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Buy a new car.
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I'll be moving in. Let's get started.
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D
Sorry, I think there's been a mistake. I bought it from Carvana.
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You what?
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D
Yeah, great price. I even have seven days to love it or return it. So there's no, no, no Buyer's remorse. More like Buyers rejoice.
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I guess I'll let myself out.
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Congratulations.
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I mean it.
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Buyers rejoice. Buy your car today on Carvana. Limitations and exclusions may apply. See our seven day return policy at Carvana.com.
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Hey everyone. Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy, conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism. I'm Derek Barris.
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I'm Matthew Rimsky.
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I'm Julian Walker.
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You can find us on Instagram and threads at Conspirituality Pod, as well as individually on Blue sky and other networks like Tech Talk. You can also access all of our episodes ad free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on patreon@patreon.com conspiracy spirituality. You can also grab our Monday bonus episodes via Apple Subscriptions. As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
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Conspirituality 321 inflammation pseudoscience. Inflammation is an important and necessary part of the body's healing process. It's also long been a wellness buzzword, used to sell products that do very little treat it. This week we look at inflammation through the lens of a new Mother Jones article, the Great Inflammation Panic, including an interview with the author Julia Metro. In segment two, we'll also discuss what inflammation is, how wellness influencers weaponize it, and what it represents in the context of Ayurveda.
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Inflammation affects almost every brain dysfunction, right?
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Depression is inflammation of the brain.
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Alzheimer's is autism, add, Parkinson's. The vaccine is in the heart. The spike protein is the heart. When you have inflammation in the heart,
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the heart is dependent on having a
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nice consistent muscle for conduction of electricity.
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Cardiovascular disease is an inflammatory process that
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it's not just about cholesterol but there's
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ongoing inflammation when you eat these oils
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and these oxidized oils, they enter into your body, they're absorbed into your blood, they actually pass through the blood brain
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barrier and they drive inflammation in your body.
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When you have a leaky gut, that doesn't happen. You start to get things leaking over
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the membrane and causing inflammation.
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The immune system is right there to protect you.
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And you get lots of problems when
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you have a leaky gut, which is a driver of so much disease. Inflammation is always caused by the power
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plants in our body called the mitochondria.
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And by fixing those, you fix your brain, you fix your body, you change how you look, you get new pants, you get everything.
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Yeah, Dave Asprey it's what I always say. If you fix inflammation, you can buy new pants. The true secret of biohacking our way to age 200. Today we're talking about inflammation. As Julia mentioned, Julia Metro will join us soon to discuss her investigation. She's someone who suffers from an actual inflammatory disease known as vasculitis, so she knows well the problems around grifting from that term term. As she writes in the article, living
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with inflammatory diseases can absolutely suck. But inflammation is not the downfall of American public health. Turning it into a buzzword just makes it a gimmick instead of truly understanding what it does well and also makes people feel guilty that they must not be doing enough to be healthy.
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And she has lived that, as you'll hear soon, because her article inspired this episode. Underlying so many wellness grifts that we've covered six plus years, inflammation is the boogeyman hiding under the bed of nearly all of them. Ironically, on a public level, it's a poorly misunderstood phenomenon which these influencers exploit. In fact, every person that I clipped from in that opening segment, including Mark Hyman, Peter McCullough, Paul Saladino, who you didn't hear, but that seed oil part was from his documentary. And Dave Asprey sells supplements that are purported to treat inflammation. Julian is going to get into the science behind inflammation in a moment, but let's go over the worst cases of inflammation pseudoscience that I've come across by wellness influencers. So we start off with my favorite seed oils. The idea that canola, soybean and sunflower oils are primary drivers of chronic inflammation is one of the most viral nutrition claims. As with everything in the upside down world of wellness, multiple controlled human trials, systematic reviews, and large cohort studies have found that linoleic acid from seed oils is linked to lower cardiovascular risk.
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C
Derek Maybe I've missed this, but is there any reason why this particular family of products has been sort of scapegoated like this? Is there any kind of economic thing going on like, like how, how do these people sort of fixate on a sor category of food item and then just go nuts on it?
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There's a bunch of reasons. One of the ones that they really glommed onto was because certain seed oils were developed around the same time as other industrial oils. So there's this myth that they come from motor oils.
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Okay, Right.
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It's a chemical processing.
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Yeah.
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That they're really identifying, but they've just mixed all of that up and then you have things like hexane are used for certain oils which are also used across a variety of the oils that wellness influencers. I challenged Dave Asprey when I debated him about him because one of the products that he sells was also used, was also manufactured using hexane. And when I cornered him, he said, yeah, but, but this thing is such a little amount of hexane, whereas the other ones are much higher.
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Just a homeopathic amount of hexane, actually.
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Right.
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So, yeah, so it's really this idea of the chemical processing. But again, a lot of the products they use, as I've pointed out before, their supplements are used using the same chemical processing as the products they decry.
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Okay.
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Now with less industrial lubricant.
