S2 E8: Your Call is Important to Us

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previously on the dream

is there anything that you have found that a lot of these folks who make these claims have in common personality trait wise

what kind of person wants to do that someone who wants to make a lot of money yeah yeah i mean wellness sells for better or worse it's cheap to make as a general matter and consumers are willing to spend a lot of money because we don't want to die

They don't want to die or they want to look beautiful.

They don't want wrinkles.

They don't want Alzheimer's.

They don't want gray hair.

They want to be thin, you know.

Yeah, and we'll pay anything for that.

Yes, unfortunately, yeah.

In 1981, a stranger showed up in Spokane, Washington to open a natural health clinic.

He was 32, married from Idaho.

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.

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.

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.

He also offered water births at the clinic.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And boy, you guys are fighting some ugly battles out there in wellness land.

Let's listen to some of the calls.

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

I had my first grand male seizure when I was almost 30 years old.

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.

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, Plexus, all promising me that if I would just take their product, that they can help heal me from the epilepsy that I had been diagnosed with.

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

I didn't, but they still hit me up occasionally to ask me if I'd like to get off of my anti-seizeder medicine and start taking their quote-unquote all-natural medicine.

So that's my experience.

Thanks for doing what you're doing.

Really appreciate it.

Hi, my name is Sasha.

I'm a massage therapist and training to be a birth doula, excuse me, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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

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

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.

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 he's he's got to be right and I think that as lay people or even as professionals in science it's important to

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.

I guess it's not really so much an experience as an observation.

Thank you.

Bye.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

So just look about thee to find some.

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?

That's where the problem lies.

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.

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

Okay, back to the calls.

Hi, Dream Podcast.

My name is Tatiana McCoffkin.

I'm from California.

And I have a little story I've been waiting to tell someone.

So thanks for asking.

So

it was probably back in like 2005.

I had young children and was feeling confused about it.

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

A lot of mothers go through that, you know.

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.

So the herbalist who taught this workshop had created a little

mini industry in a small Northern California backwoods kind of way, but she would hold these workshops at her place.

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

so to speak,

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.

So it was sort of like a

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

So one day it was time to learn about

flower essences.

Now, flower essences

are supposedly like energy medicine, kind of.

She explained how they work, that

you are getting the

basically sort of.

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

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

So,

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

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

and

then

it provides this magical medicine that transmits this healing energy just from sort of the quality of the flower's magical vibration or whatever.

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

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.

But what she said is that

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

You do not want your human finger to touch these things

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

And I was in a small group.

I think there were four or five of us.

And we were gathered around this little bowl and putting flowers into the water with some kind of tool maybe it was like chopsticks or something like that

and this one flower

was a little bit stuck it was kind of damp and sticking to the tool or whatever and one of the members of our group just you know a little tee

gesture she reached in there and just poked the flower bumped it into the water, right?

She's touching it with her finger.

We've been clearly

instructed not to touch these things.

And I felt this sense like,

wait a minute,

that's not what we're supposed to do.

But nobody in the group said anything.

It was one of those little moments of shared

denial, I guess.

And

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

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

There's no integrity to this process.

We're paying all this money to just come here

and kind of play act together in the woods.

and pretend to make medicine.

And this medicine is pretend medicine.

But flower essences are sold.

Then Tatiana got caught off again.

Sorry, Tatiana, you're a real trooper.

All right.

Well, that's the basic story.

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.

It was supposed to cure cancer.

It was supposed to cure AIDS.

And I fucking included that in my stupid report.

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.

Friends of mine, even today, are surprised when I tell them that homeopathy is bullshit and they don't want to believe it.

I live in Northern California.

Did they mention that?

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

Hope you liked the story.

I don't know if it's good enough to use.

So anyway, thank you.

Bye.

Yeah, my name is Jacob.

Love the podcast.

So, I was just calling in about my experience with wellness, more or less my mother's.

About a year ago, there's a bunch of people in our circle of friends, and more or less because they're, you know, evangelical Christians.

I come from a church background.

All my friends are Christians.

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

And it's a huge part of a lot of the culture of people around us.

And they're always trying to get us to try it,

be a part of it.

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.

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

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

not so much to help with practical things with

my dying mother but

more or less to try to sell her essential oils.

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 and people were showing up not to help with those things but to sell

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

with that.

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

we love and that love us.

But at the end of the day, like, I feel like

they're trying to sell us oils when we just, you know, need food and help with, like I said, practical things or just a hey praying for you or thinking of you.

But instead, it's Facebook message after Facebook message of this oil will help your liver.

This oil is going to help your digestive system.

This help liver, this oil help 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.

And, you know, she can't even take a Tylenol without consulting her doctor right now with the the state of her liver so why would she put something that's potentially could damage her further into her body so this has been something that's really been really horrifying

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Hi there, my name's Allie.

I'm based in the Bay Area.

I have a good story about wellness.

I've been getting these B12 shots.

Basically, all over the Bay Area, there's these like happy hours.

You can go get a shot of the vitamin B12.

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

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 B2 shrouds every few weeks.

And I think that they work.

They could be utter bullshit, but I really enjoy them.

And yeah, thanks so much.

Hi, my name is Karen.

And this is my story.

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.

