, yeah. There’s a bunch of doctors speaking up but maybe even causing more harm than good. They’re talking about the spike protein and all the problems that this could cause. But that’s to mistake the issues. It’s much more a case of if a person has been injured by the vaccine and, you know, it’s obvious a few hours or a few days later, you know, that they’re totally different to what they were before — they’re in bad pain, their joints are inflamed, maybe they’ve had a heart attack or whatever. It’s just holding on to that, saying to the doctors you then go to, look, I had the vaccine two days ago, I’ve had a heart attack now, OK? That’s for the most part going to be cause and effect. Forty, 50 years ago, 80 percent of the reports of significant harms that people reported on the pills they were on to doctors turned out to be right. The evidence-based control trials, so called, is junk science; it’s not right; it’s a lie the whole way through — (laughs) — between the fact that they don’t collect the side effects, they hide the data, and then ghostwrite the articles. But a bigger problem is almost sort of almost the good people who talk about the spike protein or serotonin levels, drugs acting on different serotonin receptors or whatever, that’s irrelevant. What’s relevant is the person coming in and talking to me and saying something like, you know, since I went on this SSRI, I’ve been drinking more, and most doctors aren’t going to believe it; they’ll say, well, we give antidepressants to people who are depressed to stop them drinking; you know, we think they’re drinking because they’re depressed. But one of the most striking cases that I’ve been involved in was this lady who had no background in health care, dropped out of school early; she was put on an SSRI, she begins to drink, and after awhile she puts it together that she’s drinking because of the SSRI. She loses her job, she ends up being picked up by the police, all sorts of things go wrong, and she begins to research it. The doctors tell her, you know, no, these drugs can’t cause that because it isn’t in the evidence base. They say to you, you should go to AA, and AA says to her — (laughs) —when you say things like this, this just proves you’re an alcoholic; this is the way alcoholics think, OK? (Laughs.)
HEATHER: It’s an excuse. (Laughs.) The drug made me do it.
DAVID: Yeah. But in actual fact, she was right, and the only people around the place who knew she was right — and she was able to — first of all, she went on the internet and even though I’ve got a Ph.D. in the serotonin system, she ends up telling me things about the serotonin system that I didn’t know, and also showing me that the only other people around the place who believe what she’s saying are the pharmaceutical industry who are running control trials on just this: drugs that do the opposite to the SSRIs as a treatment for alcoholism. So, you know, it’s not impossible for the individual person to work it all out, but the issue how these drugs do it — you know, is it an action on the serotonin system? That’s almost irrelevant except for the fact that when people say that’s the science and you need to know how the drug is doing it before you can say the drug is doing it, that of course puts things back by years, because we still don’t know how Thalidomide causes birth defects. If we were saying, well, we don’t know what really causes it until we know how it causes it, you know — (laughs) — we’d still be waiting 50 years later to be able to say that it actually causes these things. So it’s hanging onto your hunch.
I mean, it’s the point that you said: Isn’t part of the point of science to have hutches and chase them? And it is. Now, there’s one hunch that we’ve lost a little bit: 50, 60 years ago, loads of people and all doctors had a hunch that we’re trying to bring good out of the use of a poison. All drugs are actually poisons; we intend to bring good out of their use. Now, when we give you an anesthetic to put you to sleep, we can kill you, but we’re trying to do it in order to operate on something to actually save your life, OK? And all things being equal, more people are saved. But if we forget that we’re giving you a poison, we’re going to increase the risk that things go wrong. But one of the industry propaganda tricks is to make it impossible for us to hold onto that kind of idea. They want you to think —
LEE: Yeah, I would agree.
DAVID: — that they’re giving you sacraments. Yeah.
LEE: People don’t think of medications as causing harm.
Sorry, Heather. I was just saying they don’t —
HEATHER: No, I was just going to say, you know, because the FAERS data in the United States, I think it’s Adverse Event Reporting System through the FDA, that’s all self-reporting.
DAVID: Sure.
