Natural Alternatives to Pharmaceuticals: Comparing Naturopathic Medicine to Conventional Medicine

Hi and welcome to how humans heal. I'm Dr. Donnie Wilson and today I want to introduce you to Dr. Lindsay Elmore. She is a pharmacist and wellness expert. She's also a speaker, author, podcast host, and so much more. Thank you so much for joining me today, Lindsay.

Thanks so much for having me. It's going to be a very exciting conversation.

Well, I, I especially think it's fun because it's, you know, my father was a pharmacist and I essentially grew up in a pharmacy and you know, like, really feel like I grew up with a much more bird's eye view or close up view of pharmaceutical industry and what it is to be working in pharmacy. And so to get to speak to you, you know, with your training as a pharmacist, your background, and then for you to then say, hey, wait a minute, there's stuff, there's options out there for people that they may not know about. And as a pharmacist choosing to help inform people about those options, I'm just really curious about, you know, your experience with that. So maybe tell us a little bit more, like, how did that happen for you? How did you transform from, you know, sort of standard pharmacy to more holistic pharmacy, I guess I might call it.

Yeah, so I was raised by a nurse and my mom was a single mom. And so she ended up taking me to work with her all of the time. And, and so I was very familiar with western medicine and had a really strong scientific acumen from a young age. And I got my degree in chemistry. I thought I was going to go to medical school, decided I didn't want to do that, thought I would then get a PhD in chemistry. And my colleagues were just like, don't. It's not who you are. Like, you are not built to be a bench scientist. And so I was like, well, crap, guys, now I don't have a life plan.

What am I going to do now?

What am I going to do?

And at the time, nobody was talking about naturopathy. Nobody. You know, I, I didn't, I don't like hands on. So I didn't want to be a chiropractor. And I didn't even know that those were like a thing. You know what I mean? Yeah. I had never heard of traditional Chinese medicine, had never heard, I'd never heard of any of these alternative modalities. So one day a colleague comes in and says, I know what you should do. You should be a pharmacist. And I was like, that's a Great idea. Let's do that. Um, and so I go to pharmacy school, and during my first year in pharmacy school, I tear my acl. And when you tear your acl, you're locked out in a leg brace for weeks and weeks and weeks on end. Well, when your knee doesn't bend like it is supposed to, you end up hiking your hip every time that you take a step. So one day I was studying and I realized I can't sit on both of my sitting bones anymore because I realized my hips were, were out of alignment. Okay, Just, I knew that intuitively because I couldn't sit. So I end up in the chiropractor's office for the first time. My left hip was a full 2 1/2 inches higher. That. It's a lot. It's a lot. But for 12 weeks, every step I took, I had to hike my hip. And so I mentioned to her, doc, I feel like I'm going to die because I haven't slept in a month. And she goes, oh, if you're not sleeping, you need to go down the hallway to my colleague and get some acupuncture. And I had never heard of acupuncture. Never, you know, anything. But I trusted it. And so I, I went and she introduced me to the world of traditional five point acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine. And she was also a skilled herbalist, and so she had tinctures. And so I, you know, here I am rolling.

Opened up this whole new world for you.

Opened up this whole new world. And I ended up, because I am academic by nature, I always love learning. I, I loved what she was teaching me. And I'm also a. If you teach me something one time, I can teach it to somebody else. So I just started accumulating knowledge about traditional Chinese medicine and then started going to Integrative Medicine Forum. Started like hanging out with shamans and like hearing more about indigenous medicines. And it just, it just kept going and going and going until eventually I got a reputation where they were like, Lindsay knows as much about alternative medicine as she does Western medicine. And I'm very practical about the integration of the two because I think that we have this false narrative in our society that to embrace natural medicine includes a denial of Western medicine, which is patently false. It's not a true statement. And so I love working with people on, yes, there are supplements. I also have written cookbooks and just realized, like, there's some. When I was in pharmacy school, I did my first ever 21 day cleanse and I Started to realize how important food is. I've always been athletic, and so, like, the exercise was always there. And so I just kept picking up more and more and more skill sets as I went along, as well as maintaining my board certification as a pharmacist. So I don't lose the essential pharmacy knowledge that ultimately makes me so helpful for other people is because I do understand the interplay between the two.

