S2 E1: What’s Your Frequency?

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Last season when we were talking about the sketchy world of MLMs, we heard a bit from my Aunt Amy about her vast experience with them, which started early in our childhoods, going to sales parties at our relatives' houses.

Remember, Aunt Amy?

Our house was conservative as far as decorating was concerned.

And these other ladies lived in houses that were gilded

and they have a lot of mirrors and a lot of the sculpted shag carpet in very deep and odd colors.

I remember faux flowers kind of around the room, a lot of faux ivy, things like that.

Yes,

a lot of the faux flowers, a lot of

black velvet paintings.

Yes, black velvet paintings of horses.

Amy, bless her heart, was so generous last season with me poking and prodding at her, well, our collective histories involving those kinds of sketchy pyramid-shaped companies.

I interviewed her three times at length.

You can tell my gift of gab is hereditary, and each time we talked, I struggled to keep her on the topic of MLMs.

She had an entirely different story she was dying to talk about.

And to her, this other story was much bigger than the one I was chasing about Mary Kay or Melaleuca or the life vantage vitamins she was selling.

Amy wanted to talk about an epic, life and death battle she had gone through.

One that at the time I was having trouble making sense of, and one that I thought had nothing to do with MLMs.

So we cut it all out of that earlier episode.

Those hours of tape of Amy's story, Amy's troubles, are actually part of something each and every one of us inhabiting a naturally flawed human body can relate to.

For Amy, this started about 15 years ago.

We knew something was, I was sick with something, but we kept thinking that it was because I had been diagnosed with Lyme disease.

And so I kept pinning it on that,

but not really knowing.

what it was that was bringing me down.

I had

thyroid issues.

I had just exhaustion all the time.

I was sick.

I had gotten

oral herpes.

And I was so sick with that that I, in fact, when I went to the doctor and was tested with that the first time, he said, I have no idea how you're actually upright.

I've never seen anybody with that much of this virus in their body before.

I didn't have an immune system.

I just kept picking everything up and getting really, really sick with it, but then just keep, I kept driving myself and driving myself.

At that time amy had just had two daughters two years apart and as is often the case in real life and lifetime movies that's when people often get divorced and then having my husband leave meant that i had to um

push even harder and so i did and um

that then made me think that well maybe that's why i'm tired and so it was it was little because you were working so much and yeah i was i had two babies so i kept thinking that well making excuses, that it was just because I was so tired.

It was because I was drinking too much coffee.

It was because I was doing all these other things and I had two little tiny babies and

that and going through the divorce and everything.

So I just figured it was all stress.

As the years went by and the stress got a little bit less or changed, I guess is probably a better way to say it, then I

realized that it wasn't just stress.

There was something else happening because my eyes were going bad.

I was having a ton of pain.

A lot of

hormonal things go on.

I was still very, very steady with my cycle, but my cycle was going like crazy.

It was getting really, really bad.

And I could tell that my hormones were fluctuating a lot.

And then I was in my 30s at the time.

So when I would go to the doctor, they would say, oh, well, you're just starting menopause.

So, yeah, so that was really sad, honestly.

But I was sad anyway.

I knew there was something else that was still lurking and that I was still fighting something way bigger.

And I could feel it, I just couldn't put my finger on it.

Well, I could put my finger on it because I knew where I thought it was,

but I couldn't figure out what it was that was actually growing inside of me.

So it was just, it was very, very strange and very bad.

Amy went to doctors, MDs and DOs and chiropractors and naturopaths, people in weird basements where they treat maladies with all kinds of unregulated stuff.

Everyone found something, but no one really got to the problem.

And then, finally, three years ago, Amy found a gynecologist who said, I know what that is.

Do you want me to take it out?

It was

an endometrial phenomenon.

It was endometrial tissue that had been trapped in the transverse fascia of my body in the scar.

And so, from

the C-section.

And then

it goes like a little crazy when that happens and when it's trapped.

Amy calls this thing that her gynecologist removed, this painful thing in her abdomen, it.

When she talks about it, it's as if it was alive, a parasite of sorts.

She assigns it responsibility for many of her ailments.

And when I heard her talk about it,

it seemed, I don't know, kind of unbelievable.

I mean, she did use the word phenomenon.

But then I looked it up, and I can tell you, it is real.

It may not be the root cause of all of Amy's complaints, but it does cause pain, severe pain.