HEATHER: Not that it’s the best system out there, but it was a system for doing that. What you’ve seen recently, though, is a lot — most people who never even knew that system existed because now they also have — you know, there’s also the VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting. You know, even with that you’re seeing just a lot of
LEE: My experience was a lot of the doctors didn’t even know about that.
HEATHER: Yeah, just a lot of propaganda, as you would call it that, oh, well, that’s not right because it’s just people reporting their symptoms and that doesn’t mean anything, let’s not listen to that at all, which is — (laughs) —really — you know, just this huge shift where now it’s just openly promoted that your own experience with a certain treatment or drug is really irrelevant.
LEE: Well, the doctors are supposed to also use that FAERS, that adverse drug reporting system, but if they’re not acknowledging or recognizing that the symptoms are related, they’re certainly not reporting it, and I think a lot of the laypeople are not even aware that that system — you know, I think that there’s been studies to show that it’s only about 1 percent of the people that actually get their symptoms report it there.
DAVID: Sure. But there’s a point you need to recall about those FAERS and VAERS, which is that doctors talking to you — I mean, they’re only going to report it when you come in and insist the drug has actually caused the problem, OK, and you’ve persuaded them. That’s when they record it. And as you said, it’s rare. But the idea that we’ve got a doctor and a patient who are both persuaded that the drug has caused the problem, that they’re going to wait for a bureaucrat who is sitting in a bureaucrat’s office because they don’t like meeting people and has never used this drug and has no training in how to work out can a drug cause a problem, that we’re going to wait for the bureaucrat to let us know if they think the drug is causing the problem is crazy. I mean, this is just lunacy.
LEE: Yeah, it’s a terrible system.
HEATHER: I think just part of the frustration, though, is watching what my son, Shea, experienced and not having anyone to listen to him. I mean, you want to do something after something like this happens to your family, and what is it? You know? It’s like everything you tried to do to promote or prevent this type of thing from happening again, you really hit a brick wall.
DAVID: Yeah. If you’re a man, you become homicidal and you think about shooting someone. Women don’t do this, but, you know, you don’t get homicidal —
HEATHER: Well, some do. (Laughs.) It has crossed my mind.
DAVID: You don’t get homicidal all that often, but you should get angry and the trick is how to work out how to tell people that you’re a pair of angry women who want to change things. What you’ll find when — if you begin to get through to people, you know, if you begin to wake them up a little bit, that a lot of people will get angry at you and you realize, in a sense, how violent the system is, and the violence is coming from the top down. The pharmaceutical companies, et cetera, they are essentially violent rather than benevolent. They’re not working for us to help us live the lives that we want us to live; they’re trying to force us to live the lives that are convenient for them.
HEATHER: Or profitable, that keep them —
DAVID: Convenient and profitable, yeah. (Laughs.)
HEATHER: Convenient. Yeah, I think, you know, as an attorney I had a naïve belief, you know, well, perhaps if I can get some justice, perhaps if I can pursue this and at least have a forum in a court of law where these health professionals who were the reason why this happened and, you know — to try to pursue something like that, unfortunately, even our legal system has these same obstacles and suppression of being listened to — (laughs) — just like the medical professional. So while for me that was an important thing to do, in terms of impact, yeah, it might impact those doctors who caused your harm and mistreated you and that I’m sure it wasn’t a pleasant experience for them either, but really getting at the big picture here of what you would hope to see after something like this happens to you or someone you love is that it doesn’t happen again, and there’s just — that stumps me. You know, besides something like this, trying to just create outlets where people can feel like — be encouraged that they are correct in their hunches and, you know, that they’re not bound by the system which will most likely do them harm. You know, but what do you do? Can you get really angry? Yeah, we can all be very angry, but where does that land us?
DAVID: I’ve gone through all the right channels, writing to the politicians, writing to ministers of health, writing to the legal system — anyone you care to think of, the regulators, et cetera, et cetera — pointing out the fact that all the articles are ghostwritten, there’s no access to the trial data. FDA approved drugs on the basis of negative trials. FDA agree with pharmaceutical companies that they won’t tell the wider world that the trials were negative. FDA approve drugs where people die on the active treatment in the trial than on placebo. I’ve laid all this out. Nobody in the system wants to change, so it’s going to — you know, it’s not a case of trying to take legal actions, it’s not a case of trying to persuade politicians; you’re going to have think about something like hunger strikes or whatever, outside either FDA or, you know, the pharmaceutical companies or whatever. It’s going to take a bunch of women to come up with some clever idea —
HEATHER: No, you’re very clever, David, but we’re not letting men out of this. We need help. (Laughs.)
