Legal Suits reveal Collusion that Made the Opioid deaths possible

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(0:00) Hi, this is Dr. Daniels and you are listening or watching Healing with Dr. Daniels. Today is (0:08) February 16th, and this is the Valentine's Day edition. Happy Valentine's Day to everyone.

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(0:17) Okay, so today we've got three really important things to do. One, coronavirus update. Two, vitality capsules update. And three, there appears to be a chink in the armor.

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(0:27) Yes, there is a (0:32) finger-pointing going on in the opioid epidemic, which exposes a lot of the underlying (0:40) alliances in the medical industrial complex that actually created the epidemic (0:45) death and carnage in the first place. So first we will talk about vitality capsules.

(0:52) As you know, vitality capsules are awesome and have changed many people's lives and helped them heal from really difficult situations.

(1:01) However, (1:03) we have one ingredient, Cape Allo, (1:07) which the regulation in the United States for this ingredient has changed. (1:11) And so what we have detected is that our supplier is actually shipping us something that is not (1:17) the Cape Allo that made vitality capsules famous and effective.

(1:23) So we now have people in South Africa (1:28) investigating the situation to find out what's going on. We have determined that there actually (1:34) is an ongoing shortage of (1:36) the Cape Allo, the effective (1:40) portion of the plant that makes vitality capsules so special.

(1:44) And what has been happening is there have been substitutions going on really in all quarters. (1:49) This is why we're having difficulty with this ingredient and why we were out of stock.

(1:53) But we are working on this, and we hope to (1:57) locate an adequate supply to make vitality capsules within the next week or two so that we can get production started.

(2:04) So that is the vitality capsules update because we are safeguarding the quality, and I am determined (2:10) to continue to have a product that really accelerates people's healing.

(2:18) You can still order vitality capsules online, but you will not receive them until they're available. (2:22) As a reward for ordering now, even though they're not available, we will be including an extra bottle with your order, whether that's regular strength vitality capsules or extra strength vitality capsules.

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(2:35) All right now for the coronavirus update.

(2:39) Okay, so now I'm getting my numbers from the medical industrial complex itself. (2:45) This ain't no alternative healer stuff. This is the medical industrial complex. We're going to use their numbers and (2:52) their conclusions. Now, a lot of times when things (2:56) you know, they'll tell you the truth, and it will just go right by. They'll keep talking, hoping that you don't notice what they (3:02) said.

(3:08) So this is 2019-NCOV. What do these numbers really mean?

(3:14) We have Dr. F. Perry Wilson—we don't know what F stands for, but that's okay. (3:20) So the 2019 novel coronavirus is a great real-time example of epidemiology.

(3:29) Now, I'm just gonna give you the facts, not the conclusions, because the conclusions have nothing to do with the facts. So we're gonna focus on the facts. Okay.

(3:40) You've heard a ton about the new virus over the past month, from reports to top medical journals detailing case series, (3:46) breathless newscasters asking whether this is the next Spanish flu, and of course, some cautious statements from government officials (3:52) charged with containing the pandemic. I'm calling it a pandemic.

(3:56) So now all those reports focus on numbers: cases, incubation periods, attack rates, fatality rates, basic reproduction number. (4:03) So as a healthcare provider, we need to have a better intuition about what these numbers really mean.

(4:09) So let's not talk about intuition; we're gonna get the facts. And then from the facts, I'll let you know when we step off (4:18) into intuition, but we're gonna stick pretty close to the facts. Okay. Learn how they fit into (4:25) other infectious diseases that are more familiar to us and importantly (4:31) how they can be misestimated because the vagaries in these estimates can make the difference between a flash-in-the-pan scare and (4:40) a full-blown worldwide pandemic.

(4:47) So what he's saying is you have to know what the terms mean and you have to understand them.

(4:54) There's a basic reproduction rate. That means if you have one person with the disease and they bump into five people, (4:59) how many of those people are gonna get infected? And (5:08) if there's an attack rate of 60%, then 60% of the people that (5:04) the infected person contacts will become infected. The attack rates can be low, like 40%, or higher, like 100%.

(5:15) So what is the attack rate? We can think of that as infectivity.

(5:19) If you have a condition and you come into contact with however casual the contact, 10 people, what percent of those people (5:29) will become infected? They're calling it the reproduction number or the AR, attack rate.

(5:39) Back in the old days, we called it the infectivity rate.

(5:44) And this is another thing to notice about medicine: they keep renaming and renaming, renaming things so that you think, "Oh my God, (5:50) I'm not keeping up." No, we're talking about the same old thing. They just create a whole new vocabulary.

(5:55) This is a new vocabulary they're creating. It's the infectivity rate, the first thing. So if you have an infected person (6:03) who's already infected and they come into casual contact (6:07) with a certain number of people, what percent of those people will get infected? For the sake of coronavirus, let's just say it's 100%.

(6:16) Okay, that's the worst-case scenario.