Yeah, yeah, it is, it's, it's, it's that unique spot where you can see from two different, two different directions at once. And I like the point you made, which is that it's not an either or. And, and I, I find that I probably don't emphasize that enough either. You know, like, as a naturopathic doctor, my training includes learning all the pharmaceuticals and all the interactions between pharmaceuticals and natural substances. In fact, when I was in my naturopathic medical training, entering my residency, I had a job where I was running the continuing education department for pharmacists, and we were running classes about natural substances, vitamins, herbs, for pharmacists to take continuing education credits. And so it was like, really cool to me to see that how many pharmacists really do want to learn about natural substances? And, and of course, in pharmacies, a lot of times there are supplements on the shelf as well, Vitamins. Right. So if you go to a pharmacy, you're going to have the prescription substances, but you're also going to have non prescription, over the counter substances, including vitamins and herbs. So would you say, I mean, your pharmacist, your friends and colleagues who are pharmacists, are they open to natural approaches to healing? How much is that part of the training that pharmacists get?

It's unfortunate because you used to have a huge swath of pharmacist education in the, the specialty field. It's called pharmacognosy. So pharmacognosy is the study of plants as medicine. And if you back up 150 years, the pharmacist was nothing more than a compounding pharmacist. Like, we were there to put the medicines together, and we primarily did it with herbs and substances. Herbs and natural substances from plants as well as the. The most common ingredients in pharmaceuticals before the Safe Food and drug and Cosmetic act were heroin, Cocaine and alcohol were the most common medications that were out there, which are all, in effect, natural products. Right. And so not the safest thing, but that was what we had. It was what we had to work with. And so we used to get A lot of pharmacognosy where we understood the.

The application of plants as medicine, we don't get as much now. You have to go out in search of it. And that is because the division between western and alternative medicine, the reason that the divide is so line in the sand where you can't have, you can't have both. It's actually entrained. There was a gentleman named Stanley Flexner and he wrote this paper called the Flexner report. It's about 110, 120 years old now. And it basically created the modern indoctrination of what medical practice is. And it shoved aside all of the alternative, all of the alternative practices. So at the time around 1900 or 18, you know, 18, whatever, there were medical schools that actually had personalities. Right? So you could choose, do I want to go to a school where I'm going to learn surgeries or do I want to go to a school where I'm going to learn about plants as medicines, food as medicines, about energy as medicine. Like medical schools have lots of different varieties. Flexner Report came out, through all that out the window. They shuttered any schools that did not go to the drugs and surgery. So drugs and surgery are ultimately what we are taught. And so, you know, you think about a doc like you mentioned that they're just offering prescriptions, it's because they don't know any better. It's because they don't know any better. So pharmacists do have to go in search of, of natural, of natural education. And I encourage you too, friends like, don't assume that every over the counter medicine is safe and effective and without side effects. You know, be it a supplement, be it an herb, be it a tincture, be it a medication, you show me a medication or an herb or a supplement that doesn't have any side effects, I will show you one that doesn't have any effects. So in order to get the effect, we have to have sometimes the side effects. And there really aren't side effects, it's just effects that you don't like. But over the counter medications can cause significant harm and have major drug interactions. So be sure there's, there's a phrase that I love from the American Pharmacists association that we need to know our medicines and know our pharmacist. So feel empowered to go talk to your pharmacist about your medications. And if you have a pharmacist who doesn't have time to talk to you about your medications, change pharmacies. It's Literally our job is to teach people about the medications. The dispensing piece of the job is minuscule in comparison to the pharmacist role in teaching medication safety.

Oh, I love that. I love that you're saying that. And I find myself saying that to people too. Yeah, like check with your pharmacist, they might have another option for you that you didn't even realize. And, and pharmacists have way more training and yet a lot of times now they're kind of in the back of the pharmacy and you're not in a lot of times you're not even getting to interact with them. I love getting to talk to pharmacists all the time. I'm like, it's exciting part of what I do to be able to get to especially compounding pharmacists because it's like you, you get to create these new recipes. Like so much can be created for patients and like you said, some, whether the substance is directly right from nature, plant based substance level or something that was derived from a natural substance. There's so much available. And I love also thank you for bringing up the Flexner report because I think the history of medicine in the United States is so important for us to understand that. It's really because at that time in the early 1900s, there was even a naturopathic medical school in New York City and others around the United States. And at that time, not only was naturopathic medicine shoved aside, but also that's when chiropractic medicine had been pushed aside and had get themselves back in. Same with osteopathic medicine. And also midwifery became really shifted to the side. And that's when you know, as you mentioned, stand kind of this, what we know of as standard medicine today really was based on those decisions back then to kind of make medicine mean anything that's from a pharmaceutical company or a surgery or a procedure. Right. And so I think now people are really starting to open their eyes and be like, wait a minute, there's so much more. So even if your practitioner is saying you go in and you're like, okay, the only thing they're offering you is a prescription or a surgery to know, hey, there's so much more options available. Just because that practitioner isn't aware of it or isn't trained in it doesn't mean that that's the only option. And it's so great for people to be able to hear it from you, the pharmacist to say, yo, there's like all these Other possibilities. So how do you help people then, to navigate all the possibilities? Because there's so many out there, you know, and I know that's a lot of what you do is help people to go, hey, here's. There's other options. Now what, what, where do they choose? Where do they go from there?

