Your Call Is Important To Us

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Speaker 1 It says thedream.supercast.com and just click on that easy peasy you're gonna get a lot of extra stuff too we're working on all that another thing you need to do please subscribe to our instagram it's the dream x the letter x jane marie see you over there

Speaker 4 hey you driving in your car working in your studio getting your nails done oh love that color yes you what if i told you you could be california's newest superhero?

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That way, when you save energy during a flex alert, you get a credit back on your energy bill.

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Speaker 6 Cape's optional.

Speaker 8 You check your feed and your account.

Speaker 1 You check the score and the restaurant reviews.

Speaker 7 You check your hair and reflective surfaces and the world around you for recession indicators. So you check all that, but you don't check to see what your ride options are in this economy?

Speaker 7 Next time, check Lyft.

Speaker 3 I'm producer Dan Gallucci, and this is The Dream. We're on vacation this week, but we are bringing you a rerun from season two, our season on wellness.
It features calls from listeners like you.

Speaker 1 In 1981, a stranger showed up in Spokane, Washington to open a natural health clinic. He was 32, married from Idaho.

Speaker 1 Not a lot is known about his early years, but it is known that he graduated from high school. That's it.
He had no medical training.

Speaker 1 Apparently, a year before opening the clinic, in 1980, he signed up to take a course led by a naturopath, but dropped out after only a few classes, stiffing the course leader with an $1,800 unpaid tuition bill.

Speaker 1 Despite this lack of education, he opened Golden Six Health World, a facility that offered a variety of naturopathic services, and some that he himself developed, like taking blood samples from patients to interpret them, his words, in an effort to detect cancer cells.

Speaker 1 He also offered water births at the clinic.

Speaker 1 At that time, the state had been kind of lax in making sure folks practicing medicine were licensed, but something happened at Golden Six Health World on September 4th, 1982, that would inspire the Washington State Department of Licensing and local police to stage a weeks-long undercover sting operation of the facility, and it would land the owner in jail.

Speaker 1 On that September day, almost 40 years ago, Donna Young came in for a water birth at the clinic, as she and her husband both opposed hospital births.

Speaker 1 The father was later quoted as saying, there are more damn hazards in the hospital than out of the hospital, and there are enough damn statistics to prove it.

Speaker 1 Labor and delivery went normally, but after the baby was born, the owner of the clinic encouraged Donna to keep the baby in the the water with the mistaken belief that the baby could receive oxygen via the umbilical cord for an extended period of time.

Speaker 1 They ended up leaving her in the water for almost an hour and the baby died of oxygen deprivation.

Speaker 1 The county coroner later said there was no reason this should have happened and that, quote, it was a perfectly normal, healthy little girl. There's no reason she should not have lived.

Speaker 1 The owner of that clinic eventually got arrested and convicted of gross misdemeanor for practicing medicine without a license. He was also the baby's father.
His name was Gary Young.

Speaker 1 Later, Gary moved to Tijuana and opened another clinic where he developed a blood crystallization test and something he called orthomolecular cell therapy, both of which he claimed could treat or cure most of the world's ailments.

Speaker 1 He promised cancer patients that after a three-week stay in his clinic that cost them $6,000, their cancer would be in remission. For $10,000, they could be completely cured forever.

Speaker 1 Word spread through Southern California about this miracle worker just south of the border, and in 1987, an LA Times reporter sent him a blood sample, cat blood, and the unsuspecting fake doctor gave the reporter a diagnosis of aggressive cancer.

Speaker 1 Maybe to be funny, the reporter followed up with chicken blood and was diagnosed with an inflamed liver. Quote, your blood is indicating the possibility of a prelymphomic condition.

Speaker 1 It appears as though you've recently undergone a high level of upset in your life, which has weakened your immune response considerably.

Speaker 1 We recommend a supervised program of cleansing, detox, and rebuilding.

Speaker 1 They offered him the $6,000 inpatient detox, or if that was too much and he didn't want to travel, he could treat himself at home with $400 worth of supplements the fake doctor sold in California.

Speaker 1 Okay, now I'm going to get to the really crazy part.

Speaker 1 I'm sure some of you listeners know exactly who I'm talking about, and you're either mad at me for maligning one of your favorite people, or you're going, oh my God, she went there.

Speaker 1 But for those of you who've never heard of Gary Young, he's the man who, after his daughter drowned and he moved to Tijuana to fleece desperate cancer patients and healthy people alike out of thousands of dollars, he then started another natural health company, Young Living Essential Oils, the Christian Essential Oils company that my family members are involved with.