DAVID: No, no, no. No, with — listen, just as with a whole lot of other things, when people down in the U.S. South were going for civil rights, a bunch of white folk got involved as well. And the same way in the MeToo movement: There will be men, but, you know, it’s going to be driven by women.
LEE: Yeah. I think the force — I think what David’s talking about is, you know, just our journeys, him knowing the fights that we’ve had initially to try and help our sick children and after our legal battles. And I think, Heather, you know, you’ve fought for a lot of years and you never gave in and you were strong and you did that for Shea to make a change, and I did too, and it was not easy and I think we just need to — you know, that’s why we’re here today is to not give in and not give up and to share and get people to join us and also just to hopefully — like, even if you can’t make a massive change, if you can — if I can save one other person’s child or loved one from being harmed, you know, we’ve made a difference.
HEATHER: Yeah, and that’s part — I mean, you saw my news story while Charlie was sick, which led to — Lee actually reached out to me and I became part of her legal team for her case.
LEE: And it was your voice, along with the other people and even though the process at the FDA — you know, I think a lot of people think that if the FDA approves something that they’ve looked at it and it’s all really safe. What I’m hearing from you is they actually haven’t looked at any of the data; they’ve only looked at what’s been presented to them as “it works for this” or, you know, it could be an antibiotic or whatever. But it is the voice of people, and the system, you know, isn’t flawless in that very few people do come forward, but the people that do did make a difference for Charlie because that 2016, when people spoke out and got that labeling on that medication, it didn’t stop her from getting it but it did give me the credibility and also the knowledge that it was that and I needed to quickly try and address those symptoms and get her healthy without using other medication. So little by little, I think, can make a difference.
DAVID: Well, I think the key thing — yeah, what somehow needs to be engineered is a WeToo movement where, you know, up to this — in the last few years we have a bunch of women talking up about the way they’ve been abused. What we need is a bunch of women talking up about the way their children and their parents or whatever are being abused. And you’re not going to get much help from doctors because people who are failing you most in the middle of all this are actually doctors, and you’re not necessarily going to get much help because more and more people are being injured. Things are getting worse, not better. I think, as Heather hinted, you know, when you look at what’s happened with the vaccine story, you know, the way the system has been able to close down any debate or argument has been extreme. So things aren’t actually getting better. It is a point where we’re in a state of crisis and someone needs to find our way forward, and my hunch is it’s going to be a bunch of women that find the way forward.
HEATHER: Yeah, and, you know, the other thing — you brought up the Thalidomide — I always have trouble saying that drug — (laughs) — but, I mean, in that particular instance — from what I’ve read; I could be incorrect — but, you know, a reason that really stuck in our minds and was put before us was because of a very, very persistent journalist who pushed that story and got it out. I don’t even think it was the medical community. It was just, you know — and, you know, I think we need better or more advocacy in regard to just journalism and media in getting these stories out there. Unfortunately, that’s very difficult now for journalists, perhaps for the same reason doctors find it difficult, because if something affects your livelihood, if something affects your pocketbook, if you’re going to be ostracized because of the powers that be, that’s often a course that you just don’t want to take, even though you might have an ethical or just a human obligation to share those stories, and I think that’s why it’s so very difficult to get the word out in a broad way.