I am again, really down to earth. Where, what do you start with? Anything. Anything. I don't care. You want to sleep an extra 20 minutes because you've only been sleeping six hours for the past five years. Okay, do that. You want to get up and get your circadian rhythm kicked off by going out into the sun first thing in the morning. Great. You want to start lifting weights. Amazing. You want to eat one plant based meal. Okay. You want to increase your water consumption. Fine. You want to meditate, whatever. And so I really go and I look at, okay, there are eight root causes of disease, right? So the eight root causes of disease, stress, toxins, toxicants, allergens, antigens. And then you have your infections and your dysbiosis, your nutrient excesses and deficiencies, sedentary ism, lack of sleep, and then the sociogenomics. So I start to look at those and I really, if I had to choose one place to start, it's with stress. You know, there's no disease that stress does not make worse and no disease that stress does not cause. And so it's really important that we figure out how to mitigate our stress by intentionally crafting, crafting safety for ourselves. And so that's where I just, I'm like, listen, I don't care what you do. The fact that you have made the radical choice that you deserve to be healthy and that you're going to take a step towards health is important. It's, it's finding that peace in you. Because let's be honest, friends, we all know what we're supposed to do, right? We know that we're supposed to drink clean water, avoid toxins, not do drugs or alcohol. You know, we know we're supposed to sleep. We know we're supposed to eat lots of plants and really high quality fat and proteins. Like, we know what we're supposed to do. The problem is we don't think we're worth it, right? And I love the Marianne Williamson quote of, you know, you're not actually scared of failure, you're scared of being the magnanimous open. Like, we're scared of our power. And so if you can take a moment to be like, okay, I'm gonna sit with how uncomfortable this Makes me. But I'm gonna choose to go to bed at 9:30 and not be a slave to whatever inside of us stays hell bent on destruction, right? It's that internal. I'm not worth it. I'm too traumatized. I can't go back. Whatever it is, stop and just do something. Take some action. You, you know, inside of you, what you're supposed to do. And then the harder situation comes when it's like, okay, well I'm doing everything that I am supposed to do, but something is still wrong. And that's when you start getting into like, okay, maybe we want to do some labs, maybe we want to do some allergen testing, maybe we want to look at some horm. Maybe we want to do some more sophisticated interventions. You know, maybe it's time for a thermography or a colonoscopy or whatever it is. And so, but we start with the basics, start with the absolute basics and then just continue to search for what the problem is.

And I love that, you know, we, you, you had interviewed me on your podcast about stress and because I agree with you, like when we can understand and not just expect that we're going to have zero stress either, right? Like, because then we just, we just end up sabotaging ourselves again, right? Like thinking, oh well, I just give up because I can't have zero stress. But actually it's about how do we help ourselves recover from stress, which is the things you're mentioning, like, how do we just start putting one foot in front of each other and making different choices so that we create that sense of safety and that ability for our bodies to recover from all the stresses and toxins that we're exposed to. And, and so I love that that is like we just start simple. And I know you offer so many resources and, and coaching as well through your website and I'll be sure to share that below. So if people are like, hey, okay, you know, they're resonating with how you're communicating and how you help people, I want to make sure they can be able to find you. I know that like, even if we use this as a way to connect like the experience in a pharmacy to the use of natural substances. And, and again, I love this, this point for people to hear that so many substances that we use, even in pharmacy, whether prescription or over the counter, were originally derived from nature. I mean, nature has so many resources for us to heal as humans. And one of the most popular has become probiotics. And addressing the microbiome, which I Agree is huge. There's so much research now helping us understand how important these hundred trillion bacteria living in our gut are to our health. And so I think people are, you know, more often going into a pharmacy and saying, hey, which probiotics do they have? Or, or which, or even online, which probiotics should I be taking? And I know this is a real passion of yours, so tell us more, like, what is your take on this whole concept of the microbiome and, and the power it holds for our health?