Speaker 1 Gary Young, the self-proclaimed healer who made millions selling miracle potions to desperate folks from across the globe, died suddenly in 2018 of a stroke. He was 68.

Speaker 1 That's a story I've been dying to tell you for, well, since last season. This season, you've been dying to tell us some of your stories.

Speaker 1 Reports of wellness gone bad and good and have flooded our inboxes and Twitter feeds. So we gave you our phone number and asked that you call in and share your stories in your own words.

Speaker 1 And boy, you guys are fighting some ugly battles out there in wellness land. Let's listen to some of the calls.

Speaker 10 Hi, my name is Crystal and I wanted to share my experience with quote-unquote wellness.

Speaker 11 I had my first grandma's seizure when I was almost 30 years old.

Speaker 11 It came totally out of nowhere and of course when it happened my husband posted on Facebook to let all of my friends know what had happened to me because I had to be taken away in an ambulance and it was very scary.

Speaker 11 When I came home from the hospital, I had no less than six messages from all of my friends who sold for Jeuterra, Young Living, Thrive, Plexis, all promising me that if I would just take their product, that they could help heal me from the epilepsy that I had been diagnosed with.

Speaker 11 And they figured that maybe since I hurt my brain, that all of a sudden I would want to buy their wellness products.

Speaker 11 I didn't, but they still hit me up occasionally to ask me if I'd like to get off of my anti-season medicine and start taking their quote-unquote natural medicine. So that's my experience.

Speaker 11 Thanks for doing what you're doing. Really appreciate it.

Speaker 14 Hi, my name is Sasha. I'm a massage therapist and training to be a birth dual doula, excuse me, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Speaker 14 I just listened to your podcast with birth and thought that was really interesting. But the thing that I mostly wanted to share was that I've noticed as somebody who works in the wellness industry

Speaker 14 and who feels that they have an evidence-based and science-based practice, and that matters a lot to me,

Speaker 14 that everyone thinks that they have an evidence-based practice. You hear quantum mechanics a lot.
To me, that's not something that rings true. You hear about frequencies and things like that a lot.

Speaker 14 To me, that doesn't make sense. Even going into conspiracy theories like chemtrails, people will say, well, I listened to an expert.
I read about an expert. This guy went to Harvard.

Speaker 14 He's got to be right.

Speaker 14 And I think that as lay people, or even as professionals in science, it's important to

Speaker 14 know that we aren't all being objective, much like your podcast shares your own personal subjective experience and you're honest about how that influences and informs you. And so that's my two cents.

Speaker 14 I guess it's not really so much an experience as an observation. Thank you.
Bye.

Speaker 1 Sasha's call connects to some evidence we presented in episode five of this show, the one about birth. In that episode, we also talked about the dangers or maybe not dangers of phthalates.

Speaker 1 They've been studied to death, and there's possible links to birth defects, though causality has been hard to prove.

Speaker 1 But right after our show, like one day after that episode was out of our hands and I said maybe there wasn't anything to worry about with phthalates, a paper came out saying, hold up, wait a minute.

Speaker 1 Maybe they're actually terrible for pregnant people, even in low doses, and can affect early embryonic cells, leading to miscarriage, among other things. But the study was done on worms.

Speaker 1 The doctor we talked to in that episode argued, phthalates are everywhere. They're the thing that makes plastic flexible, and they make things stick to other things like printer ink.

Speaker 1 So just look about thee to find some.

Speaker 1 Using phthalate-free as a selling point on your natural shampoo bottle, but not warning customers that there's a ton more phthalates on the three-foot-long CVS receipt for that shampoo?

Speaker 1 that's where the problem lies.

Speaker 1 Either phthalates are a global health threat and we have to change everything about the physical environment we've built with them, or we live with an unknowable amount of risk.

Speaker 1 Welcome to the almost impossible to navigate world of true wellness.

Speaker 1 Okay, back to the calls.

Speaker 18 Hi, Dream Podcast.

Speaker 19 My name is Tatiana McCofkin.

Speaker 21 I'm from California, and I have a little story I've been waiting to tell someone.

Speaker 10 So So thanks for asking.

Speaker 22 So

Speaker 23 it was probably back in like 2005.

Speaker 18 I had young children and was feeling confused about it.

Speaker 19 I wasn't prepared to have children and disoriented and needing to find a new sense of identity for myself.

Speaker 26 A lot of mothers go through that, you know.

Speaker 17 And so I was doing something to take care of myself, to sort of be good to myself by signing up for this herbal workshop.

Speaker 19 So the herbalist who taught this workshop had created a little

Speaker 26 mini industry in a small Northern California backwoods kind of way.