And it is rare, and it is not well studied, and it has a name, extrapelvic endometriosis.

Before I tell you more about it, you need to know what regular endometriosis is.

And you should know what it is just in general anyway, so you can be a more informed friend, relative, or lover to your pals who are suffering.

Endometriosis is a disease where tissue that should grow inside of a uterus finds other homes nearby outside of one.

Think about that.

Say your stomach lining just decided to creep outside your tummy and wrap itself around your pancreas.

Or if your lung tissue decided to hug your heart to death.

So that's regular endometriosis, uterine tissue going rogue and finding another home nearby, usually in ovaries and such, and then it proliferates causing severe pain and reproductive difficulties and cancer and whatnot.

Amy had a rarer sort called extra pelvic endometriosis, and it grows in stranger lands, like her C-section scar.

Endometriosis itself, though it's a word you've probably heard, is still a debated diagnosis, often referred to in scholarly papers as a theory.

But keep in mind, there's more than one gender gap in science.

Anatomical researchers, who are still predominantly male, didn't start studying female reproductive anatomy in any serious way until halfway through the last century.

No one fully autopsied a clitoris until 1998.

And to this day, about 47% of studies on animal genitalia are focused solely on males.

44% have a mix of males and females.

And that means that less than 10% are just looking at female anatomy.

10%.

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Anyway, so that's a major part of what was going on with Amy.

But that 15-year stretch, 15 years of discomfort and not knowing, that long war Amy had to wage with dozens of experts to finally get just one diagnosis after already having been diagnosed with Lyme's disease, which is another illness no one totally understands, I think all of that fundamentally changed the way Amy looks at her body, her health, the medical establishment, and the world around her.

She was in pain for a very long time and no one believed her.

She was suffering, and people told her it was stress, or more likely and vaguely, lady problems.

Amy was sick of how the mainstream doctoring world treated her, and that's what drove her into the willing arms of alternative therapies, which brought her to MLMs.

Not the makeup ones, the ones that claim to have products and cures you can't find at the doctor for ailments your doctor won't diagnose you with.

Those make up about a third of the MLM industry.

I wanted to have a much more natural environment in my home and I could associate the chemicals that I'd been using with the issues that I was having.

And so I was seeking out a cleaner environment in my home, less chemicals.

I guess the Young Living Oils,

one of the things that's really good about that company is that they are so pure that you can ingest most of the oils.

And so, I mean, nobody recommends that you do that sort of thing because you can hurt yourself that way too.

But in natural medicine, there are, you know, certain guidelines you can follow and you are able to use those particular oils because of that.

And so that was another thing.

That was another company that grandma and grandpa invested in because you could ingest them, because they were so pure, because they came with all the education and all of the guarantees and that sort of thing.

Grandma and Grandpa refers to my grandparents, Amy's parents.

I was visiting them last year while looking into MLMs and I asked my grandma to show me her oil stash.

Where are your young living oils?

Yeah, can you show them to me?

Sit tight.

Okay.

I'll show you some of them.

I don't know if I can get them all out or not.

Okay.

Jane.

No,

I need to use them for stuff, so I mix them up.

I remember when I first got a job that required me to fly on airplanes, not even that frequently, grandma gave me a homemade bottle of Thieves Oil, which is a mix of clove and cinnamon and eucalyptus and some other stuff.

And it was reportedly used a lot during the Middle Ages to combat bubonic plague.

Thieves, you put on what we do is we put it on like a collar or something like that.

And when you're out places, then you don't usually pick up anybody's colds or anything.

We haven't had a cold this year.

We haven't had the flu in years.

And so we're very blessed because we're able to use things like that, you know.

I've got that lang lang.

Oh, grandpa likes lang lang.

Yeah.

Bergamot, geranium, rosewood, lemon.

And other ones, too.

You see other oils.

Patchouli.

And I think he's got a lang lang in one of these too.

Cypress.

Oh, that's a tree oil.

That joy one had a mix.

The young living oils were for you know the frequencies and the and and the medicinal value, therapeutic value of the oils.

Wait, what are frequencies?

For a second, I thought you were talking about bowel movements.

What are you talking about with frequencies?

Frequencies.

The oils all have their own frequency.

Okay, bear with us here.

This is where things start to get a little...

You know, like

quantum physics, where like the chair you're sitting in has the components that make up that chair have frequencies on this planet.