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So my other favorite is leaky gut syndrome. And this is an entirely made up diagnosis that has become a great way to sell supplements and diet books. The notion that a leaky gut is the hidden cause of nearly every inflammatory symptom and is just not real. As always, this needs to be separated out from intestinal permeability, which is real and treatable, and you should see someone if you have it. But Mark Hyman has said things like up to 90% of all diseases are from a leaky gut. And you heard him, the very opening of that clip. Depression is inflammation. Anxiety is inflammation. Everything that's. That's him.
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Autism.
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Yeah. Now we'll go old school. The alkaline diet is, is a driver of inflammation. The idea that acidic foods cause a state of chronic inflammatory acidosis that alkaline foods reverse ignores the fact that our kidneys and lungs tightly regulate blood ph regardless of diet and healthy people.
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You can't really purify your blood from excess acid.
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No.
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Or heat. Okay, we'll get to that later.
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No. And I know we're getting into Ayurveda later, so here's a deep cut for you Matthew. Nightshades, which is big in Ayurveda, I know. And then we have Gluten are universal Inflammation triggers. Influencers who love elimination diets tell their followers that tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, eggplant and of course gluten are inflammatory. For everyone out here in the real world, nightshades are generally anti inflammatory and actual celiac disease is real but rare. Heart disease is another one. The anti statin crowd loves treating inflammation as the root cause of cardiovascular problems. And in truth, inflammation is implicated in heart disease, but usually as a consequence of or independent risk factor pertaining to LDL cholesterol. If you're selling a don't take statins, take this supplement product though downplaying cholesterol makes a lot of sense and that's exactly what they're doing. And mental health distress, as you heard in that first timing clip, everything is due to inflammation of the brain. Or so he claims. And then sells you hundreds of supplements. A 2023 study found top wellness influencers mention a product or service in 76% of their so called educational content and they often use inflammation as a vague, unfalsifiable hook that's nearly impossible to disprove. Yet again, it's perfect for selling supplements. I know so many people who claim to suffer from inflammatory problems and in fact personally I used to ascribe my anxiety disorder to inflammation because felt right. You mentioned heat a moment ago. It very much when you're having a panic attack you feel very hot and inflammation is correlated to heat. In fact, I was with a buddy who took a spill this week when we were hiking up in Washington. He ended up bruising his ribs. He thought they might have broke, been broken and it was bad. But when it happened, he felt super hot because the inflammation was rushing to try to help to start the healing process of what had just happened. And so you know, this is a long time grift. Let's go into the science of it. So Julian, what exactly is inflammation?
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Great question. Let's do a quick 411 on what inflammation actually is, when it goes wrong, and why it has become such a wellness pseudoscience. Buzzword. Inflammation is good. It's essential to our health. When you nick your finger in the kitchen or pick up a mild respiratory virus or work out events like these trigger a healthy inflammatory response to tissue damage. Initially it's acute redness and mild swelling at the site of the cut, a fever response to the bug, muscle soreness and stiffness from say lifting weights or running. These are signs that Your immune system is responding to tissue damage. The cells damaged by the cut release signals that tell the immune system to clean up dead tissue, fight off any opportunistic microbes, and then start repair. In the case of a cold, infected cells trigger alarm signals and are then killed and cleared, giving you, for a while, a sore throat and a runny nose. For example, working out causes micro tears in muscle fibers, again signaling the need for cleanup and repair. Once this process has run its course, cellular signals switch from alarm mode to healing mode. Some immune cells actually brilliantly switch their roles. An example is macrophages, which initially promote inflammation to fight damage or infection, but then shift to clearing dead cells and even releasing anti inflammatory molecules. If only we could bottle that, I guess. That internal cyclical process of maintenance, cleanup, expelling invaders and tissue repair is, in one word, healing. What the word inflammation means in its healthy natural form is healing self healing. In holistic vernacular, it really is body wisdom in the true sense. Like on the sacred altar of natural health, the balance cycle of inflammation should by rights be represented by the largest and most iridescent crystal.
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I have a question. Now, you've given this great description of the mechanism, but what about the sensation of heat? Is that real? Is that a perception? Like your friend who falls, Derek, he bruises his ribs. If you could monitor the temperature of that injury, that trauma injury, would the actual heat of that area be elevated? Or is it the chemical process that's making you feel like you're hot in some way?
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Well, my sense is that you have a lot of blood rushing in, you have swelling at times. Right. And you have this whole process that's happening. So it's probably a combination of all of those things. But yeah, there's, there's an experience of something being hotter. I actually got a. I had a staff infection on my thumb from biting a hangnail once, and it felt like someone was turning up a Bunsen burner. Every hour or so, another click. It got hotter and hotter and hotter until I was ready to say, just cut it off and take me out. Put me out of my misery.
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Yeah, that's shingles too.
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In my friend's circumstance, you have adrenaline too, right? Because when you're, you're hurt something. And I just know from having adrenaline rushes, there's, there's a heat association with that as, as well.