Speaker 10 But she would hold these workshops at her place.

Speaker 19 Women would come and gather and they would learn about different aspects of wellness,

Speaker 25 so to speak,

Speaker 26 herbs, work in her garden. Well, not really work in her garden, but like have classes that were oriented around the garden or around more creative type stuff, introspective sort of activities.

Speaker 10 So it was sort of like a

Speaker 19 bonding, self-nurturing experience at the same time as supposedly educational.

Speaker 19 So one day it was time to learn about

Speaker 27 flower essences.

Speaker 24 Now, flower essences

Speaker 22 are supposedly like energy medicine, kind of.

Speaker 19 She explained how they work, that

Speaker 19 you are getting the

Speaker 17 basically sort of.

Speaker 1 We didn't warn callers that they'd get cut off if they talked too long, so Tatiana called back.

Speaker 19 Okay, I'll try and wrap it up in this message, in this last message.

Speaker 25 So we're going to learn about flower essences, and she explains how it works.

Speaker 26 The energy of the flower needs to be transmitted into the water,

Speaker 24 and

Speaker 22 then

Speaker 26 it provides this magical medicine that transmits this healing.

Speaker 26 energy just from sort of the quality of the flower's magical vibration or whatever.

Speaker 22 So she tells us how to make the flower essence, which is you have a bowl of water.

Speaker 26 I'm sure there were special things, like it was a crystal bowl or a glass bowl or something, and the water was like from a spring or, you know, like I don't remember all those details.

Speaker 22 But what she said is that

Speaker 10 You put the flowers into the water, but you do not touch the flowers or the water.

Speaker 26 You do not want your human finger to touch these things

Speaker 26 because we are making something that is just a pure vibration of flower.

Speaker 26 And I was in a small group, I think there were four or five of us, and we were gathered around this little bowl.

Speaker 19 and putting flowers into the water with some kind of tool, maybe it was like chopsticks or something like that.

Speaker 19 And this one flower

Speaker 23 was a little bit stuck, it was kind of damp and sticking to the tool or whatever.

Speaker 26 And one of the members of our group, just you know, a little sneaky gesture, she reached in there and just poked the flower, bumped it into the water, right?

Speaker 19 She's touching it with her finger. We've been clearly

Speaker 24 instructed not to touch these things,

Speaker 17 and I felt this sense like,

Speaker 30 wait a minute,

Speaker 17 that's not what we're supposed to do, but nobody in the group said anything.

Speaker 22 It was one of those little moments of shared

Speaker 26 denial, I guess.

Speaker 18 And

Speaker 28 something in me at that moment clicked like, oh, we're just pretending.

Speaker 19 We're all just here pretending together and it's making us feel good to do this together.

Speaker 21 There's no integrity to this process.

Speaker 18 We're paying all this money to just come here

Speaker 26 and kind of play act together in the woods and pretend to make medicine.

Speaker 22 And this medicine is pretend medicine.

Speaker 10 But flower essences are sold.

Speaker 1 Then Tatiana got caught off again. Sorry, Tatiana.
You're a real trooper.

Speaker 26 All right. Well, that's the basic story.

Speaker 19 And I also gave a presentation at the end of this session where I was reporting on this flower, Calendula, and I just looked in the book and read all the things it was supposed to do.

Speaker 19 It was supposed to cure cancer.

Speaker 10 It was supposed to cure AIDS.

Speaker 26 And I fucking included that in my stupid report.

Speaker 23 It's embarrassing, you know, but it's also good to remember that group mentality, that groupthink that we had, and that people still have.

Speaker 21 Friends of mine, even today, are surprised when I tell them that homie opposing the end is bullshit, and they don't want to believe it.

Speaker 26 I live in Northern California. Did he mention that?

Speaker 10 Okay, so anyway, thank you so much for the show.

Speaker 26 Hope you liked the story.

Speaker 19 I don't know if it's good enough to use. So, anyway, thank you.

Speaker 25 Bye.

Speaker 15 Yeah, my name's Jacob.

Speaker 15 Love the podcast. So, just calling calling in about my experience with wellness, more or less my mother's.

Speaker 15 About a year ago, there's a bunch of people in our circle of friends, and more or less because they're evangelical Christians. I come from a church background.
All my friends are Christians.

Speaker 15 Therefore, all my friends seem to be selling young living essential oils.

Speaker 15 And it's a huge part of a lot of the culture of people.

Speaker 15 around us and they're always trying to get us to try it, be a part of it.