And so you can read the frequencies through quantum physics.

And so the oils actually have an active frequency.

And so when they touch your body, the reason that they're therapeutic is because of the way your body responds to those frequencies.

And so it's not just an aromatherapy.

It's actually they can

they have the ability to give therapy to your system.

That's arguable in most medical

forums because there's no way to really quantify it.

But you can't deny, just like we can't deny that mass has a frequency.

Any, you know, a rock, a certain type of rock, granite has its own frequency.

That's what makes it granite.

You know what I mean?

So it's that type of

scenario where you're dealing with

the pure oil and using the pure oil to in massage therapy and aromatherapy and in any kind of therapeutic application.

So I have no idea what you're talking about.

Is this stuff in the literature for those?

If you want the Young Living Oils book, just to peruse, I want them back, but I got a copy.

When Amy said, I want it back, It was accompanied by a look that said, this book is not leaving my site, which made me even more curious than I already was about these frequencies and what Amy and my grandma actually do with all those oils.

It was all right there in the book, and I didn't think she was going to let me take it, so we got our own.

Yeah, we did.

We do.

Welcome, Dan,

to the program.

Dan Gallucci is the love of my life, and also my business partner, and also a producer and reporter on this show.

And he'll be looking into the legal side of things.

Anyways, we have a book now.

Let me read the title of it.

Okay.

It's the Essential Oils Desk Reference, 8th edition,

by Life Science Products and Publishing, which is Young Living Oils publishing company.

Okay.

So is it like a catalog?

It is.

No, no, no.

It's in the form of an encyclopedia.

The book is heavy, 640 spiral-bound pages, and it's inscribed to all those who seek yesterday's wisdom and today's discovery.

After all, it is their hearts and minds that turn to the knowledge within these pages.

There's a photo collage on page two of fields of lavender, a microscope, and then a papyrus with hieroglyphs, and a Bible open to Exodus.

And on the first page of the first chapter, it reads, Essential oils are substances that definitely deserve the respect of a proper education.

Users should have a basic knowledge about the safety of the oils, and having a basic understanding of the chemistry of essential oils is very helpful.

However, it is difficult to find this knowledge taught in universities or private seminars.

Chemistry books are difficult to understand for most people, and they don't usually address the specific chemistry of essential oils.

There is very little institutional information, knowledge, and training on essential oils and the scientific approach to their uses.

I think that's their manifesto right here.

Right.

And so

that is the knowledge that you can gain about essential oils, is this book.

This is all you got.

What's concerning about it is that my aunt and my grandma fucking love this book.

And it's like,

it's their health Bible.

Well, you've gone through the book.

Essentially, yeah, I've read the whole thing.

Okay, so

is there anything good?

I mean, interesting?

Or, like, did you learn anything?

No.

Everything is qualified in a way, I think, probably

written to be obscure a little bit.

Like,

we think maybe this does that, you know, and so it's hard to read because it reads like propaganda.

Right.

But I also am not someone who minds reading textbooks.

Right.

And they said up front in the very first chapter that that's no good, no fun, and nobody likes doing it, which is what brings you to this book.

So already off the bat, like I'm not the intended audience for this.

And I mean, we should point out again, it was made by the manufacturers of these essential oils that they're talking about.

It's a sales manual.

Yeah.

And not just a sales manual for any old company.

It's a sales manual for an MLM.

In it, they talk about neurotoxins and antioxidants, alkalinity and oxidative stress.

the most perplexing chapter addresses those frequencies Amy was talking about.

Almost right off the bat, it states, when studying the topics of vibration, frequency, and energy, it is a wise man or woman who realizes he or she does not know everything.

It then goes on to say so much nonsense about how everything, including humans, emits a frequency measured in megahertz.

Everything except canned food.

That has zero somehow.

Apparently there's an ideal human frequency, a healthy one.

And the lower your frequency, the sicker you can be.

Essential oils have a high frequency.

So if you put them on your body in specific places, or inhale them, or ingest them, or take a bath in them while we're just throwing ideas out, if you use the oils, your frequency will increase.

Et voila, you will be well.

I felt like such an asshole, like an unwise woman who thinks she knows everything while I'm reading this, so I had our producer producer Lyra take a look to make sure I wasn't alone.

Just initial thoughts.

Um, okay, well, my very first thought-I don't know if this is what you're specifically asking about-is like the way it's laid out.