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Yeah, yeah. So my sense, back to, back to what I was saying about, you know, the, the altar of holistic health, the wellness consumer seeks out the magic of the body. But I think they've Been misled into thinking metaphorical descriptions of it point to something else. Metaphysics or subtle energy or mind over matter or something so sharply on the cutting edge that it's not supported by scientific evidence yet, says the pseudoscience peddler. Okay, so what about when inflammation goes wrong? We've established why it's beneficial and important. Let's take the three causes I've seen most often cited by reputable medical sources. This is when inflammation goes wrong. So excess body fat, smoking, and physical inactivity. Excess body fat increases chronic inflammation. And we'll get into what that is in a moment because it enlarges fat cells to the point where they send distress signals. Immune cells then rush in in response, create inflammation and do cleanup. But if that overload continues, instead of going through the relatively short term cycle that ends in recovery, which I described a moment ago, it creates a vicious cycle. And then this chronic inflammation has a host of negative effects that interferes with insulin pathways, which drives fat buildup in liver cells. It accelerates plaque formation in blood vessels, and it short circuits that tissue repair phase of the process because acting as if there's always a crisis. Similarly, smoking creates cell damage via chemical injury, setting up an ongoing inflammatory response, in this case specifically in lung tissue and blood vessels. And you know, we already know about the negative cardiovascular, lung disease and cancer risks that this creates.
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I just got to note that Julia frames the article around her experiences with Steven Gundry. We haven't really covered him much, but he's out there. He was on Dr. Mike's show a couple years ago debating Danielle Bilardo, friend of the pod. And that's included in the Mother Jones article. But I had to laugh because Gundry says that smoking is anti inflammatory. So he's, he's, he's in the Jeffrey Tucker let's bring back smoking crowd. Nick Brian artist nicotine guy. Brian actually makes the clay. Well, Jeffrey Tucker is protein smoking. Brian artists is pro nicotine patches. And now you have Gundry, who has long been pro anti inflammatory due to smoking. It's a very weird circuit.
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But you know Gundry, I think he advocates for mentholated cigarettes, which are actually cooling. They have this icy flavor as they go in your throat. Kind of feels all sort of alpine and fresh. So I think that's what he's getting at. It reduces the heat in the body.
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So what about physical inactivity? This does not create inflammation per se. Rather it stops protective processes from happening. This has been because muscle contraction from exercise releases something called myokine signals. These are chemical messengers that help regulate immune activity. They help your body handle glucose and fats more efficiently, and they actually reduce chronic inflammation. Lack of exercise then removes those positive inputs into this inflammation cycle from your system. So if you want to limit actual chronic bad inflammation, exercise, don't smoke and eat in ways that reduce excess body fat. Improving your sleep quality and duration is also really helpful. Those are all the optimizing hacks you really need. But these are not the ingredients for a super lucrative pseudoscience sales funnel, now are they? Wellness influencers create content. They sell you on charisma, ideas, a worldview and ideology in which their products and services are the secret solution that either no one else, nose or mainstream shills are hiding from you. These narratives need scientific sounding hooks. In the case of inflammation, they exploit these two things. First, the very real problem of chronic inflammation, which is part of chronic disease processes, gets positioned as a scary monster that could be hiding in the most healthy seeming of people gradually building, coming to kill you, unless you adopt these simple but potent new practices, buy my products or engage in an ongoing process of of restrictive dieting and cleansing. And second, they exploit the experiences of people with rare conditions. And this is the place where the line gets blurred between two terms, chronic disease and chronic illness. So they exploit people with rare conditions, often grouped together under the term chronic illness, and disorders that either drive excessive inflammatory reactions or result in autoimmune syndromes. And we've seen this with examples like celiac disease, as you mentioned, Derek. This is an autoimmune condition caused by a genetic susceptibility in which the immune system attacks the intestinal lining in response to the trigger of eating gluten. And people with this disease cannot eat things like wheat or barley or rye. But the wellness influencer might add gluten to the list of supposed inflammation causing foods that should be excluded from everyone's diet if they want to be really healthy. And as you mentioned, Derek, that list of forbidden foods might include nightshades, tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants and peppers. It might include dairy or the lectins found in beans, certainly seed oils. They may even then claim that autoimmune disorders are caused by eating these foods or by not experiencing the benefits of their cleansing and supplemental recommendations. So they've taken some. This is why it's pseudoscience, right? They've taken some observations from medicine and kind of flipped them and distorted them and they're using them opportunist. None of this is supported by science. Autoimmune conditions and Food allergies mostly arise from a combination of genetic predisposition and environmental factors, with some food intolerances also resulting from normal aging processes and exposure over time. It's just another example of how the intersection of pseudoscience, fear mongering, and manipulative sales techniques tend to dominate the wellness space.
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Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster. If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep podcast. I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. Each episode provides enough interesting content to
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hold your attention, and then your mind
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lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster.
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Hey, do you have trouble sleeping? Then maybe you should check out the Sleepy Podcast. It's a show where I read old books in the public domain to help you get to sleep. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom. Classic stories like A Tale of Two Cities, Pride and Prejudice, Winnie the Pooh. Stories that are great for kids and adults alike. So whether you have a tough time snoozing or just like a good bedtime
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story, fluff up the cool side of
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your pillow and tune into Sleepy. Unless you're driving, then please don't listen to Sleepy. Find Sleepy wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Sunday. Sweet dreams.