Speaker 15 And about a year ago, my mom started going through liver failure and was extremely sick and was in the hospital for a while and went through a year of just being really sick.

Speaker 15 And we didn't know if she was going to make it.

Speaker 15 And it just really surprised me and shocked me how many people kind of came out of the woodwork,

Speaker 15 not so much to help with practical things with

Speaker 15 my dying mother, but

Speaker 31 more or less to try to sell her essential oils.

Speaker 15 You know, we were worried about things like meals and trying to make sure that my mom had food because she wasn't able to necessarily cook or take care of her house.

Speaker 15 And people were showing up, not to help with those things, but to sell

Speaker 15 oils that she should ingest or rub on her liver to help with that. So it's just, it's been a really shocking kind of experience.

Speaker 15 with that.

Speaker 15 And so I'm glad that you guys have touched on a lot of the essential oils because it's, you know, obviously the wellness mixed with this multi-level marketing where they're trying to sell a product, but it's like people that should care and people, family and friends that

Speaker 15 we love and that love us. But at the end of the day, like I feel like it's they're trying to sell us oils when we just

Speaker 15 need food and help with, like I said, practical things.

Speaker 15 Or just a hey praying for you or thinking of you. But instead, it's Facebook message after Facebook message: this oil will help your liver, this oil is going to help your digestive system,

Speaker 15 this oil helps detox you. Not to even mention, obviously, my mother would never take any of these things because she's on such a regimented diet and medication.

Speaker 15 And you know, she can't even take a Tylenol without consulting her doctor right now with the state of her liver.

Speaker 15 So, why would she put something that potentially could damage her further into her body? So, that's just been something that's really been really horrifying.

Speaker 3 Back to school is a time when routines reset, and so does screen time. With all the pickups, practices, and after-school logistics, kids need a way to stay connected.

Speaker 3 But handing them a phone designed for adults with internet access and social media, that's where the real concern begins.

Speaker 3 Teens already spend an average of nine hours a day on screens outside of school. That's basically a full-time job just scrolling.
The U.S.

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Speaker 3 Nearly half of teen girls and a third of boys say social media causes overwhelming stress. A quarter of teens say it makes them feel worse about their own lives.
Here's the good news.

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Speaker 8 You check your feed and your account.

Speaker 1 You check the score and the restaurant reviews.

Speaker 7 You check your hair and reflective surfaces and the world around you for recession indicators. So you check all that, but you don't check to see what your ride options are.

Speaker 7 In this economy, next time, check Lyft.

Speaker 6 There's the part of me that everyone sees. I'm Howie Mandel, the comedian.
Apparently, I know what funny is. Funny bought me a house, but I also know what isn't funny, OCD.

Speaker 6 I've lived with OCD my entire life and people throw the term around like it's no big deal. But OCD is severe, often debilitating.

Speaker 6 It's a mental health condition that involves unrelented, unwanted thoughts that can make you question your character, your beliefs, even your safety.

Speaker 6 General therapy can help with some things, but for OCD, it can actually make things worse.

Speaker 6 That's why I want to tell you about no cd no cd is the world's largest treatment provider for ocd and is covered by insurance for over 155 million americans their licensed therapists specialize in erp the most effective treatment for ocd if you think you might be struggling with ocd go to nocd.com to book a free 15-minute call they are here to help Hey, I'm Paige DeSorbo, and I'm always thinking about underwear.

Speaker 9 I'm Hannah Bruner, and I'm also thinking about underwear, but I prefer full coverage. I like to call them my granny panties.

Speaker 8 Actually, I never think about underwear.

Speaker 33 That's the magic of Tommy John.

Speaker 9 Same, they're so light and so comfy, and if it's not comfortable, I'm not wearing it.

Speaker 2 And the bras, soft, supportive, and actually breathable.

Speaker 9 Yes, Lord knows the girls need to breathe. Also, I need my PJs to breathe and be buttery soft and stretchy enough for my dramatic tossing and turning at night.

Speaker 9 That's why I live in my Tommy John pajamas.

Speaker 34 Plus, they're so cute because they fit perfectly.

Speaker 9 Put yourself on to Tommy John.

Speaker 35 Upgrade your drawer with Tommy John.

Speaker 32 Save 25% for a limited time at tommyjohn.com slash comfort.

Speaker 34 See site for details.

Speaker 34 Hi there, my name's Allie.

Speaker 16 I'm based in the Bay Area.

Speaker 12 I have a good story about wellness. I've been getting these B12 shots.

Speaker 28 Basically, all over the Bay Area, there's these like happy hours. You can go get a shot of the vitamin B12.