(6:26) So the seasonal flu, for example, has an RO, reproduction number. Now, reproduction number is okay: if one person (6:37) is infected and they come into contact with five people, if the attack rate is 40%, (6:44) then the reproduction number will be two. So one person gets infected, it creates two infected people for every five they come in contact with.

(6:51) I know it sounds a little complicated, but don't worry, I'm keeping it straight for you.

(6:58) So right away we need to know something: the reproduction number, in other words, how many infections one contact creates, is not the measure of how terrible an infection can be.

(7:08) The Spanish flu killed 50 million people. If I say I'll take chicken pox over the Spanish flu any day of the week, this is what the author says: he'll pick chicken pox.

(7:19) Remember that because we're gonna get back to chicken pox.

(7:23) So enter case fatality rate. So if you got it, what percent of people who are infected will actually die? And so the Spanish flu is as high as 10%, and in other (7:33) illnesses like typhoid, it's 10%. So 10% is kind of like the benchmark. If something kills 10% of the infected people—whoo, bad news there.

(7:47) So now they give us some numbers. Facts, calm facts, we're gonna believe them.

(7:52) So we're looking at then Spanish flu, bubonic plague, smallpox, AIDS, and SARS, and all of those have a death rate, case fatality rate, of 10% or more.

(8:05) Then we have the seasonal flu death rate of 0.1%, and we have chicken pox, which they say has a death rate of 0.1%.

(8:16) Honestly, I've practiced medicine for I can't tell you how many decades, and not one case of chicken pox death. Just saying.

(8:27) So in other words, the death rate is less than one in a thousand.

(8:29) Now, where is the new coronavirus in all of this? Okay, so the new coronavirus, they collaborate my numbers, which is slightly more than 1%. Well, they say 2%.

(8:44) That's right now. Again, what I did was I separated out, subtracted the baseline death rate in the United States of 1%, which leaves a coronavirus (8:51) basically right at 1% or 1.5% case fatality death rate.

(8:57) This is important to get a grip on. Now, this person in this article did not make that correction. They didn't subtract out the background noise of folks that were gonna die anyway.

(9:13) All right, but we will. We're gonna make that correction. So that brings the coronavirus death rate down to 1.5%. That's if you're infected with it, okay.

(9:29) But they give us a little more information. Thank goodness, we like that.

(9:35) So they said with a reported face—oh my gosh, it has an attack rate of 2.5% and a reported case fatality rate of 2%.

(9:51) So let's go back. Let's just go back. We check our numbers.

(10:01) If one person meets five people, and we're talking about coronavirus, two of them are going to get infected.

(10:16) So we're saying then an attack rate of around 40% or a reproduction number of around 40%.

(10:42) But wait. Of those who get infected, only 2.5% are going to die.

(10:47) So that means that if you have an index case and you come in contact with it, your chances of death are actually less than 1%, because if you have this person infected, they come in contact with a 40% chance you're gonna get it. And if you get it, there's a 2.5% chance you're gonna die. So it's really 0.4 times 2.5, which is less than 1%.

(11:21) 0.4 infectivity times 0.025, just 2.5%.

(11:46) Okay, so that means there's less than four in a thousand chance of you dying from being in contact with someone who has the coronavirus. But wait, it gets better.

(12:01) He's got some other things. But boy, the infectivity case fatality rate of 2% is wrong. He tells us it's wrong. Well, how wrong is it?

(12:17) The wrinkle here is that these interventions depend on identifying cases, and it's an open question as to whether transmission can occur in the asymptomatic period.

(12:35) The good thing is the combination of a long latent period and infection that can be transmitted when symptoms are not present is a recipe for disaster. However, (12:47) because the number of actual cases is not being measured, the number of cases actually existing is low by a huge margin, perhaps an order of magnitude.

(13:09) What's an order of magnitude? It's tenfold.

(13:19) So now we can just take this 0.004 and add another zero in there, and now we're talking about a death rate of four per 10,000.

(13:31) Can we see how that compares to chickenpox? Chickenpox, which we're calling harmless, only has a death rate of one per 1,000, or to be precise about it, 10 per 10,000.

(13:57) So we're comparing the 10 per 10,000 to the coronavirus, which has a death rate of four per 10,000. In other words, it is less deadly than chickenpox.

(14:07) I know it's a lot of math, it's a lot to follow, but the bottom line is, coming into contact with someone with coronavirus is less deadly than coming into contact with someone with chickenpox.

(14:16) So if you want to kind of harmonize your life, then you should treat coronavirus infection with the same or less concern than you treat chickenpox.

(14:29) This is from the medical industrial complex itself. These are their numbers. Thank you, medical industrial complex. We needed that.

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(14:29) Okay, now for the meat of the matter: the opioid epidemic and how it's exposing cracks in the medical industrial complex and creating backbiting. With backbiting always comes exposures and, well, confessions.