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Julia Metro is a disability and public health reporter at Mother Jones. Her work focuses on disability issues, mental health, and chronic illness. Metro, as you'll hear during our conversation, lives with vasculitis, a traumatic brain injury, and hearing loss. Julia, you cover disability and public health for Mother Jones, two extremely important and often intersecting beats that, in my opinion, are not discussed broadly or accurately enough, especially in mainstream media. And you have personal experience with this due to a lifelong struggle with vasculitis. As you write about in your article the Great Influence Inflammation Panic, you frame your story around your father, who has really great intentions. But he stumbled across a physician and huge supplement salesman who I know for many years, Steven Gundry, one of goop's experts. Can we start with a brief explanation of what you learned about Stephen?
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Just a quick thing. My vasculitis journey started at 18. Though I've had disabilities my whole life. I've been hard of hearing. Okay, when I was young, was 22 or 23, my dad was like, okay, here's this book I heard from someone who someone else whose kid has vasculitis went on this diet, no longer uses a wheelchair. You need to follow this book's diet or you're not taking your health seriously. And I personally just saw red a bit because I am someone who does take care of her health best that I can. I'm not gonna lift off the laundry list of biomedicine backed medications I'm currently on. But. But the point is, I do care about my health and my doctors know this. And so I started looking to this guy and by this time I had already started doing health reporting. Health reporting is my background. It's my disability, encompassing all purposes of life and every subject matter. The journalists covering disability through health publications is really the way I saw my way in. And so when I looked at this diet, I just started googling and I'm like, there is no evidence any of this work. And I also am someone who temporarily had to go on a restrictive diet. When I was 22, I lost a lot of weight in a short amount of time. I didn't know it was wrong. Turns out I became suddenly lactose intolerant and I was on the low fodmap diet, which is a very restrictive diet. I was on it in a medically supervised way. And so part of my brain is also like, I'm not going on a diet I don't have to go on. There's no evidence any of this work. And so I told my dad this and he kept on pushing it, kept on pushing it, kept on pushing it. And then eventually I had a rheumat. I had a vasculitis appointment coming up at UC San Francisco when I was a grad student at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He's like, you need to bring this up to your doctor. You're not taking it seriously. Then I sent him his Wikipedia page, Stephen Gundry's Wikipedia page to my dad, which outlines the fact that a lot of experts say there's no evidence backing this diet. And not only that, it outlines him spreading conspiracy theories about the COVID vaccine. He put out this abstract in 2021 that makes claims that is not supported by any evidence, using weird measurement things, saying that, oh, the COVID vaccine is more likely to give you a heart attack and cause cardiac issues. The abstract received extensive corrections. And also, as listeners to this podcast probably know Abstract, it's not a meta analysis, it's not serious science when it comes to that. And when I sent my dad the Wikipedia page, he was like, oh, you know, you're right. Maybe my daughter should bring up someone to her doctor. Not that I think my doctor would be judgmental and I don't think doctors should be judgmental. But I was kind of like this guy is not a serious person. And I have to a funny anecdote when I was corresponding with his PR person, she had said, well, there is evidence backing up the 2021 abstract. And I'm like, no, there's not. Like a single case report does not do that. But that's my introduction to Steven Gundry. I have to admit I haven't even really paid attention to his supplement. Nonsense. I did however also see a YouTube clip from Dr. Mike which I bring up in my article where Gundry, who was at one point a very respected surgeon and then went way downhill, said that smoking helps you live longer. Which is just a ridiculous claim that it's wild to even hear from anyone.
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B
Yeah, yeah, there's a whole Brownstone Institute Jeffrey Tucker, smoking is good for you world that we've delved into before. And I'm glad you used that clip from Dr. Mike. I texted Danielle Belardo who was on that episode combating Stephen Gundry to Dr. Mike your article after just to be like, hey, you know, Gundry's still out there but at least he's being held accountable here. And she was happy to see it. In the lead to the story you write, the wellness world's favorite buzzword has gone federal. And as I said before we started recording, I mean inflammation is something in wellness that I've just come across as problematic for just a whole range of problems, cardiovascular problems. I was just watching some Mark Hym videos before we talked where he claims that inflammation is more important than cholesterol for heart disease. Autism of course, all sorts of diet related. In your research for this, what did you find to be the most egregious uses of the word inflammation in the broader wellness space?
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D
I would say very egregious things for me that just terrify me are the anti vaxx ones. If these people claiming that vaccines causes severe inflammation, it's true. I'm sure a lot of us have gotten the COVID vaccine and not felt 100% the next day, but that's a sign that it's working. And there's difference between having a tiny inflammation spike and dealing with severe inflammation that can kill you. I deal with my vasculitis is out of control. I deal with inflammation that could potentially kill me. I think how it's used by anti vaxxers incredibly dangerous. Also the argument is like let the herd die off just enrages me too. And I don't subscribe to that because I'm like, there are children whose parents aren't getting them the COVID vaccine. I mean, I don't want anyone to die, but especially there are children whose parents are making decisions for them. There's an endless amount of people just like pushing supplements, just being like it'll bring down your inflammation. And this something I think a lot about as someone who's chronically ill, whose condition in many ways is manic, is we are very bad at treating feeling like blah when it comes to chronic illness when it's not connected to active organ involvement or anything like that. And I've had doctors acknowledge this and I say this with utmost respect to my doctors for acknowledging this. And I think just feeling terrible leaves people completely vulnerable to being like, oh, this supplement, I, I'm going to try it because I'm so desperate and it's really taking advantage of people feeling terrible and just wanting some relief.