Speaker 16 I have no idea if they like actually work, and the scientific evidence has been pretty shoddy, but my therapist recommended them.

Speaker 16 And since I have seasonal depression, and there's a lot of really great treatments for seasonal depression, and so I go and get my B12 shots every few weeks and I think that they work.

Speaker 28 They could be utter bullshit, but I really enjoy them and yeah, thanks so much.

Speaker 36 Hi, my name is Karen and this is my story.

Speaker 36 Like you, I had a fall when I was in my childhood. In fourth grade, I fell down the stairs.
I fell down two flights of stairs and hit my head on the concrete.

Speaker 13 I woke up.

Speaker 16 I was dizzy.

Speaker 36 They sent me to the doctor and they said I had a concussion. I was sent home from school.

Speaker 36 Like you, I had migraines. I was, you know, it was debilitating.
It was really awful. I was throwing up.
I was sick. I had to grind my teeth at night.
Now I'm taking all kinds of medication for it.

Speaker 36 I'm taking Xanaflex, which is a really, really intense muscle relaxer. Topamax, which is an anti-convulsant.

Speaker 16 I'm taking painkillers. Basically, I take a fist full of pills every night.

Speaker 36 all this medication for the intense amount of pain and the amount that I clench and grind my teeth at night. It's really terrible.
Anyway, over Christmas, my family decided to go to Las Vegas.

Speaker 36 And now I'm a good two-shoes and I've never done any drugs before in my life.

Speaker 36 My siblings, who are significantly cooler than I am and significantly more party animals, decided we were all going to go to a dispensary together.

Speaker 36 And they handed me CBD gummies because we were going to go watch a Cirque-Colette show. And let me tell you, the knot between my shoulders was gone.
The clench in my jaw was gone. I was relaxed.

Speaker 36 I didn't feel high. I went to bed.
I took another one. I woke up in the morning and it was as strong or stronger than any of my medications.
It was like magic.

Speaker 36 I have taken one every night before I go to bed. I've realized it's better for me to take every night.
And I've taken this medicine for years, and I'll swear by them.

Speaker 12 Thanks.

Speaker 1 I love this caller. She is like me in every way, except she hasn't done drugs for fun.
And I am thrilled that she found something that works for her.

Speaker 1 So yes, it's totally possible that a substance, CBD, that does nothing for me, or at most makes me grumpy error actually has pain-relieving and anti-anxiety effects. That's still being studied.

Speaker 1 The jury's still out. But it's also possible that what we're all experiencing, at least some of the time, is a version of the placebo effect.
And what's so wrong with that?

Speaker 1 We've mentioned the placebo effect as a powerful force in the wellness world many times now on this show. So we sought out an expert who could tell us more about it.

Speaker 37 My name is Catherine Hall, and I am an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and an associate molecular biologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

Speaker 1 Dr. Hall is currently studying how our genetics might impact our response to placebos, which is an amazing idea and important to figure out.
Think about it.

Speaker 1 Placebos are used as the control for every clinical trial for every FDA-approved medication.

Speaker 1 So it'd be nice to know if there are differences already inside each of us that would somehow throw those experiments off, right? Right? Yes.

Speaker 1 But today, we're just going to get into the basics of the placebo effect. Dr.
Hall took a very kind break from looking at our DNA and talked me through what the placebo effect even is.

Speaker 37 You know, we're still trying to, quote-unquote, piece it together.

Speaker 37 We started off with a very simple hypothesis, and this is, I'm talking the 1800s, 1900s, that your imagination was this powerful mediator of clinical response.

Speaker 37 And I think that, you know, nobody would argue that that's not true,

Speaker 37 but there's an incredible stigma associated with that. And,

Speaker 37 you know, what is our imagination like? Where is it coming from? Obviously,

Speaker 37 we think it comes from the brain.

Speaker 37 And so when in the early 2000s, they started to do neuroimaging on brains of people while they were being treated with placebos, they saw that there were very specific regions of the brain that were activated in response to placebo treatment.

Speaker 37 And they also saw that the greater your expectation for benefit from a treatment, the more signaling there was in the brain.

Speaker 37 And

Speaker 37 This shouldn't really shock us because if you think about it, if somebody was to walk in now and bang on the door and say, you know, like, you need to get out, there's a fire,

Speaker 37 three things are going to go up at a minimum.

Speaker 37 Your heart rate is going to go up, your breathing will change, and you're going to physically get up, right, to move your muscles, and you're going to have this translation of words into a physiological response.