Well, the microbiome is so critically important. It has three functions that are, that are just, they're critical for life. We cannot live without our microbiome. And so when we think about the microbiome, we have these metabolic functions where they help us to metabolize foods, extract energy from complex and digestible sugars. They also ferment our dietary carbohydrates and fibers to produce what are called postbiotics. And these postbiotics are amino acids as well as short chain fatty acids. The microbiome uses our food to produce vitamins. It also helps with mineral absorption, and they also metabolize our bile acid, which helps us to regulate our cholesterol levels. So they have this huge metabolic function. The microbiome also has a protective function where it creates layers for our immune system to be educated as well as to provide a barrier function. So the barrier function of the microbiome basically says we're going to put all the good bacteria in their homes and we're going to, we're going to create a barrier where bad bacteria can't come in. They, they live in these certain niches in the gut and that just protects by creating a barrier. Also having a really well diversified and expanded microbiome also helps with the, what I call the starve the energy or starve the enemy strategy. So when we starve the enemy, we are actually eating all of the calories with our good bacteria so that the bad bacteria don't have any food. So you are stealing the energy from your enemies and smart bacteria actually. So your good bacteria will actually. So let's say that there's a bad bacteria that feeds on a certain.

Nutrient. Well, if your body has the ability to create that nutrient, good bacteria will say, hey, don't make that nutrient anymore because it's feeding that guy over there. Okay. Then there is the bacteria sidings, which is a good, healthy microbiome can literally kill bad bacteria. They are, they're toxic and they cause them to die. Then you get to like the real secret Sauce of the microbiome, and the secret sauce is, is like the trophic functions where the gut bacteria talk to the lining of your gut. And then the lining of the gut helps to understand and interpret that. The, the information that's being given to it, which can help to turn genes on and off. It strengthens the gut barrier, it changes fat deposition, it influences our growth, it influences changes in the body. We also have this really important system called the gut brain axis. And so gut microbiome microbes, which aren't just bacteria, but you have these more ancient bacteria like species called archaea. We also have a human virome that I think people don't talk about very much at all. And there are viruses that live on us and in us, including pathogenic viruses that live on us and in us. Just like every single person on the planet has pathogenic bacteria inside of them at all times. To go through life and not acknowledge that you are exposed to sugar toxin producing E. Coli every single day, it's simply naive. So we have this interplay between good bacteria, bad bacteria, good viruses, bad viruses that are, that are just part of how we educate and train our immune system. And so the gut brain axis modulates our response to stress, mood, behavior. It governs our food cravings because it has impact on ghrelin and leptin. In, it also manages our circadian rhythm. So your gut bacteria, just like we have circadian rhythms, so too does our gut bacteria. They, they like to go through the same 24 hour cycle that we do. The microbiome is critically important for brain development in early life and it also helps with the education and regulation of the immune system. So between birth and age three, the microbiome goes through a maturation process. And this maturation process is very, very, very important. It's one of the reasons it's so critical not to over sanitize when children are really, really young. Because when we over sanitize children when they're very young, it leads to allergies, it leads to chronic disease earlier in life. Because during this birth to age 3, the microbiome is teaching the immune system what is friend and what is foe. And then later in life, the microbiome and the immune system continue to communicate. And this is what helps to balance out pro and anti inflammatory responses. And so the microbiome does a lot for us and we're getting more sophisticated in our knowledge of different strains of bacteria that we can now go and say, okay, I'm looking for a strain of bacteria that reduces cortisol or I'm looking for a strain of bacteria that helps with constipation. I'm looking for a strain that helps with digestion. So we can get very specific because I think we're moving towards a time where we don't just refer to the bacteria by the genus and species, where we don't just say, oh, it's Lactobacillus rhamnosus. It's Lactobacillus Rhamnosis R0011, which has a very different function than like an R0047. And so we get to be very specific about what are we taking and what's the intended end point for what we hope to happen by taking this supplement.