(14:29) So you have to wonder, just how do you kill 50,000 people in a year, right?

(15:19) I mean, it's a little challenging, right? I got it. I mean, how many people have you killed last year, right?

(15:25) 50,000 a year is a lot. That's—I'm just saying it takes effort, and it is not an accident. There are many elements in place.

(15:36) One is the lack of culpability. That means if you're involved in the death, and the person dies, and you are discovered to be involved in the death, then you are not blamed.

(15:48) Number one: lack of culpability is important. But next, if we can't erase culpability, let's erase the penalty. In the United States, there are only three penalties: a fine (you pay money), imprisonment, or death—the death penalty, right? So that's it. Those are the three penalties that the legal system imposes.

(16:13) So it imposes the penalty of money, or we can say loss of property as well. It's a loss of property, loss of freedom, and loss of life. Those are pretty much the only penalties that are imposed.

(16:22) So if you say to someone, "I want you to kill a few people—not a lot, just a few—but before we get started, I want you to know that you will not be held responsible. You will not be paying, which means you won't be blamed, or if blamed, the penalty to you personally will not be loss of money, loss of freedom, or loss of life." If you create that situation, then most people will gladly engage in killing.

(16:56) We can look at people who administer the death penalty, for example. They have that situation where when they do what they do, and it clearly results in the death of this individual, they are not held responsible. They're not charged with anything. There's no lengthy investigation, and they're not penalized with loss of money, loss of freedom, or loss of life.

(17:22) Okay, that's important.

(17:26) So let's take a look at this situation with the opioid epidemic. Pharmacy chain sues Ohio physicians over opioid prescribing.

(17:31) I'm like, what? That sounds dumb. Why would the pharmacy chain sue physicians?

(17:40) This is so amazing.

(17:42) So several large pharmacy chains have sued 500 unnamed doctors in Northeast Ohio as part of the sprawling litigation that has arisen from the opioid epidemic.

(17:55) Now they say the opioid epidemic, but let's be clear. We're gonna read a little further. It's not just the opioid epidemic. Let's see what we're talking about.

(18:03) The federal lawsuit alleges that opioid prescribers—that'd be doctors—bear some of the responsibility for the overuse of these powerful drugs, which have killed more than 400,000 Americans during the past 20 years. That's at least 20,000 a year, but most recently 50,000.

(18:18) Among the plaintiffs in the case are CVS—hey, heavy hitter—Walgreens, Walmart, Rite Aid, Discount Drug Mart, Giant Eagle, and HBC Service Company.

(18:35) Wow.

(18:37) The suit refers to the defendants as John Does 1 through 500.

(18:44) According to the newspaper, the pharmacy's attorneys said they would name the physicians only if their identities were revealed in the course of the legal proceedings.

(18:51) Okay, so they've got these doctors' names written down. They're telling these 500 doctors, "Hey, you owe us money." So let's see what is owed to whom and what happened.

(19:05) Following widespread lawsuits against manufacturers—that's the drug companies—and distributors—that's the pharmacies—of opioid drugs, two Ohio counties, Cuyahoga and Summit, in 2018 sued the major drug chains, alleging they had failed to halt the diversion of prescription narcotics to the black market.

(19:29) All right, there's a lot wrong with this, but let's just try to understand what they're saying.

(19:36) What they're saying is the pharmacist pill counter counted out pills and handed them to someone who did not take those pills but sold them to someone else who later died from them.

(19:48) Okay.

(19:50) Now, what the pharmacies are saying is, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you, that doctor who wrote that prescription, have some responsibility here. You might sue us. You might say we owe money to somebody, somewhere, somehow, but that doctor—those doctors—need to chip into the kitty." So that's the legal fight.

(20:14) Now, let me give you a little backdrop here.

(20:14) Because I practiced medicine for 10 years and interacted with pharmacists, there's a little more to this story. So you have to say, why do you pay a pill counter, right?

(20:25) Not pilfering a bottle, putting a label on it—why do you pay this person a boatload of money every year? That's what the pharmacists said was, "Well, we're gonna justify our incomes by saying that we are a second check on the doctor. We are inspecting these prescriptions to make sure that they're proper and to make sure that they're safe. And so we're an extra safety valve for the patient."

(20:55) This is what pharmacists alleged, and this is why they deserve licensure, more pay, and they have malpractice insurance as well.

(21:08) So now drug companies are backpedaling and saying, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, no, no, no, no, we're just pill counters. You know, that doctor, he's responsible for what he wrote. You know, hey, we didn't examine the patient. We didn't make this up. We didn't write the script."

(21:24) So can you have it both ways?

(21:27) I don't know. See, the courts are gonna decide.

(21:29) But the point here is the only way the opioid epidemic could happen is if you have the doctor writing the prescription and the pharmacist dispensing it. Why? Each one believed at the time they would not be liable or responsible for the outcome—in other words, the death of the patient.