Speaker 37 So it's not surprising then that

Speaker 37 whether it's through conditioning or expectation, we can translate the context of the therapeutic encounter into a physiological response. Because we do that all day long.
That's what we do.

Speaker 1 We also do this other thing Dr. Hall told me about, predictive processing, where we make a mental map of the world and update it as we go through life.

Speaker 1 You know, guessing what might happen next and being right enough of the time to not feel completely startled all the time.

Speaker 37 You don't have to go too far from prediction processing to start to understand how placebo response or placebo effect might be one small subset of that phenomenon that we've cut out and carved out and kind of put in the context of the medical

Speaker 37 clinical encounter.

Speaker 1 Right. So meaning

Speaker 1 whether a drug is an actual pharmaceutical medication or sugar, as long as there's not some wild, adverse, unexpected effect.

Speaker 37 You can see a shift. Placebo researchers are the first to say that this is not true for all conditions and all diseases.

Speaker 37 You know, if you have cancer and you go to the physician,

Speaker 1 you're packed with hope.

Speaker 37 And when you take that chemotherapy treatment or that pill, you can still have a placebo response or a placebo effect. It's just that it's not going to have an impact on the

Speaker 37 tumorigenic process that's happening independent of all that. But if,

Speaker 37 for instance, I go in and I have this knee pain, the first insult may have been like I bounced my knee, right?

Speaker 37 And I see that it's red and or it's black and blue. And when I touch it, I feel the pain.

Speaker 37 I'm definitely engaged in this pain process interaction with this wound that I see, and I'm experiencing the pain.

Speaker 37 If somebody gives me this, you know, this, this, somebody who I really believe in gives me this ointment and says, rub this on it, in a couple of days, you're probably going to feel much better.

Speaker 37 I might rub it on it, and now I'm going to start to check in, right? Wait, how am I feeling? Oh, you know, I might not have, I don't really feel that so much. I must be getting better.

Speaker 37 And I've created this, I have shifted the prediction, And now I'm starting to move away from a focus on the pain. I've taken my focus off of the pain and I've put my focus on, am I getting better?

Speaker 37 Right. Which is a good thing, because at the end of the day, we want to be well.
We want to feel better.

Speaker 1 Dr. Hall also told me about the first placebo study ever done.

Speaker 1 In the 1790s, this guy named Elisha Perkins came up with this therapy using two metal rods that he claimed could, quote, draw off the noxious electrical fluid that lay at the root of suffering.

Speaker 1 They were called Perkins tractors and people were into them. Google them.
The illustrations from the time of people being cured are bonkers.

Speaker 1 The tractors became such a popular magic cure-all that hospitals were buying them up, and Perkins claimed that the president bought some.

Speaker 1 But within a few years, some British physicians started to doubt the efficacy of these metal rods.

Speaker 1 So, they painted some wooden stick silver and ran a study, study telling patients they were being treated with the real Perkins tractors, never mind the fact that neither set were doing anything.

Speaker 1 And guess what? They worked just as well.

Speaker 37 Now, what's amazing about this paper that he writes is the stories of the healing.

Speaker 37 You know, he has Mr. So-and-so who for years has been unable to walk,

Speaker 37 another person who's been unable to lift their arm, somebody who's been depressed, and to a man or a woman, these people, the physicians that do the studies with these sham wooden tractors report amazing findings.

Speaker 37 But the thing that is more amazing to me and more

Speaker 37 all of us on a certain level alarming is not that these things work because we've seen this all of us have seen some version of this in our lives or maybe even have experienced it

Speaker 37 but it's the fact that we then stigmatize and take the tractors away and we don't replace it with something that is just as effective and I'm not saying that we should be giving people placebos that's not what I'm saying I'm saying that we need to really figure out what's important here and how to deliver it so that people can feel better.

Speaker 1 Right. What's the goal? Right.

Speaker 37 What's the goal?

Speaker 1 Right. Because the point is for people to feel better.

Speaker 37 Exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 37 But not, but, but to be safe.

Speaker 37 And it would be obviously better if the thing that they were buying had some efficacy.

Speaker 1 That's so complicated, though, because listening to your body, if you want your body to be feeling better because of this thing,

Speaker 1 and then

Speaker 1 it does. because you wanted it.

Speaker 37 If you think about like how many different things we can put in our body on this planet, it's surreal and disturbing.

Speaker 37 And there's a really old quote that says it's, you know, that anything can be poisonous at any, at some dose.

Speaker 37 And so I think we do have to be very cautious what we put in our body.

Speaker 37 And thank God we have kind of at least in terms of drugs, the FDA to kind of put a barrier on things that and tell us like, you know what? This might cause you to have tardy.