DAVID: Let me just point out one little thing here which has come to mind given that you mentioned journalists. They’re facing the same problems. They’re told, this story about Heather McCarthy’s son, that’s an anecdote. The science doesn’t show that this is happening. Are you responsible if you spread misinformation? So they’re facing that as well. And as regards journalists, things have got worse. But one thing journalists have taught me is that names count. What happens is when you report to VAERS, the first thing they do is they remove your names. There’s no identifiers left. So if this thing goes to court as a legal case, the pharmaceutical companies can say, this is all just hearsay. “These reports to VAERS, they’re all just hearsay, Your Honor; they’re misinformation. Who knows? They may be generated by a robot.” If you can bring a named person into court who can talk about what happened to them, which is the same as what happened to either Lee’s daughter or your son, then that becomes a completely different thing. The court can’t say you can’t bring this anecdote into the court if there’s a name on the anecdote, if you see what I mean.
HEATHER: Right.
DAVID: And that’s a key thing. I mean, people can’t — just, I mean, the story about what you think is happening to you counts much more than the serotonin levels that may be in your brain or the spike proteins that might have been in the vaccine. You know, going down that route’s the wrong way. It’s people and the story they have count, and that’s what we need to restore.
LEE: And that’s one of the things that we’re hoping to do, too, just through our journey, which is just beginning, is highlight some of those people’s stories and give them a voice, because I think that will —
HEATHER: Yeah.
LEE: — give them power and us power to hopefully help others.
HEATHER: Yeah, because Lee and I will never understand, like, someone who is a scientist or a doctor the way — I might be giving him too much credit — to say that they understand better how some of these drugs work; perhaps they don’t. But they have a better understanding of that. We have an understanding of the stories and what’s happened to us.
(To David.) You’re shaking your head. (Laughs.)
DAVID: They don’t have a better understanding.
HEATHER: Do we have just as good an understanding of the medicine?
DAVID: You have a better understanding. Having seen what happened — Lee’s daughter and your son — you’ve had all the data there in front of you. You know, you’ve had the person and the story and the changes, you’ve seen the changes, you’ve heard them, you’ve smelled them, OK? What an expert has is ghostwritten articles; they don’t have access to the data behind the claims they make. They might talk about spike proteins or serotonin, but the problem may not be anything to do with either of those things. So you’re talking about somebody who comes out with a bunch of words that we don’t know how that relates to the real world, whereas you know your experience and how it relates to the real world.
HEATHER: And unfortunately, they don’t know what they don’t know —
DAVID: Yes.
HEATHER: — because they’re unwilling to listen to people like Lee and myself.
DAVID: Yeah, exactly.
HEATHER: And I think that’s the gist of it.
DAVID: Yep, I agree totally.
HEATHER: Well, I want to thank you, David, for being with us today. Really fascinating information and good to talk with you again and just want you to know what an impact all your help to me has been over the years and to many people who I know have gone through similar experiences in the health system and having someone validate what they went through and also to be able to speak up on their behalf. So looking forward to some more episodes. Maybe we can get a little deeper on some of these issues and also some of the effects of these medications, such as the akathisia that we discussed a little bit today, but just want to say thank you.
DAVID: Let me just quickly add into that which is that you’re there thanking me, but, you know, it’s really the other way around. Everything I know has come from women like you, so, you know, I’m the one who needs to be thanking you guys.
LEE: Thank you.
HEATHER: We’ve made a good team. (Laughs.) And I hope that I was able to carry it on for Lee when this happened in her family, and that’s really what this podcast is all about, just creating a system of supports so we have each other. Unfortunately, when this was happening to my family I didn’t have that until Shea was gone, and we really want to create that type of system for those who’ve suffered these negative consequences, so you have us to reach out to and offer that type of support so we can get more outcomes like — the best outcome would be these things wouldn’t happen but, when they do happen, to have, you know, an outcome like what happened to Lee and her daughter, who I should say is in medical school now — (laughs) — so if that’s not a success story to really pay it forward and to understand patients when they present with these issues from the treatments that they’re provided.
HEATHER: Thank you for joining us today on this episode of “Know Risks,” and remember, being your own expert is the best way to prevent yourself or your loved one from being harmed.
LEE: And please join us for future podcasts and help support us by subscribing, providing some feedback, and of course giving us a five-star rating. You can also follow us on Facebook and Instagram at knowrisks, and check us out on website at knowrisks.org, where you can read our stories, suggest future topics, and share your stories.