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B
You write a little bit about what vasculitis is and I'll include of course your article in the show notes. But for listeners who don't know, can, can you explain what it is?
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D
So vasculitis isn't one thing. I, I tend to an article, just call it vasculitis. There's actually like 20 different conditions where your blood vessels are inflamed. It's an autoimmune disorder. Depending on what kind you have, different organs are impacted. I fortunately have like one of the more mild kind. There's some where your brain can be impacted, which of course is very terrifying. And I say a fun fact. Vasculitis very often used to be a fatal condition until 1971 when Dr. Anthony Fauci and his team discovered that when you bring down the inflammation through anti inflammatory drugs and immunocompromising drugs, people with vasculitis tend to live very full lives.
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B
Well, we just did an episode on the the Devil that is Fauci. What's amazing is how many good things he's done for the world and the way he's being treated right now is just, it's, it's horrendous. I, I know you said earlier you didn't want to go through all your biomedicines. Can you give us any indication of your treatment protocol?
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D
Yeah, of course and I'm totally open about it, but I just like there, there is, there is such a long list and I'll just say the ones I'm on specifically for Vasculitis I also do happen to have me CFS and a head injury. Actually, I'm pretty open. So for my vasculitis, I'm on hydroxychloroquine, which is definitely a drug that's gotten a lot of attention in 2020. I'm on it for reasons that make sense. Vasculitis and lupus have a lot of similarities. I am also on a drug called colchicine, which is originally used for chronic gout. For Miami cfs, I'm on a drug called Abilify. And for a head injury where I was unfortunately sucker punched in the head in 2019, I'm on ADHD meds and they work. I'm very pro medicine and I'm on trazodone for sleep too. I wouldn't be able to work full time if it was not for these drugs.
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B
Right. And I, I think it's a very important thing to lay out because this is something I'm sure you've come across this. There's also benzo antipsychotic drugs that help people with mental health that RFK Jr. Maha is on. And I've had so many listeners just when we cover this right. In our comments saying I can function because of these drugs. And so when they see it belittled in the way that Maha is doing, so it infuriates people. And so I think it's important to lay out, you know, what the protocols actually are as compared to taking some supplements that have never been tested for these.
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D
And I'm on zero supplements. I will add. I'm on zero.
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B
Well, speaking of, though it did seem like it took you a little while to find the diagnosis.
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D
Yeah.
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B
Was there any time where you felt you were susceptible to the sort of wellness influencer who could make promises that perhaps your doctor?
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D
I would say I was a very studious person, super involved in my undergrad newspaper. So I feel like I was just running between doing that my classes and passing out in bed. So I honestly wasn't scrolling through social media that much, which definitely shielded me from a lot of that. I will say it never got to an unhealthy amount, but I definitely drank more than I do. And I have to say I was an undergrad at McGill University, drinking age of 18 with not breaking any laws and very much a good too. Sure you still am today. Yeah. I was like, oh, when I drink alcohol, I'm not in debilitating amount of pain. And I think just reflecting on that years later is like that could have led me to a serious problem.
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B
Yes, yes, I'll just say shout out to Jonathan Jerry, friend of the pod, McGill University science communicator, one of my favorite journalists out there covering the sort of beat that you cover, as well as a disability reporter specifically, what is something you wish more people would understand about covering people with disabilities and the importance of the public understanding the sorts of challenges that you face in the coverage area of the people you cover?
- [34:23]
D
I would say I have never personally been on Medicaid, but I think a huge thing right now is the Medicaid cut. There are a bunch of Republican politicians lying saying like the real disabled people won't be impacted by Medicaid cuts, but also there's no worthy and unworthy disabled people. So I just find that argument to be ridiculous. But people who receive home and community based services, which is Medicaid funded home care, they're being impacted because Medicaid funded home care is an optional program so states don't have to fund it as fully as it would benefit people. And so we're definitely seeing. And also with Medicaid work requirements, which I've seen some other people called Medicaid job penalties, not everyone has a doctor to fill out that paperwork. Of course there's like completely bogus, like research attempts right now, like finding the cause of autism, which is just eugenics. It's clearly an attempt to be like, let's get, let's genocide autistic people. But I would say the cuts to impacts to NIH funding impacts people with conditions that makes them feel like crap. Because it's really through a lot of this NIH funding that we get a lot of these breakthroughs in maybe one day, for example, helping people feel less like blah even when their chronic illness is already pretty managed.
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B
And just on a personal level, when you see RFK Jr repeatedly and chronically talking about chronic illnesses being a problem, and yet the ways that he presents these people, how does it make you feel?