(21:48) The problem here, of course, is these are criminal proceedings. So the government, which is the state governments, has started criminal proceedings. Malpractice does not protect you against criminal proceedings. And so before the unwritten agreement between the doctors who are carrying out the deadly deed—you can say drug companies or whoever's behind the scenes writing the standard of care—it does matter, but right now it's not the critical point. The critical point is doctors agreed to their role in the mass murder of Americans in exchange for malpractice protection, where each death would be treated as a civil matter, not a criminal matter, and the doctor could pay in a certain amount of money every year, and then when he was accused or maybe even caught harming or killing someone, he had a defense team—lawyers on retainer, right? And further, the penalty would be paid out of that kitty that he put into over the years. That was the agreement. But there would never, ever be any criminal proceedings arising from the doctor killing people just following orders.

(22:42) All right, and if the doctor killed someone and failed to follow orders, even that would be treated as non-criminal—that's deviation from the standard of care.

(23:29) Okay, so that's the past. That's the agreement. And so now the states are reneging on that by suing—well, let's not get ahead of ourselves. The states are suing the drug companies who have no such protection, by the way. They don't have any such protection.

(24:16) But it then went on to sue the pharmacies. Now the pharmacies also have no such protection. Only the pharmacist, not the pharmacies—the difference. The pharmacy is a kind of a corporate entity. The pharmacist is an individual with malpractice insurance.

(24:08) So the pharmacies and the defendants and the drug companies who do not have malpractice protection are now saying, "We want to drag the doctors in, and we want to say that malpractice protection does not cover this action, or if it does, it needs to step in and pay part of our fees if/when we're found responsible."

(25:32) So the U.S. District Judge blah blah blah is hearing the case, later allowed the plaintiffs—that is, the pharmacies and the drug companies—to change the suit to include the pharmacists.

(25:51) Wow, the pharmacists who allegedly did not exercise due diligence before dispensing the drugs. So now what's happening is the drug companies and the pharmacy companies, who are not covered by malpractice, are leaning into the pharmacists, who are covered by such a thing, to either remove their coverage and take their personal assets, or access that bigger kitty to pay part of the judgment.

(26:29) Since the judge allowed them to add the pharmacists, who would ordinarily be exempt from such an action, a criminal act because of their malpractice coverage, now they're saying, "Hey, let's reach a little further. Let's reach into the doctors for malpractice kitty."

(26:49) So in this suit, filed January 6, the Cleveland Federal Court said the pharmacy chains argued the doctors and other prescribers should have to pay some of the penalty if the drugstore companies are found liable at trial. The poster has scheduled a trial for October.

(27:15) Now, there are two ways to decide here. One is you observe the legal separation. If you think the doctors are liable, then the state should sue the doctors under the malpractice law because criminal prosecution is prohibited.

(27:42) Or you can say, "We're going to violate the protection of malpractice and expose pharmacists and doctors as private citizens committing harm and hold them liable for this outside of malpractice."

(28:08) Among the companies are cities and counties, Indian tribes, and the relatives of infants born with addiction to heroin or to narcotics.

(28:03) So there's nearly 2,500 opioid-related lawsuits filed against drug companies in federal courts. More than 300 suits have been filed in state courts across the country. State attorneys general have filed 89 lawsuits against drug companies.

(28:19) The state government is getting involved. About half the attorneys general have proposed a $48 billion settlement in those cases.

(28:31) Proposed—not million, but billion-dollar settlement in those cases.

(28:42) Other states have not approved it.

(28:47) So the post noted drug manufacturers and distributors agreed or were ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements and one court verdict reached in state and federal courts last year. But the big pharmacy chains have not been held liable so far.

(29:00) Now, you have to ask yourself, who are these drug companies paying this money to? Who are they paying the money to?

(29:08) Well, if the attorneys general are following the cases and receiving the money, then it goes into state coffers. And so it amounts to an after-the-fact kickback and after-the-fact bribe because the people who are harmed aren't getting any of it. They're dead, right? Game over.

(29:29) So in regard to the pharmacy chain suits against Ohio doctors, organized medicine has remained conspicuously silent. This is important—remained conspicuously silent. Why would you remain conspicuously silent?

(29:44) Two reasons: One, if it's a criminal situation, anything you say can and will be used against you. So it's a criminal situation.

(29:56) Now, the other thing is that organized medicine has got the ace in the hole in your hip pocket, which is the malpractice card.

(30:29) So now what they're gonna do is, preemptively, they're gonna have the malpractice companies weigh in with all their legal power to prevent the doctors from becoming a deep pocket or even side pocket for any judgment. The reason for this is once it is allowed that doctors can be criminally prosecuted for what they do, the whole medical industrial complex just comes unraveled.

(30:46) Just comes unraveled.