Speaker 37 dyskinesia, but that's okay because it's going to treat, you know, your symptoms of schizophrenia. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Like, this will get rid of your cancer, but your hair is going to fall out. And that's what you're going to do.
Right, exactly.

Speaker 37 You can make that trade-off for yourself, right? And I think there's no substitute for that.

Speaker 37 Hi,

Speaker 37 I grew up in a family who were big believers in some naturopathy and stuff like that. We basically only saw a chiropractor unless it was really serious.

Speaker 37 I actually ended up with Hodgkin's lymphoma at the age of 16.

Speaker 11 No idea what, you know, no idea how that happened.

Speaker 11 But the chiropractor that we saw, he recommended to us that we go to Houston and receive a treatment from an FDA not approved doctor named Dr.

Speaker 11 And I ended up doing his treatment for, I don't know, at least six weeks or more. And my cancer actually spread during that time.

Speaker 11 And apparently, Dr.

Speaker 11 is still

Speaker 11 practicing and is still not SDA approved. And I've been

Speaker 11 cancer-free for a really long time, but that's because I eventually went through medical science to get radiation and surgery and all the things that actually did the job. So

Speaker 13 yeah, I was 16. It was like 1990.

Speaker 11 And so, yeah, I've been well since then, but I just thought you guys might be curious to hear about this guy, Dr.

Speaker 11 D. Houston,

Speaker 11 you know, that he's been going on for so long. Thank you so much.

Speaker 13 Bye.

Speaker 1 We wanted to name the clinic and tell you all about it. So I called and gave them a heads up that we were running this story and asked for comment.

Speaker 1 And that's when they asked me to tell them the patient's name so they could find her file and talk about her. And that's when I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
I'm pretty sure that's illegal.

Speaker 1 But maybe it's not illegal if you're not a real medical doctor, which this one isn't. He has a doctorate.

Speaker 1 So that's why we had to bleep it.

Speaker 1 Hi there. This is Kelly from Wisconsin.

Speaker 30 I am calling to tell you about my wellness experience.

Speaker 30 I'm somebody who has occasionally gone for chiropractic care, acupuncture, that sort of thing.

Speaker 30 And I got a referral to a wellness center in Eau Claire where um I went and had something called QNRT, quantum neural reset therapy.

Speaker 30 And though I was skeptical, I tried to go in with an open mind and my insurance would mostly cover it, so why not?

Speaker 30 At any rate, turns out that this doctor essentially had me wear a few different pairs of like tinted, you know, colored eyeglasses while waving lights around my body, had me hold vials with certain things in them, and at the end told me that I should try to avoid soy products and chocolate, and had me say some affirmations.

Speaker 30 To close out this treatment, he sent me into a different room where I had an ionic foot bath, which used, you know, tap water and this rusty looking electrical device that supposedly was pulling toxins out through the soles of my feet.

Speaker 30 And

Speaker 30 as I sat there, you know, in my 30-minute ionic foot bath, actually with a laser that resembles something that they see on UPC codes at the grocery store.

Speaker 30 One of those pointed at me, I guess that's the laser therapy part.

Speaker 30 I was reading the scientific articles about

Speaker 30 whether or not an ionic foot bath was a thing that actually did any good for anyone, and just grew increasingly frustrated. So, maybe I was doing those affirmations wrong.

Speaker 30 But yeah, I think it's pretty safe to say that I won't likely return for those treatments, especially because I'm pretty sure that foot bath was also in the neighborhood of 75 bucks a pop.

Speaker 30 So, thanks for the work that you're doing. I'm very much appreciating the podcast and keep it up.

Speaker 8 You check your feed and your account.

Speaker 1 You check the score and the restaurant reviews.

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Speaker 32 Hey, I'm Paige DeSorbo, and I'm always thinking about underwear.

Speaker 9 I'm Hannah Berner, and I'm also thinking about underwear, but I prefer full coverage. I like to call them my granny panties.

Speaker 8 Actually, I never think about underwear.

Speaker 33 That's the magic of Tommy John.

Speaker 9 Same. They're so light and so comfy.
And if it's not comfortable, I'm not wearing it.

Speaker 2 And the bras, soft, supportive, and actually breathable.

Speaker 9 Yes, Lord knows the girls need to breathe. Also, I need my PJs to breathe and be buttery soft and stretchy enough for my dramatic tossing and turning at night.

Speaker 9 That's why I live in my Tommy John pajamas.

Speaker 34 Plus, they're so cute because they fit perfectly.