- [36:00]
D
Yeah, so I remember in 2024, at some point I'm blanking the name of the book and it doesn't matter matter because I don't give RFK Jr. A needed promotion. But I did read a book that he wrote that kind of looked at studies and claimed that, oh yeah, this amount of people who received the vaccine, two more people versus unvaccinated people got Crohn's disease, which is just like a terrible mismanagement of science. That's not how this works. And I think he uses chronically ill people to promote his anti vax stuff like being people are sicker because of all these vaccines, when in fact the opposite is true. I did an article last month. Well, I thought it was gonna be an obituary. It was not looking at Mitch McConnell and how he's actually promoted vaccines as a response to how polio has given him a lifelong. He's never identified as a disabled person, but he has spoken about how. How polio affected his mobility. A lot of early disability rights activists were disabled by polio. We know that these vaccine preventable illnesses can cause disabilities. And of course there's nothing wrong with having a disability. I just say, even just looking at right now with Medicaid cuts, whatever happening, Department of Education, we just don't have the infrastructure to support an influx of disabled people. And there's already an influx of disabled people due to long Covid.
- [37:26]
B
Yeah, of course, one of the consequences of long Covid being in inflammation or different, different aspects of inflammation in the body. So always an irony, a tragic irony in that Final question. What sorts of areas in health, public health and disability are you interested in covering in the future?
- [37:45]
D
Yeah, I will say one thing I am interested in covering and maybe I'll do a person first story essay which I, because it makes me very excited, is CART therapy. I don't know if you've heard of it, but it was originally created for blood cancer. It's different than crispr, but it's kind of like the same idea where it's editing you and then making your body work a slightly different way. And research is showing it's shown a lot of promise for people with autoimmune disorders. Fortunately, research is also being done in other countries than the United States right now on this. And I think, yeah, I would love to do a story with me in it and be a guinea pig because that excites me. If any researchers here this I will be your guinea pig. But yeah, and I think other important things are paying attention to the attacks on vaccines. Other things are attacks on autistic people and also how disabled people are being treated within the deportation machine right now.
- [38:54]
C
I'm really glad she wrote that article. I found it very moving. It was great to hear her in conversation with you, Derek. And I just want to say I think colchicine is an amazing drug. I take it myself for gout flare ups. And it's kind of extraordinary actually within, I don't know, a couple of hours, if I take the correct dosage, the inflammation comes right down and then, you know, I manage it with other stuff. So anyway, very Resonant with colchicine. Big fan. But I wanted to start by saying that the first two sentences of Julia's article could summarize an entire mini history of the intersection between medicine and pseudoscience. Here's how she opens. Julian.
- [39:40]
A
The first time I was hospitalized at 18 for my then undiagnosed chronic illness with an extremely puffy face, high nausea and trouble breathing, I was told the cause was anxiety. I know firsthand how frustrating it is to be undiagnosed with serious symptoms and how tempting it can be to reach for an explanation that promises answers.
- [40:00]
C
I don't know about you guys, but when I was in the yoga world, I added value to my stretching classes with information from the Ayurveda that I'd studied, like very intensely. And I have had one of those explanations that promised answers for mysterious symptoms that doctors supposedly couldn't identify. Oh yeah, these would be people who'd had persistent, often low grade symptoms that disturbed them over a long period of time, and which occasionally erupted into bouts of pain or insomnia or indigestion, but usually tied up with anxiety or depression or relationship issues. Like there was a whole story that would be associated and kind of expanded upon in the sort of self help or the wellness world. And either these are folks that didn't quite trust their family doctors, or they were dismissed by them, or they didn't think that modern medicine could really address their deeper issues, which were all connected in the same way that going to the gym or doing physio wouldn't really have had the same effect that the yoga was having on them. So I would talk to some students about humoral theory, which had even older roots in divine possession. So anything in, you know, Julia's inflammation or heat category was obviously an aggravation of the fire and water elements that together regulated metabolism generally. But as the ancient texts also suggested, these functions also regulated vision, digestion, hunger and thirst, softness of the body, complexion, luster, cheerfulness and intellect, prowess, exhilaration and clarity, perception and cognition.
- [41:51]
A
I just want to point out that science may know a lot of things, but it still can't explain most of those words.
- [41:56]
C
And that's the thing, right? Because there's a very ancient literature that ties them all together and relates them to each other. So there's this intuitive and poetic idea that I think resonates with a lot of people that, you know, fire warms, it cooks, it extracts essences from wastes, it radiates, it illuminates, it drives a person forward through time and according to their dharma or destiny. And so if this function, and the Sanskrit term was pitta, was in balance, then you were in communion with. With the God Agni, the ancient fire God who resided inside you. However, fire can burn too hot, too wet, too dry or too oily. It can consume you from the inside. And when disturbed, the functions of Pitta flip into pathology. So excess heat, burning sensations, and a sharp sour quality will dominate. You'll taste something metallic in your mouth. Maybe you'll have rashes, swelling, acne, boils, the arthritis you have. It won't be cold and stiff, but it will be hot and sort of rheumatic. You might have gout, you might get shingles, high blood pressure, loose stool, blood in the urine. These are all signs of overheating as a general category, but also the consequence of excess exposure to the sun, too many spicy, sour, salty, or fried foods, alcohol, intense competition or overexertion. So this is like the Gordon Gekko category of diseases. Excessive intellectual work, being too horny or greedy, suppressing anger or letting anger fly. These are all signs that you had angered the fire God within. And so the treatment was to stick to cooling, sweet, bitter, and astringent foods. To eat ghee and drink cool water, to walk under the moon and meditate on equanimity, to wear blue and green clothes and blue and green gems. If it was really bad, the person could do a purgation. And there were plenty of super disgusting bitter herbs like neem or guduchi that you could swig down with water. Now, maybe you and the listeners can tell that this was a. An extremely developed, comprehensive list of things to do. And I found it really plausible. And. And I found it also helped me in many, many ways, and many people did. I don't know how it helped particularly, but it seemed to work. And I knew that if you actually went for treatment in India, which I never did, you could experience an intensely scheduled round of treatments provided by a very old infrastructure of herbalists, chefs, massage therapists, pulse readers, astrologers, and mystics. And because treating pitta meant everything from digestion to the management of anger and the discernment of your very destiny, it really did feel like you were being seen in your holistic entirety, including your psychic life.