(30:49) For example, when I was in medical school—well, let's back it up to when I was a teenager—my father sat me down and said, "If you're gonna commit crimes, you need to commit them in private and all by yourself because you will be the fall guy. Let me tell you, if there's a crime going on and if you're accused or someone else is accused and you're in it with them, but you didn't do whatever it was, you'll be the fall guy. So you need to not commit crimes and stay away from anyone who is committing crimes."

(31:14) All right, so I had that lecture, and this was back in the pre-civil rights era, okay, where my father explained to me, "You're black, and that means you're the fall guy, so you need to stay away from any criminal activity."

(31:35) All right, fast forward to medical school. They explained to me that as a doctor, I'm gonna be prescribing stuff, and people are gonna die as a result of that. But it's not gonna be a crime. I've got special protection called malpractice, so I can kill all the people I want. I can follow orders even though it results in the death of a whole bunch of people.

(31:49) I said, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, problem over here. Killing is a crime. I'm aware of that, and I am not gonna be complicit in this crime because I know I'm gonna end up being the fall guy."

(32:09) So I did not accept it. I did not personally accept that mantle of protection that was extended to all doctors—all medical students in medical school. No, no, no, no, no. I will not be committing crimes under someone else's orders. Oh, no. I'm just gonna be a doctor. I'm not killing anyone. And if I see a dangerous drug, I'm gonna stop using it. I don't need to wait for the recall.

(32:35) So if it is allowed that state governments or federal governments or even personal individuals can sue doctors in the criminal realm for the practice of medicine, you'll have more doctors behaving like I did, which means totally out of control.

(32:59) I mean, you can't market the next whiz-bang drug because doctors are gonna say, "Whoa, whoa, well, that evidence, that research looks a little sketchy to me. I don't think I'll be prescribing that. Oh, no, no, no, that drug is addictive. I don't feel like creating addicts or treating addicts. No, thank you."

(33:36) So you're gonna have more doctors exercising personal conscience and responsibility, which is not—you can't have that if you're gonna kill 50,000 or the medical industrial complex admits 227,000 people a year. It just grinds—the whole thing grinds to a halt.

(34:01) So here, doctors across the country who have prescribed opioids did so to treat pain. In other words, they did it in the course of practicing medicine.

(34:28) So these addicts and this killing were done in the course of practicing medicine, and they thought they were doing the right thing, Dr. Martin said.

(34:01) Now, I was a doctor. I can tell you I took a look at the whole opioid thing, and this is not right. This is not right. I'm not doing it, and I did not prescribe narcotics while I was in practice. I did not accept narcotic samples, and if you came to me as a patient and you were on narcotics, good luck with that. Whoever got you started can keep you going.

(35:06) So did not touch the stuff, and it was so bad, people called the Medical Society to complain that Dr. Daniels is not prescribing narcotics, and I need them, darn it. And I said, "You need to go to another doctor." Easy beans.

(35:36) And so the doctors know they're doing the wrong thing, but they were following the standard of care. And so I said, "No, no, no, no, no, I won't be following that standard."

(36:06) We're gonna see how the litigation shakes out. If it shakes out that doctors are held responsible, which is gonna be painful—very painful for a lot of doctors—because malpractice does not provide defense for criminal matters, then this present generation of doctors is gonna hurt. But what's gonna happen is doctors who survived this, maybe they didn't prescribe narcotics last year—who knows, whatever—they're gonna be very, very touchy about the standard of care. Like, that's the standard of care, but yeah, it's not—it's deadly. I know it's deadly. I'm not doing that.

(36:49) So this is what's really at stake. What's really at stake is the whole medical industrial complex collapsing because instead of the doctor asking himself, "Is this the standard of care?" he's gonna ask himself, "Is this gonna harm the patient?"

(37:59) And if the doctor has to answer the question, "Is this gonna harm the patient?" you'll see doctors doing a lot less, and you'll see hospitals basically closing because doctors are gonna say, "I'm not admitting the patient for that because that's not safe." You'll see doctors saying, "I'm not prescribing a drug. It's not safe. It's dangerous."

(37:09) So the last thing you want is doctors exercising independence of conscience. It's bad. It's bad for any assassin or any soldier, you know, in an army. When there's a war going on, if your job is to harm or kill someone and someone's got you asking the question, "Is this gonna be harmful?" well, you're just gonna lay down your gun and say, "Whoa," or as a doctor, you lay down your scalpel, you lay down your prescription pad and say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Not for me, not today."

(37:59) So they even go into revealing this. But there are some people who are overprescribing. Also, in some cases, the dosages could have been lower, or other options could have been tried first.

(38:42) Martin traces the role of physicians in the opioid epidemic back to the early '90s, when the huge increase in opioid prescribing began. Let me take it back to '82. I was sitting in medical school, and they asked the question, "What is the right amount of narcotics?" Answer: "Enough—all the patient needs to kill that pain. If you give a dose and it's not working, give more, give more, give more, give more." I won't be doing that.