Is it it looks like your high school chemistry book?

It looks like a textbook.

Right.

Second paragraph, there's a sentence that really bothered me that says, Who is to argue with German biophysicist Fritz Albert Popp, author of 150 scientific studies.

I just like, why is this like textbook nagging me as if that like quantity means that he's right?

Yeah.

Do they say in here

why it's better to have a higher frequency or what frequency you're supposed to have?

This is the normal range.

And then here's this chart shows you if you keep going lower, you get a flu when you're at this frequency you get a cold and candida at this frequency Epstein bar at this frequency and then you get cancer

okay so holding okay

it says if you hold a cup of coffee your frequency goes down to 58 millihertz and that's

and that's when you get a cold

They're claiming here

that

by manipulating the frequencies of someone's body.

Which you have to believe is a thing in the first place.

Right.

Then you can prevent cancer

or get rid of cancer

and cure cancer.

Stringing together words into sentences that don't make sense to anybody, you know?

So what I found is

this disturbing page that has an

out-of-place graphic at the top, if you ask me.

What's the graphic?

It's a map of the world with every young living corporate farm or partner or distillery or international office or global headquarters marked on it.

And right below that is this troubling stuff.

Because of the research being conducted by many scientists and doctors, the healing power of essential oils is again gaining prominence.

Today, it has become evident that we have not yet found permanent solutions for dreaded diseases such as Zika and Ebola viruses, Hantavirus, AIDS, HIV, which are kind of the same thing, and new strains of tuberculosis and influenza like bird and swine flu.

Essential oils may assume an increasingly important role in combating new mutations of bacteria, viruses, and fungi.

More and more researchers are undertaking serious clinical studies on the use of essential oils to combat these types of diseases.

A vast body of anecdotal evidence

suggests that those who use essential oils are less likely to contract infectious diseases.

Moreover, oil users who do contract an infectious illness tend to recover faster than those using antibiotics.

I hate that I have to say this out loud, but there are reasons why you don't use anecdotal evidence, obviously, and that you use, you know,

studies.

A study of lemon verbena and lemongrass essential oil against the bacteria that cause ulcers caused the scientists to marvel about the power of lemongrass.

But what did it do?

It doesn't say.

What was it effective at?

It doesn't say.

And also, who determined that the scientists were marveling at this information?

It seems very subjective.

The second half of the book is a reference guide for every ailment imaginable.

and the corresponding essential oil that should be used to alleviate it, including bed bugs, heart attacks, and anorexia.

Because of all these wild claims, the FDA sent out a bunch of really long letters back in 2014, warning letters, that's what they're officially called, telling Young Living and doTERRA, that's another MLM selling essential oils, but with less reliance on the Bible, to knock it off.

Quote, Your consultants promote many of your Young Living essential oil products for conditions such as, but not limited to, viral infections including Ebola, Parkinson's disease, autism, diabetes, hypertension, cancer, heart disease, the list goes on.

And then they included some quotes from some distributors' websites.

Ebola virus cannot live in the presence of cinnamon bark.

Hmm.

Research shows that components of frankincense oil have an anti-tumor effect on the following types of cancer cells, causing them to implode.

prostate cancer cells, colon cancer cells, cervical cancer cells, bladder cancer cells, leukemia cells, melanoma cells, and brain tumor cells.

All you need is frankincense oil.

Essential oils weren't the only target of those letters in 2014.

Another company, Natural Solutions, was saying some pretty crazy shit too.

My name is Rima Ilebo, MD.

I am the medical director of the Natural Solutions Foundation.

Nano silver, 10 parts per million, has been shown in laboratories and in clinical environments around the world to inactivate viruses like the HIV virus, the hepatitis B and C viruses, influenza viruses like H5N1, and Ebola virus.

You've heard about Ebola and you know that it's a singularly deadly virus.

Some say a weaponized virus.

Now, Ebola is uniquely...

I mean, it's important to know the FDA has been going after companies like this for this thing since the 30s.

And one of those companies,

much like Young Living Oil, was

an MLM.

It was the first MLM of all time.

That company was Neutralite, and they sold a vitamin syrup back in the 30s.

They're also the company where the founders of Amway got their start.

They were blatant snake oil salesmen.

They put

people who had no medical background at all into drugstores wearing white lab coats and like, you know, glasses and the whole like just

steroid out.