It's really. It really is so cool and amazing. I mean, to think that even. Not that long ago, we were even so afraid of bacteria and microbes. And I mean, even now, sometimes, especially coming through the pandemic, people became again, very fearful of exposure to germs, let's say. And at the same time, we have all of this research and new information about how important our microbes in our gut, let alone the microbes that live around the whole rest of our body are to our health. And so to be able to, I think, for people to stand back for a minute and just think, wow, yeah, like you said, if we're constantly using antibacterial soaps and preventing exposure, even to our. For our children at a young age to an environment of healthy exposure, that, that. That they might not have as healthy of a microbiome in their life to be able to protect them. And so, you know, just learning how to navigate that and get more comfortable with it and to realize that, I. I mean, I'm excited, too. Like, every. Every year, I was going to say, let alone every few months now, we're seeing more and more products being developed that are, like, you're saying, specific bacteria or other microbes that are being researched and identified with a specific action. Like, like you said, like, here's a. There can be specific bacteria that help decrease cortisol. That's too high. You know, so it was like, okay, then I think to myself, okay, then we got to make sure we got to know who's the right person for that. You know, me, not everybody has high cortisol. So we have to go, okay, who has high cortisol? And then would this particular treatment be, you know, be appropriate for them? But how exciting that we even are going to be able to have those tools. Because I think right now, still most People are just hearing the term probiotic, which is, as you know, like mostly lactobacillus and bifidobacteria of certain strains. And it's kind of like a general. Right. It's like sometimes I think like a. Just. It's like a general flooding the system with just a couple strains. It's not. And what you're saying is we're on the path of becoming way more specific than that when it comes. Right. It's not going to be just throw in some general probiotics. It's going to be exactly which probiotics for which purpose. Like a, like a pharmaceutical prescription for the specific microbe.

Mm. Oh, yeah, absolutely. We can get very, very specific these days about what do we want the bacteria to do and what do we look for to ensure that. That we're getting the. The outcome that we want. And so, like, for example, if you look at, like a Bifidobacterium longum, R0175, this is going to help with cognition, it's going to decrease our stress, it's going to help us to remain calm, versus a Lactobacillus rhamnosis is going to lower cortisol exposure and improve GABA signaling. So it's a very, very different set of functions than number one that you might think of in a, in a, in a probiotic. But we are knowing now that the gut brain axis is a very critical part of our mental health. But then if we look at some other bacteria we might have, like a Lactobacillus acidophilus 14, well, that's going to be more important in the healthy function of the immune system. We have bacteria that can help with immune balance because, you know, everybody wants to talk about boosting our immune system, but you don't want to boost your immune system if it's already in overdrive. We need to bring the immune system into balance so that we have neither too much or too little. Because when we have too little, this is when we get infections, and when we have too much, this is when we get autoimmunity. And so we want it all to come into balance instead of talking about boosting the immune system all the time. But, yes, you can drill down and get very, very specific about what you want the. The bacteria to do.

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Yes. And so I think small intestinal bacterial overgrowth as well as small intestinal fungal overgrowth is very, very important to address. This is where my brain goes when somebody talks to me about chronic heartburn. Right. Because the medications that are used to treat chronic heartburn and gastroesophageal reflux are not safe to be on for an extended period of time. They are safe to be on for a short period of time. And in fact, the original labeling of these medications and the original instructions that drug reps were given to educate physicians is to never use proton pump inhibitors for more than two weeks. Well, I know, and you see people on these meds for 20 plus years. And it's a major problem because it's depleting massive amounts of nutrients affecting bone health, affecting digestion. You actually need acid in your stomach. So whenever I talk to somebody about heartburn, I think we have, I think that lower esophageal sphincter tone is a player in heartburn, But I don't think it's the only player. I think what typically is happening is you have a small intestinal bacterial or small intestinal fungal overgrowth, and as a byproduct of their metabolism, they generate hydrogen gas and hydrogen sulfide gas. Well, when you're generating gas in the small intestine, you are forcing air upwards and it is bringing the gastric juices along with it. And so it's not only lower esophageal sphincter tone that is critical in the assessment of, of, of heartburn. So you can listen to my interview with Dr. Bill Davis, who he teaches people how to inoculate their yogurts at home with lactobacillus rooter eye and help to rebalance and kill off some of the bad bacteria. The problem is, is sometimes if you've got a rip roaring case of small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and then you start supplementing with probiotics and prebiotics, or maybe you start supplementing with.

With, you know, foods that contain prebiotics and probiotics. You feel like crap, you get sicker.

It's worse because there was already too many bacteria.

Yeah, there's too many of the wrong bacteria. But what we have to do is work to bring it into balance so that we have the correct distribution of our, our good bacteria with the bad. We're never going to get rid of all the bad bacteria. It's just we are surrounded by bacteria. And to be fair, we have co evolved with virus and bacteria and parasites and fungus.