(39:06) But that was being taught in medical school in 1982. Now, in the '90s, what happened was they actually took narcotics, handed them out to doctors like candy, and told the doctors, "This pill is not a narcotic. You can prescribe it safely."

(39:28) That would be the tramadol and other pills, which have now been reclassified as narcotics. But again, even with those pills, I took a look at it, the effects and the side effects—mm-hmm, I won't be prescribing that one either. That sounds like a narcotic to me.

(39:42) So again, if you have the doctors reading the package insert and exercising independent discretion, they will quickly get exactly where I ended up after a mere four years of medical practice, which is not writing any prescriptions at all.

(40:06) And they say there was this idea that pain should be the fifth vital sign, and there was a push from Big Pharma for doctors to prescribe opioids for pain.

(40:19) The fifth vital sign—excuse me, that became the standard of care. They literally evaluated doctors. "Did you ask for the fifth vital sign? Like, are they in pain?"

(40:42) And so there's a lot of buck passing, but doctors were actually trained killers. So some doctors were a little lax, some rigorous in prescribing, and were using opioids as the first option instead of trying non-medical options or other medications.

(40:06) But doctors, encouraged by Big Pharma, were also prescribing larger doses.

(40:42) Here's the quencher: medical schools also bear some responsibility. So, well, well, well, are we going to allow them to include medical schools as partly economically liable in these suits concerning the opioid epidemic? Let's see.

(41:17) For many years, medical schools did not offer much training on prescribing for pain. Oh yes, they did. I was in medical school. I just told you what they said: "Give more and more and more and more and more until the patient stops breathing or stops complaining of pain." There you go.

(41:36) What would be the best opioid dosage? Oh yes, we got the instruction: how to start, how to identify patients at risk. That's changing now, but it also needs to be put into context.

(41:42) Good pharmacists could have done more to mitigate the crisis. Yes, they could help combat the epidemic, but it's complicated.

(41:36) It is complicated, and the reason it's complicated is because the goal is to kill patients. And the medical industrial complex, again, with its own numbers, is killing 227,000 patients every single year like clockwork.

(41:56) That kill rate in cars would be unacceptable, but the medical industrial complex has had this privilege. Why? Absence of liability. Absence of culpability. They would not even be accused.

(42:07) And so this is the exposure that's happening. And so what the drug companies and pharmacy companies have figured out is, "Whoa, we're not taking this hit alone. We need to pull in some other people here. We're pulling the doctors who wrote the prescription. We're pulling the medical schools who taught the standard of care. Who else can we pull in?"

(42:41) So 48 billion is a lot of money—a lot of money. And so the question is, is a 14 trillion dollar industry going to allow itself to be compromised by a mere 48 billion? Well, we don't know.

(42:53) But here's another wrinkle. Now, this one is appalling. This is—this is jaw-dropping.

(42:57) So electronic medical records—if you recall from a show I did about a year, it was two years, two or three years ago on electronic medical records, it was found that electronic medical records contributed to patient death and patient mortality. And they're trying to figure out how electronic medical records contributed to patients dying in larger numbers.

(43:31) So it's an established fact, it's accepted, that electronic medical records have contributed to patient mortality. That means dead bodies, right? Funerals, right? Okay.

(43:42) But how could this happen?

(43:56) Now, back then, there were a lot of plausible reasons. There's the copy-paste button. The doctor is so overwhelmed, so is the nurse, with the volume of documentation these electronic records are requiring, and it is copying and pasting from one patient to another, and the electronic records are basically not accurate. Anyway, they're totally unreliable compared to the previous written records.

(44:16) But here is another piece of the puzzle. This is not even English. I would give you the Greek, and then I'll translate it to English: EHR vendor Practice Fusion settles opioid kickback case for $145 million.

(44:25) Well, let's just understand here that there's a kickback going on for the prescription of opioids, which means basically killing patients in the opioid epidemic, and the person or the company settled for $145 million.

(44:33) There's some information here.

(44:37) So Practice Fusion, a San Francisco-based electronic health records vendor—okay, so this is an EHR, electronic health records vendor—so a company, it doesn't matter the name, that sold electronic health records was involved in the opioid epidemic and took kickbacks. We don't know how much the kickbacks were, but the penalty they paid was $145 million.

(44:49) So this—isn't it interesting? So you have to ask yourself, how could electronic records—whatever—how could they create deaths from the opioid epidemic?

(45:22) So the federal government—they paid $145 million to the federal government. This is important: whenever you penalize a company by having them pay a fine to the government, that is essentially a kickback to the government to allow them to continue operating and continue committing crimes.

(45:37) So when I was younger, I had this naive view that these were penalties and that the company was being punished. No, they weren't. Punishment would be to dissolve the company and not allow it to operate anymore.

(45:48) That would be a penalty. And to revoke all their government permits for operating. But that's not what happened here. It happens: "Okay, let's keep operating. Just give us $145 million."