Yeah, kidding.

Thera nosed out.

And doctor gear.

And then those people would be carrying a clipboard and they'd be in front of an in cap that had like Vita 6 on it or whatever.

And they would go up to people and say, excuse me, can I ask you a few questions so that I can give you a diagnosis about

the current state of your health?

I mean, there was nothing that neutralite couldn't cure.

Short, fat, bald.

Yeah.

You like notice a woman with three children in her shopping cart.

Right.

And you're like, oh, man.

Are you bummed?

I bet you're bummed and you don't sleep well, right?

You look like you're suffering from insomnia, but I've got to.

Does your husband suck?

Does your husband suck?

And can we call him to make sure he makes sure you take this?

Well, and that's the thing is like the FDA did actually go after neutralite.

They were one of the first vitamin company or you know supplement companies that the FDA actually went after, and they went pretty far.

They started raiding their warehouses, they started going into those drugstores and pulling all of the product off the shelf in front of the lab-coated sales associates.

This has been going on forever, and it's been

a real battle.

It's a problem.

I don't understand.

See, here's what I don't understand.

Letters go out 2014.

We ask in 2019, hey, can we talk about this?

Because this shit's still going on, and you guys know it's a problem, and you know it's still going on.

And they say,

A,

we can't talk about it because it's still going on.

And B, here's the most recent communication we can send you from five years ago.

This is the problem with the FDA deciding not to grant any of my interview requests.

I want to know from them, and I am not anti-FDA.

I think it's a very important organization.

We thought they were going to be on board.

I thought they would be on board.

I would like to understand

not why they are ineffective,

why they have fought to be more effective and have been pushed back every time.

I called my Aunt Amy the other day to see how she's doing, and she answered from the car.

Grandma was driving.

They'd just gone to the health food store for some trace minerals, and she said she's treating her Lyme disease on her own at home now, using techniques that only European doctors employ, which include raising her body temperature above 102.2 degrees once every three days.

She accomplishes this in a hot bath.

I asked her why she's taken it upon herself, and she said of mainstream doctors and naturopaths both, quote, no one should be saying they can cure anything.

You can do things to help your body fight against these things, but there's nothing you can do or take on this planet that can completely annihilate anything.

It's all the same smoke and mirrors for either side of the fence.

They're all trying to sell you something.

This season on the dream, we're taking on the massive $5 trillion wellness industry, yeah, trillion, which is almost unfathomably huge until you break it down into its endless parts.

Getting a touchless massage is wellness, but so is violent rolfing.

Wellness is meditation and mindfulness and juicing and taking a curated mix of vitamins or things that look sort of like vitamins but sound like prescriptions while smelling like perfume.

Wellness is athleisure and athleisure wear.

It's looking beautiful while drinking a mocktail on a beach in Fiji.

It's your employer giving you a kickback for joining a gym.

Rude.

Wellness is giving your crystals a moon bath while setting intentions for the next lunar cycle while free bleeding.

It's CrossFit and yoga, veganism and paleo dieting, washing your hair with an all-natural shampoo, or better yet, just never wash your hair ever ever again.

That's wellness.

Vaginal steaming, turmeric or turmeric, probiotics, home births and hospital births that look just like home births but aren't covered by Medicare for all.

Or are they?

We'll talk about the shadiness of the massive dietary supplement industry.

You and I could decide to launch a dietary supplement after this phone call and like put an ad online tomorrow, and that would be fine.

And what would we have to do to, like,

would we have to inform the FDA that we were doing this?

No,

that's part of the problem.

We'll explore the push and pull between modern medicine and alternative therapies, when to trust your doctor and when to trust your gut.

The vast majority of my patients,

I don't feel like they're suspicious of me.

I work really hard to have a relationship with my patients, and I think that at some point in pregnancy or labor and delivery,

at some point, you have to pick the experts that you're going to listen to.

I hope that you have trust in that person, and I hope that that person knows what they're doing and will get well ourselves.

I don't know.

She said something about ashwagandha will help me help my muscles feel better.

No, wait, that was the other one.

I don't know.

Or die trying.

I'm recording this on my phone from

the hospital.

That's all coming up

this season on The Dream.

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

Editing by Peter Clowney and Tracy Samuelson with production by Stephanie Karauki and Lyra Smith.

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

Our mixing engineers are Casey Holford and Brendan Burns.

Please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

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