It hit my head on the concrete.

I woke up.

I was dizzy.

They sent me to the doctor and they said I had a concussion.

I was sent home from school.

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.

I'm taking Xanaflex, which is a really, really intense muscle relaxer.

Topamax, which is an anti-convulsant.

I'm taking painkillers.

Basically, I take a fist full of pills every night.

all this medication for the intense amount of pain and the amount that I clench and grind my my teeth at night.

It's really terrible.

Anyway, over Christmas, my family decided to go to Las Vegas.

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

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.

And they handed me CBD gummies because we were going to go watch a Serpento Soleil show.

And let me tell you, the knot between my shoulders was gone.

The clench in my jaw was gone.

I was relaxed.

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.

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.

Thanks.

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.

So yes, it's totally possible that a substance, CBD, that does nothing for me, or at most makes me grumpy, er,

actually has pain-relieving and anti-anxiety effects.

That's still being studied.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

but there's an incredible stigma associated with that.

And,

you know, what is our imagination like?

Where is it coming from?

Obviously,

we think it comes from the brain.

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.

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

And

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, three things are going to go up at a minimum.

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.

So it's not surprising then that

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.

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

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

clinical encounter.

Right.

So meaning

whether a drug is

an actual

pharmaceutical medication or sugar, as long as there's not some wild, adverse, unexpected effect.

You can see a shift.

Placebo researchers are the first to say that this is not true for all conditions and all diseases.

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

you're packed with hope.

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 tumorigenic process that's happening independent of all that.

But if,

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

And, you know, I see that it's red and or it's, you know, black and blue.

And when I touch it, I feel the pain.

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

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 days, you're probably going to feel much better.

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.

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 now I've put my focus on, am I getting better?

Right.

Which is a good thing, because at the end of the day, we want to be well.

We want to feel better.

Dr.

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

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.

They were called Perkins tractors, and people were into them.

Google them.

The illustrations from the time of people being cured are bonkers.

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

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

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

And guess what?

They worked just as well.

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

You know, he has Mr.

So-and-so who for years has been unable to walk,

another person 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.

But the thing that is more amazing to me and more

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 our lives or maybe even have experienced it

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.

Right.

What's the goal?

Right.

What's the goal?

Right.

Because the point is for people to feel better.

Exactly.

Yeah.

But not but but to be safe.

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

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

and then

it does.

because you wanted it.

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

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

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

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 targetive.

dyskinesia, but that's okay because it's going to treat, you know, your symptoms of schizophrenia.

You know what I mean?

Like, this will get rid of your cancer, but your hair is going to fall out, and that's it.

Right, exactly.

You can make that trade-off for yourself, right?

And I think there's no substitute for that.

Hi,

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.

I actually ended up with Hodgkin's leuoma at the age of 16.

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

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.

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.

And apparently, Dr.

is still

practicing and is still not FDA approved.

And I've been

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

yeah, I was 16.

It was like 1990.

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

Down in Houston,

you know, that he's been going on for so long.

Thank you so much.

Bye.

We wanted to name the

clinic and tell you all about it.

So I called and gave them the heads up that we were running this story and asked for comment.

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.

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

He has a doctorate.

So that's why we had to bleep it.

Hi there.

This is Kelly from Wisconsin.

I am calling to tell you about my wellness experience.

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

And I got a referral to a wellness center in Eau Claire where

I went and had something called QNRT, Quantum Neural Reset Therapy.

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

At any rate, turns out that this doctor essentially had me wear a few different pairs of tinted 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.

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

And

as I sat there, you know, in my 30-minute ionic foot bath, actually with a laser that resembles something that they scan UPC code to the grocery store.

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

I was reading the scientific articles about

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.

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.

So thanks for the work that you're doing.

I'm very much appreciating the podcast and keep it up.

Hey,

I live in Northeast Wisconsin and you asked for submissions about

wellness and kind of our experience and that sort of thing.

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

was

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

And for some reason, the pastors decided to start endorsing

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

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

the Christmas women's service or

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

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.

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

you could pick up to go to this place.

And I just, oh, it was so sickening.

sickening to me.

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

Anyway, thanks.

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.

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.

So we did acupuncture and chiropractic treatments, and we did state piercings, and we had all of those because and paid out of pocket for it and

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

And

so, then all of a sudden, that worked.

The surgery surgery worked and people stopped trying to sell me on alternative treatment.

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

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

And

yeah, thank you for doing this podcast.

It justifies everything that I think and believe and have experienced.

Thank you so much.

Thanks so much to all the listeners who called in with your stories of wellness.

We really appreciate it.

Next time on the dream.

I think what's interesting about the anti-vaccine movement to me is the idea that you can be really well-intentioned and really want the best for your children or your family or your personal health and make really bad decisions because the anti-vaccine movement is based on beliefs that have been debunked over and over and over.

The Dream is a production of Little Everywhere and Stitcher, written and reported by me and Dan Gallucci.

Editing by Peter Clowney and Tracy Samuelson.

Producing by Lyra Smith and Stephanie Kariuki.

The Dream is executive produced by me, Dan Gallucci, Peter Clowney, and Chris Bannon.

Our mixing engineers are Casey Holford and Brendan Burns.

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