(46:14) So this is a kickback in plain view because your average uninformed individual doesn't realize that the company has now been freed to go forth and commit more crimes. There hasn't been any kind of change of heart or management or anything like that, you know? I mean, it's the same company.

(46:31) But what we really want to understand here is what was the nature of the behavior that was penalized, the behavior that created more dead bodies in the opioid epidemic.

(47:05) This is worth looking at. So this company took kickbacks from an opioid drug maker and other pharmaceutical companies in return for creating clinical decision support tools that promoted those companies' drugs at the point of care.

(47:19) So in other words, you have a doctor, and he's doing electronic records in real-time. The patient is sitting there and saying, "Okay, patient has pain."

(47:27) And that electronic records company created clinical decision support tools, which means a pop-up block saying, "How about prescribing this narcotic?" All he's gotta do is click that. Boom. Fill in the blank. Continue with the rest of the visit as opposed to pulling a drug out of his memory bank and typing it in.

(47:46) So by putting in a piece of software that literally made it easier for, and in some cases impossible not to prescribe, a narcotic, this electronic health records company contributed to the deaths of an untold number of the 50,000 Americans every year.

(48:16) The settlement includes a criminal fine of $25.4 million and the forfeiture of $1 million in revenue.

(48:28) So that's included in the $145 million. So that settles a criminal lawsuit but also settles a civil lawsuit against the company, and they pay this money to the government, and it's included in the $145 million.

(48:45) Besides the illegal kickbacks from drug companies, which is what the electronic health records company received, the agreement also covers many instances in which the company misrepresented—that means they lied about—the features of its electronic health records so that the doctors or users could attest to using a certified electronic health record required for meaningful use incentive programs, according to the release.

(49:14) So the electronic health records company also helped people get incentive payments from the government that maybe they weren't really entitled to. So under the overall settlement, this company admits that the criminal charges against it are true, but the civil claims resolved by a settlement are only accusations, and they're not admitting to the civil claims, only the criminal claims.

(49:18) So as a part of the resolution of the criminal case, Practice Fusion acknowledges that it asked for—and received—kickbacks from a major opioid company in exchange for using its electronic health records to influence physician prescribing of opioid pain medications, and they created an alert that would cause doctors to prescribe more extended-release opioids, which are more dangerous, by the way, and cause more deaths.

(49:52) Well, maybe they would have only prescribed a rapid-release opioid, which would not have been deadly.

(50:08) Besides the fine and the forfeiture, the company must pay an independent oversight organization to approve any sponsored pop-ups. It also has created a comprehensive compliance program to prevent future similar abuses.

(50:23) The civil settlement covers not only the company's kickback deal with the opioid company, but also resolves allegations of kickbacks relating to 13 other pop-up arrangements where the company agreed with drug companies to implement pop-up alerts intended to increase sales of their products.

(50:43) Now, you can imagine, here's this doctor practicing medicine, and he gets a pop-up alert, and for the doctor, it's like, "Holy cow, do I have to do this, or I'll get penalized, or someone's looking over my shoulder, or is this a deviation from the standard of care if I don't click on this pop-up?"

(50:49) So you can see the electronic health records presented this pop-up to the doctor in a pressured atmosphere, almost amounting to coercion, where the doctor did not know, "Hey, who wrote this program? It's my employer putting these pop-ups in, and I'm supposed to obey them in order to get my paycheck? It's the standard of care put in these pop-ups. I have to click and obey them in order to comply with the standard of care."

(51:19) So the doctor doesn't know any of this, but he sees the pop-up, and he's like, "Holy cow."

(51:22) And so he's very likely, because of the context, to obey it and to engage in a practice resulting in the death of quite a few Americans.

(51:30) So this company's conduct is very bad.

(51:38) So during the height of the opioid crisis, a company took a million-dollar kickback to allow an opioid company to inject itself into the sacred doctor-patient relationship. I mean, how sick can it be, right? The insurance company is in there, the licensing board is in there, the government at every level is involved in the doctor-patient relationship. It's hardly sacred. Well, they all might be sacred, but it's, well, no, it's not sacred. It's a free-for-all.

(51:46) So that it could peddle even more of its highly addictive and dangerous opioids.

(51:56) So in other words, the company is still operating. That's an important thing to understand.

(52:05) Or you can say nothing's changed.

(52:18) So of course the big thing is, electronic health records are very, very unsafe for many reasons, and this is just a new one, which is your doctor's prescribing practices are now being influenced in a very pressured, coercive way, and he doesn't even know where it's coming from, right?

(52:29) So he doesn't know, "If I don't prescribe this drug, am I gonna lose my job? Am I gonna be sued for malpractice? Am I gonna lose my license?" But he feels that this suggested pop-up is coming from an authority. He just doesn't know which authority.

(52:36) And so it creates a very dangerous situation for the patient.

(52:40) And one thing the doctor doesn't ask as he sees that pop-up is, "Is that gonna be dangerous?" No.