Since whenever you begin, whenever you believe that the beginning of time was, we have co evolved with all of these things because bacteria and virus predate us. Right. They were around before us, and we need them in order to train our immune system. So we're never going to get rid of all the bad bacteria. But if you are somebody who, you've maybe done the breath test, maybe you've done the stool cultures, you know that you've got sibo, maybe you want to do a couple of days of some sort of prokinetic laxative. You may want to do 10 straight days of, like, digestive enzymes, three, four times a day. And if you still can't kick it, take the antibiotics and the prokinetic drugs to flush it out, and then we'll work on restoring your microbiome. But I do think that using a senna preparation or a cascara preparation to help speed things along as well as taking digestive enzymes are a step that you can take before you decide, okay, I'm going to do the metaclopramide, the prokinetic drug, as well as an antibiotic to get rid of this. And then, As I mentioned, Dr. Bill Davis's work and the way that he teaches people to culture Lactobacillus Rooter eye is really, it's really kind of cool how he can reverse SIBO using bacteria, because it doesn't stand to reason. You know, you would think you're adding more bacteria to where you've got too many bacteria, but it does work in this case.

Yeah. I mean, and that's the thing is, like, I, I agree with you. Like, sometimes when you start to have these symptoms, at the very least, like you're saying, like, kind of think through, like, why is this starting? Instead of just running straight to the practitioner or the pharmacy to get whatever pharmacy, whatever prescription to kill a bacteria, how about we stop and think about it first and Be like, what's really happening here? Why is it that things are at a standstill? And, and then. And if there's gases, yes, there's somebody's overgrowing and many gases, so we have to, like, start to solve it. And, and I find that it's. When I start to ask those questions, why and how do I. Why, where did this start from? And how do I. How do I change the environment in this human body so that it's not perpetuating it? Because otherwise we're just taking antibiotics over and over and never getting anywhere. And that's not really solving anything either. Just like taking PPIs forever, it's not really solving anything. In fact, it's probably causing other issues. So just to be able to say, hey, let's stop and be like, hey, how is my. Am I actually, like, giving my body a chance and the right signals to digest my food? And if my bowels are not moving, let's get the bowels moving. And am I feeding myself in a way where I'm not over. Over feeding the bacteria? Right. So we can start there, like you were saying. And then if it still really needs more help, maybe we get more help. Whether it's a prescription or I use, you know, antimicrobial herbal protocol to address overgrowing bacteria. But I agree with you. It's never about. I got the analogy. I often find I'm curious about your impression of it is like, if there, if you have an overgrowing garden, you know, where the plants you do want and the weeds are overgrowing, you don't need to go and rototill the whole garden. You, you want to go in and say, hey, we just need to weed the ones we don't need anymore and, and prune the ones that are overgrowing and just like work with the garden from that place versus completely wiping it out and trying to start over.

Absolutely. And another analogy that I really like that I think sums up kind of the difference between a functional medicine approach, because like you said, taking the PPE does not cure the heartburn. Why do you have the heartburn? I think so often Western medicine, they. A Western medicine doc walks into a room and goes, oh, my gosh, the room is flooded. Let me mop it up. A functional medicine physician or pharmacist or clinician, naturopath, whatever, walks into the room and says, oh, no, the room is flooded. Let me turn off the faucet. And so we're trying to look at where is the faucet to turn off versus let me just mop up the, the, the mess. Because mopping up the mess is not going to do anything if you don't actively work on turning off the floodgates. And so, and you turn off the floodgates in, in all of the most boring, mundane ways day after day after day after day after day. And you know, we try to treat health like it's. Everybody's looking for magic, right? But what we really need to be looking for is our simple, down to earth grounded decisions that we make each day that ultimately lead us to find the miracle that is being healthy and being well. We have to stop looking for the magic pill. And mm, it's unfortunate because, you know, I have mixed feelings about evidence based medicine because on the one hand we do need to do clinical trials and find out what works, what doesn't. We need it on natural products, we need it on medications, et cetera. But this whole concept of evidence based medicine being the only kind of medicine and it being the only way to inform guidelines, it being the only way to practice, is simply not true. And it, there's so many conflicts of interest between pharmaceutical manufacturers, the, the evidence that they produce. I mean, take a step back and think about it. Go listen to my interview with Dr. John Abramson, who's been a, a Harvard, Maryland and Harvard professor for more than 25 years, wrote a great book called Sickening How Big Pharma Broke American Healthcare and How to Repair It. Think about this. Think about this, friends. You send in a paper to the New England Journal of Medicine, the new, the New England Journal of Medicine gets that paper, they send it out and 10 people peer review it and send it back and say, yes, this is good enough to be published in the New England Journal of Medicine, or no, this is not good enough. The problem is.