Speaker 9 Put yourself on to Tommy John.

Speaker 35 Upgrade your drawer with Tommy John.

Speaker 32 Save 25% for a limited time at TommyJohn.com/slash comfort.

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Speaker 5 Hey,

Speaker 5 I live in Northeast Wisconsin and you asked for submissions about wellness and kind of our experience and that sort of thing.

Speaker 5 But the thing that turned me off the most, this was something that happened, was

Speaker 5 I was attending a church here in Northeast Wisconsin, and it's a evangelical church, non-denominational church, whatever.

Speaker 5 And for some reason, the pastors decided decided to start endorsing

Speaker 5 a local wellness center, chiropractic office, that sort of thing.

Speaker 5 And within six months, a lot of events that this church hosted, so like a women's retreat or

Speaker 5 the Christmas women's service or

Speaker 5 definitely several Bible studies, but they would incorporate messages of how

Speaker 5 maybe maybe one reason you're unbalanced spiritually, or maybe another reason why you feel unwell about God or about life is because your hormones are out of balance and you need to go to this place to get it balanced or get a chiropractic adjustment.

Speaker 5 This was preached from the pulpit, and then as you walked out of the sanctuary, there were coupons, referral coupons that

Speaker 5 you could pick up to go to this place. And I just, oh, it was so sickening, sickening to me.

Speaker 29 I just, I, I don't even know why you would do that.

Speaker 13 Anyway, thanks.

Speaker 29 Hello, my name is Abby. I am a patient who has a rare brain thing called idiopathic intracranial hypertension.
And I spent three years undiagnosed and they called it migraines.

Speaker 29 So we did all of the alternative treatments for migraines because it turns out there are no real medical treatments besides a few medications for migraines.

Speaker 29 So we did acupuncture and chiropractic treatments and we did Dave piercings and we had all of those because and paid out of pocket for it and

Speaker 29 didn't do a thing, but we did it because like maybe, maybe there's a chance it'll do something. It'll help and wouldn't that be amazing? Because I've been basically bedridden for three years.

Speaker 29 And then, yeah, then they found out I didn't have have migraines. I had idiopathic intracranial hypertension and the only treatment is really brain surgery.

Speaker 36 And

Speaker 29 so then all of a sudden that worked.

Speaker 29 The surgery worked and people stopped trying to sell me on alternative treatments.

Speaker 29 And it was honestly it was the best thing because when I was sick and doing all the alternatives, well, we it's more complimentary.

Speaker 29 We're doing them complimentary, but they stopped selling them to us when they figured out, like, oh no, she's really sick.

Speaker 29 And

Speaker 29 yeah, thank you for doing this podcast. It justifies everything that I think and believe and have experienced.
Thank you so much.

Speaker 1 Thanks so much to all the listeners who called in with your stories of wellness. We really appreciate it.

Speaker 1 The dream is a production of Little Everywhere and great review and subscribe wherever you listen. Thank you.

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Speaker 32 Hey, I'm Paige DeSorbo and I'm always thinking about underwear.

Speaker 9 I'm Hannah Bruner and I'm also thinking about underwear, but I prefer full coverage. I like to call them my granny panties.

Speaker 8 Actually, I never think about underwear.

Speaker 33 That's the magic of Tommy John.

Speaker 9 Same, they're so light and so comfy, and if it's not comfortable, I'm not wearing it.

Speaker 2 And the bras, soft, supportive, and actually breathable.

Speaker 9 Yes, Lord knows the girls need to breathe. Also, I need my PJs to breathe and be buttery soft and stretchy enough for my dramatic tossing and turning at night.

Speaker 9 That's why I live in my Tommy John pajamas.

Speaker 34 Plus, they're so cute because they fit perfectly.

Speaker 9 Put yourself on to Tommy John.

Speaker 35 Upgrade your drawer with Tommy John.

Speaker 32 Save 25% for a limited time at tommyjohn.com/slash comfort.

Speaker 34 See site for details.

Speaker 1 Hey, dream listeners, it's finally here. The dream plus, where you can get every single episode of our show with no ads.
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Speaker 1 We'll be able to take out the ads that we don't even know are getting put into this show, which is annoying to both you and us. We're also going to have an amazing discussion board.

Speaker 1 The interface has it cataloged under AMA, Ask Me Anything. But I don't love rules.

Speaker 1 So, what I did is started a bunch of threads like ask Dan and I questions, general chit chat, just to make friends and stuff.

Speaker 1 And every time I've been in charge of a discussion board, I've made a tab called Women Be Shopping, and it's there. And we're just going to talk about what we bought.
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