(52:48) Because he's worried, "What about the mortgage? What about the medical school loan repayments? What about—what about—what about—what about?" And he is held harmless because of malpractice. Therefore, anything he does is not a criminal act. It's not a criminal act.

(53:02) And because of malpractice, then he's also exempt from civil penalties, such as a fine.

(53:05) So he's not gonna get imprisoned, and he's not gonna get the death penalty if this patient or ten patients die, and he's not subject to a fine or any kind of economic loss.

(53:29) That's what makes a doctor such an incredibly valuable pressure point. When you can exert influence at a point that is solid and not vulnerable to criminal or civil prosecution or inquisition, then that is huge.

(53:36) And that's why drug companies, and insurance companies for that matter, and even hospitals spend so much money trying to influence a doctor, because that's where the pay-go for the gold is. The doctor has the immunity that neither the hospital nor the pharmaceutical company nor even the insurance companies have.

(53:38) And because of this immunity, he's in a position where he can kill without penalty. And that's what makes a doctor so valuable and so pivotal.

(53:38 - 54:09)

(53:38) What's a patient to do? I would say definitely refuse any narcotic prescriptions. That would be numero uno.

(53:54) Or if you're going to be so bold as to accept the narcotic prescription, accept the short-acting narcotic, not a long-acting one. And you cannot count on the doctor to tell you which is which; you need to go look it up.

(54:01) So, short-acting, and then you need to make up your mind how many pills you're gonna take and for how long. Let me suggest less than a week.

(54:04) So, yeah, the important thing is to not even go there.

(54:31 - 1:00:44)

Question: Jen Rice asks, "Are there any dangers in wearing synthetic hair extension weaves? Yeah, I am wearing them."

(54:41) Answer: Not from the plastic itself. Some people say the chemicals used in the synthetic hair are hazardous. If you go online and look at the different hair extension products, some of them are hazardous, but that is more than covered in the people who review the products. So if you go online and look at the product reviews concerning the synthetic hair that you're going to use, it'll steer you away from the ones that are a problem.

(55:24) The other thing you can do with your synthetic hair is smell it. If it doesn't have a smell, you're pretty much good to go. But I wear synthetic hair weaves; my own hair is about that long.

Question: 37-year-old female on Prozac since age 15 asks, "How do you quit Prozac safely?"

(56:09) Answer: So why are you on Prozac? Let's just say, for the sake of brevity, you had some type of emotional situation when you were 15. Most of the situations are generally caused by malnutrition. You need to first fix your nutrition.

(56:24) The simplest shortcut is to eat lots of vegetables, some fruits—like two pieces a day—lots of unrefined carbs like brown rice, quinoa, lots of cooked vegetables, lots of raw vegetables—about two raw fruits a day—unrefined carbs you cook yourself at home, and liver. Liver is the king. Liver—actually, liver and bacon—restores mental stability.

(56:53) So once you start with these, then, and only then, can you cut back on your Prozac. A lot of people try to cut back the Prozac—or these drugs—suddenly, and it doesn't work. Some people try to cut them back gradually, and it still doesn't work, and that's because of the malnutrition issue. Now, some people are lucky; they can just stop it and go through some cold turkey withdrawals, and then they'll be just fine. So it's really a matter of judgment. You have to decide.

Question: I've been soaking my flaxseeds as you instructed: quarter cup flaxseed to one cup water overnight. I noticed some of those seeds rise to the top while some stay at the bottom. Do I drink the entire cup?

(57:28) Answer: Absolutely. No difference—it doesn't matter. Now, the ones that rise to the top, I would stir them up so they can get soaked. Even though a seed is dried, there's varying amounts of moisture content, and the ones that have the least moisture content—they're really, really super, super dry—rise to the top. But if you give it a stir and get some water over them, they'll soak up water.

Question: I have a low budget. I'm in West Africa. What would be the most effective and economical way for me to filter my water?

(58:38) Answer: You can go on Amazon or wherever and buy the LifeStraw—S-T-R-A-W. That would be a cost of more or less $20 as opposed to $200 for reverse osmosis or $200 for a distiller. So that would be the thing.

Question: Brandy asks, "I have a tight chest and shaking that's relieved by eating salt. What should I do?"

(59:25) Answer: If that's the case, then definitely eat more salt. It's a very simple solution. A lot of people have believed the low salt hype, I call it. It's not true. You need to eat salt. I personally eat about a tablespoon of salt a day. That's a lot of salt, but you've got to figure out how much salt your body requires and definitely go for it. Eat that salt.

Question: What are your thoughts on the coronavirus?

(1:00:05) Answer: We covered that at the beginning of the show, so we are good.

(1:00:25 - 1:00:44)

(1:00:25) All right, that brings us to our one-hour mark. That is it. I hope you found today's episode helpful. Please like, share, subscribe, and we will see you again next week. As always, think happens, and you should too.