Nobody is required to go back to the pharmaceutical manufacturers and actually verify that the data that they presented in the paper to the New England Journal of Medicine for peer review is factual.

Nobody, nobody requires that. And during, during Dr. Abramson's testimony, he's been a key witness in tons of criminal litigation. He's been an unpaid witness for the Department of Justice as well as the FBI. When you actually subpoena their email chains, their research papers, like you look at the, the emails that were floating around at Merck when Bextra Valdecoxib was on the market. Valdocoxib is very similar to Celecoxib, which most of you may know as Celebrex. So These are selective COX2 inhibitors our, our traditional COX inhibitors inhibit both COX1 and COX2. And when you only inhibit COX2, you, you force everything in that pathway down the COX1 pathway. Merck outright knew that Valdococcib was causing massive amounts of heart attacks and they did not care. They lied about the data, got it published in journals, and now fast forward, we know that, we know that tens of thousands of people died from the side effect of it, and they knew it. And so we have to have this greater transparency in evidence based research. And if we are going to live in a society where we live and die by treatment guidelines, the people that write the guidelines cannot be the same people that are doing the research for the pharmaceutical companies and manipulating the data in order to say, this is what we recommend. You know, a really famous case of this is statin medications. Because when, when Dr. Abramson went back and stratified data related to statin medications, the use of statin medications for primary prevention of cardiovascular events in women, women actually have more heart attacks, more strokes, and more death associated with the use of a statin medication for primary prevention. This is not secondary prevention after you've had a heart attack. The problem is the guidelines keep getting more and more and more aggressive to where. Now, if you read the cholesterol treatment guidelines, upwards of 75% of the US population, it is recommended to be on a statin medication for either primary or secondary prevention of cardiovascular events. But if you actually pull the data out, women suffer more when used for primary prevention. And so we have to be able to rely on the fact that we are going to get actual tangible information out of pharmaceutical manufacturers or we're simply putting patients at risk for harm. And these companies make so much money, so much money, because you guys realize we're one of the very few countries in the world that doesn't have governmental oversight of drug pricing. Companies can charge whatever they want for drugs. Really famous scenario, insulin, insulin. So insulin used to be only a recombinant insulin that was created from an animal product, right?

The drug companies came along, created insulin analogs without having any proof that the insulin analogs either reduced the risk of allergy or reduced the risk of hypoglycemia. They went out to all the prescribers and said, guess what? These insulin analogs, less allergies and less hypoglycemia. They had no data.

They made it up.

They absolutely made it up. And then what they did was jack up the price of insulin glargine and insulin as part to the point where patients are withholding their insulin doses because they can't afford their medications because we don't have governmental oversight of drug pricing. We're seeing it play out right now with the COVID vaccines where we as taxpayers subsidized these half a trillion dollar companies. I mean, you look at Johnson and Johnson, half a trillion dollar company with a credit score greater than the United States government, and yet we as taxpayers were, were required to help produce the COVID vaccines. Well, now that the tax subsidies have stopped, well, Johnson and Johnson's has been pulled from the market for safety concerns because it caused so many blood clots. But if you look at like Pfizer or Moderna, guess what? They're tripling or quadrupling the price of the COVID vaccine. And so you cannot. I, I so wholeheartedly agree with Jonas Salk. So Jonas Salk, when he created the first vaccine from bacteria, naturally occurring bacteria was where the first vaccine came from. And they came to him and said, all right, time for your patent. And he said, you can't patent the sun. This was something given to us. And so don't tell me that there is a vaccine that is life saving, that can prevent tons of people from dying, and then you're going to be so selfish as to triple or quadruple the price of it. That is just so unethical that I, I can't stand by and not educate people that like, look, we must undo the political influence of the pharmaceutical industry over our government or else it threatens our democracy as we know it.

Yeah, it's really true. And I'm so glad you're pointing that out, because a lot of times, here's a, it could be a natural substance, and then a pharmaceutical company will just add sometimes just colors and fillers so that they will be able to patent the substance and probably raise the price on it. Even though it started as a substance from nature. That was helpful.