- [45:03]
A
I think one of the things that's fascinating about this, Matthew, especially in terms of an account from someone like you, right, Is that it's not only some combination of placebo, and potentially some things are relaxing or nourishing or helpful in certain ways. Yeah, but they're also I think for people from the west is the conversion experience, right. That you're being initiated into an elaborate high cost on many levels, right. There's a level of commitment, there's a level of psychological buy in, there's a level of perhaps spending some money, but your time and your energy and your identity are getting sort of are bonding with this new elaborate way of seeing the entire world, but also of thinking about your own body and your health and your aspirations for everything you want, your life. And that's powerful.
- [45:53]
C
And it's also I think just from a psychological perspective, maybe a psychotherapeutic perspective, if it forces you to slow down and think about a whole bunch of things all at the same time in a very concentrated way, that's got to be stress relieving in some, you know, evidence based or evidence researchable way. It's Right. It's like anybody who has a holiday from themselves is going to benefit, right?
- [46:19]
A
Yeah, there's a, that you're putting yourself into an experience that requires this commitment and participation. As a result, you're going to have insights, you're going to have, you're going to realize things that you're going to go through a whole new experience in which all sorts of benefits will either happen or appear to be happening.
- [46:39]
C
So, you know, I mentioned that because of the comprehensiveness of this stuff, it did feel like one was being seen in, you know, one's holistic, you know, personhood like. And that would include your psychic life. And this is where I come back to Julia, because your psychic life would include things like anxiety, which if you really pressed on it, if you really were dug into that, what that anxiety was, you know, it could come to represent the heart of every problem. Because isn't every internal disturbance related to fear? Fear, fear of death, fear of uncertainty. Aren't these the big questions that indicate you're not okay with your existential condition, that you haven't answered the most basic questions of why you are here? And what made Ayurveda very compelling to me and I think so many others, was that it had a rich spiritualized language that physicalized and materialized all of those questions. And in that sense, I think it really filled in the gap for people like Julia who had been dismissed as hypochondriacs. And the irony is, for me, the starting point in both processes was the same because the doctor tells the person it's all in their head and sends them away to a practitioner who says, yes, it's originally in your head, your heart and your soul. And that makes it very important that we treat you correctly. So it's not just that the alt health explanation is filling in for an incomplete or a premature or a diagnosis that isn't available to the practitioner yet. It's saying if you have a mysterious malady, it's really a pathway to self knowledge and spiritual healing. And when a significant proportion of real autoimmune disease is first waved off by doctors as anxiety, stress or in your head, there's a door that swings open. So the wellness world isn't rescuing patients from this purely biomedical gaze that ignores the psyche. It's also competing with a clinical system that can default to over psychologized ambiguous illness before the right thing is found. And so I looked it up and it turns out that on average, vasculitis patients like Julia are first misdiagnosed over 70% of the time. And I have to underline at first because at least real clinicians are able to catch the mistake eventually. And this is one of the crucial differences between the medical and the alt med paths, like the latter is cosmology. That's not going to self correct. In fact, if you try to challenge the person who gave you the inflammation is part of your, you know, restless soul diagnosis, they're going to tell you you just haven't accepted it yet. Right? It's not going to self correct. So the, the path to correct diagnosis on average with vasculitis takes seven months. And that's a lifetime for a suffering person who's looking for answers, as Julie is talking about. And that time lag creates its own issues. So I found a 2025 University of Cambridge study published in Rheumatology that covered lupus, vasculitis and other autoimmune conditions, documenting, and they documented a chasm of misunderstanding and miscommunication between clinicians and patients. So patients whose disease was misdiagnosed as psychosomatic or psychiatric, they reported significantly higher depression, higher anxiety and lower mental well being. One patient quote from that study was one doctor told me I was making myself feel painful. And I still can't forget those words. So there's an irony building on irony here, because if you tell a young woman that her inflammation comes from anxiety, it may well increase her anxiety or other negative mental health states. And I believe that that's one thing that Ayurveda or alt Healthcare will not do at the outset, because its value proposition is to take your money by taking you seriously.
- [50:41]
B
Right?
- [50:41]
C
Like they're not going to. Nobody's going to brush you away. There's no incentive to brush you away. Right. But eventually, when the herbs and the mantras don't work, you might be worse off all around and perhaps more deeply impacted by the layering and thickening of symptoms of the condition that's not being treated. So here's where I want to bring in Miranda Fricker, who's a feminist philosopher who works on medical ethics. She calls this moment of misdiagnosis testimonial injustice. Because, man, it's not like intentional. It's that the patient's credibility is just taken away from them. Maybe it's due to identifier based prejudice related to age or gender. And so Fricker says this inflicts a harm to the patient as a knower of her own experience. And it's part of a broader description of epistemic injustice which theorists can apply to things like reports of sexual violence or political silencing. Okay, so Ayurveda is not alone in pitching this type of story about inflammation. It's very complex, but, you know, it's privileging of esoteric causes. We find it all over. You'll probably know that, you know, it turns up in Louise Hay. It turns up in Gabor Matei. It turns up in the holistic psychologist Nicole Lapera, or whoever was writing her posts and books. And the wellness scene treats inflammation and autoimmune activity as a psychological split, that the body is attacking itself. So the hives and the swelling are this kind of somatic echo of self hatred, repression, or unprocessed trauma. So in Louise Hay's 1976 Heal your body, and then she repeats it in 1984 and you can Heal youl Life. We've talked about these books bunches of times on this podcast. She argued that immune and inflammatory conditions are caused by self rejection. Allergies are framed as denying your own power. Acne is a dislike of the self. Anorexia is, you know, self hatred and rejection. And so healing could only come from self love practices and affirmations. And I know, Julian, you've talked about this being a very, very common theme in a lot of the yoga culture in LA that you were involved in. And I think, Derek, that's probably true for you too, right?
- [53:04]
A
Oh, absolutely. I think a big part of the appeal of all of this is the bundling together of physical health with spiritual progress. Yeah. That you're going to get more physically healthy the more you get your spiritual act together. And I just want to say here too, that what you were saying a moment ago through this feminist lens is very, very relevant because around 80% of autoimmune, slightly less than 80% of autoimmune conditions affect women. And some autoimmune conditions are 90 or 95% of people diagnosed are women. So women have been dealing with these particular disorders for a very long time as medical science has slowly been catching up. And that catching up has been hampered by the baked in misogyny and patriarchal kind of biases that were there from the start saying, oh, she's just hysterical. Right.
- [53:54]
C
And really, what are you really complaining about, right. When you actually don't want the answer to that question because it opens a whole door to history.
- [54:05]
A
Yeah, yeah. And that also explains the appeal and the angling of so much of the pseudo science marketing towards women. Like women in many ways, if we take out the optimizers and the manosphere, which is kind of a newer phenomenon, for a long time this space has been dominated by female consumers.
- [54:24]
C
So then we get to Gabor Mate, who has a book in 2003 where it's called when the Body says no. And his argument is that autoimmune disease is the paradigm case of the body unable to distinguish between self and other, where chronically suppressed anger, anger and an ability to say no gets somatized as the immune system attacking its own tissue. Then we get to the holistic psychologist Nicole Apera, who takes this material, same material, same ideas, and takes it into a trauma and nervous system language. So chronic illness is reframed as whole body dysfunction from unprocessed childhood pain with healing reframed as self administered nervous system regulation. And clinical support is recast as secondary. Or maybe even it's going to be part of the problem. And you know, I think it was, I was, I was happy to hear that Julia didn't run into this stuff. But it's part of the origin story of what has metastasized into the Maha era. Inflammation, panic. Because a lot of what we're seeing is this collapse of a real pathological process into a moral judgment of, you know, spiritual malaise. But I think if we, if it were cognitively honest or legal to just flip this interpretation here, I'd say that the additional irony of Maha is that inflammation is much more likely to be caused at a spiritual level by treating vulnerable people like shit. But last thing, this is a big thought, as you guys have pointed out. I don't think it's a mistake that Maha and the grifters go after these diagnostic gray zones to Rage, bait and sell snake oil, like the gaps in the clinical encounter are where the gods can be found. And Derek, I think you've quoted Susan Sontag's illnesses metaphor a bunch of times over the years where she says it is diseases thought to be multi determined that is mysterious, that have the wildest or the widest possibilities as metaphors for what is felt to be socially or morally wrong. I'm going to add that the stakes, I think seem higher and the target seems easier when we get into the realm of internal states related to selfhood. Because in some ways this category of, you know you're attacking yourself, you know you're at war against yourself, is kind of the pinnacle of neoliberal logic because it zeros in on how the individual, internally, from their own side, is the cause of their own suffering. And I see it as well in the obsession over autism, which is another so called pathology of the self. So Eugene Bleuler coins autismus in 1911. He builds it directly from the Greek atos, or the self. And then isthmos, you know, denotes a state or a condition. And he's using it to name a symptom of morbid self absorption, an inward collapse away from consensus reality into an internally generated one. He knows nothing about what he's talking about, but the idea is get in line, get with the program. You're not in, you're not, you're not productive, you're not doing what everybody else is doing. And so I think it's easy to see how intensifying this logic serves this the agenda of hyper individualism, while closing the door on asking broader questions about social material conditions and how to accommodate and minister to this whole spectrum of human experiences. Grainger knows when you're a procurement manager for an office park, you're not managing
- [58:15]
D
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C
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- [58:33]
D
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