Absolutely. So there's a lot of ways that, that companies go about manipulating patent laws in order to keep drugs on patent. So you look at the antidepressant citalopram, okay, so you've got Celexa. Okay, so citalopram. Then there's this concept in chemistry called enantiomers. And so you, you have enantiomers that they're like mirror images of each other. Okay? So citalopram is both mirror images. Okay. But then s. Citalopram comes up because each enantiomer one is called S, one is called R. Okay, so then they just got rid of The R. Okay, so all they did was a really simple chemical manipulation extraction to just pull out the S. So now they have Escitalopram, which is Lexapro. Another really famous, really famous. Okay, you heard of a drug called Oxycontin? Okay, so Oxycontin.

The Sackler family, which Gerald Posner describes as essentially a crime family, which they are, they manufactured the, the opioid crisis to the nth degree. And this is not their first rodeo, so their third generation in this company in being influential over the, the marketing. So marketing of medications as we know it. Arthur Sackler, who's kind of the patriarch of this whole Sackler family drama. Mortimer and Arthur Sackler engineered modern pharmaceutical marketing as we know it. They stole every play from the tobacco industries book about how to sow seeds of doubt and just ran with it. Ran with it. And so while they were engineering this idea that you know, that pain is the fifth vital sign, that's a very real new thing in our way that we describe pain.

The problem that they had was they had Ms. Content. So content is nothing more than the delivery system of the medication. It's what, it's what like holds everything together. So Ms. Content was morphine sulfate in this content delivery system. Problem was it was going to go off patent. And so what did they do? They created OxyContin which they marketed as having a 12 hour half life. The problem is it doesn't, it does not have a duration of action of 12 hours. Most patients were reporting problems within about 8 hours after their dose. They also convinced the FDA to allow onto the label that Oxycontin was non addictive. How did they found that? The very first labels of oxycontin, non addictive opiate. Okay. And so they, the way they did that is they had. So here's another thing too. When the media gets their hands on, on drug information. If I were to say, hey, there's a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, you're going to be like, all right, that sounds legit. But what the media actually needed to say is there is a short non peer reviewed five sentence letter from a physician detailing his experience of having patients who were in acute post operative surgery on OxyContin for three days and discharged without meds. He says in this commentary that was published in the New York in the New England Journal of Medicine. In my professional experience, I've never seen someone get addicted to OxyContin. It's like, yes, yeah, you gave it to them for three days and then cut them off, right? And so both of the fundamental marketing points that Purdue Pharma made is that it's non addictive and that it lasts 12 hours, both of which are patently false. They also did not have their content system well enough developed. So all you had to do to get the entire dose was just to crush the tablet. The tablets now are harder to tamper with, but it's not impossible. And if any of you have read or watched Dopesick, you know that the way that they dealt with what they called breakthrough pain was not to admit that hey, our drug doesn't work 12 hours like we said. Because had they gone back and said no, you got to take it every eight hours, guess what? They would have lost their patent. Because there's not something significantly different than other more safer opioids. You know, like a hydrocodone with a 4 to 6 hour duration of action, an Ms. Content which lasts about 8, 8 hours as well. So there were these cheap off patent medications that did not have this 12 hour duration of action. So Purdue could not admit that their drug did not last 12 hours. So there are two major marketing points. That it is non addictive and lasts 12 hours are simply not true. And we don't call them at all.

And how many people became addicted to this substance and even have lost their life because of that?

I mean, estimates are around a half a million dollars at this point. It took the FDA at least 250, 300,000 people before they would take any action against Purdue and they would not stop them. I mean, by the time the FDA got involved, they had gone from an OxyContin, 5 milligrams, 10 milligrams, 20 milligrams, 40 milligrams, 80 milligrams. Because that was their marketing. Double the dose, double the dose. If you got breakthrough pain, double the dose. The FDA did not stop them until they were about to produce 160 milligram tablet of Oxycontin. You are talking one pill to kill an elephant, for goodness sakes. This is another thing we don't talk about in drug education. There is actually a list of pediatric of medications where it is known that one pill will kill a child. It may not, but it can. And it's not just the, the oxycontins and the morphines of the world that can do it. Beta blocking medications, some of the most common medications used to treat high blood pressure can do it. There are barbiturates that can cause one pill, one pill to kill. And like you said, lots of drug manufacturers, they use artificial colors, artificial sweeteners, and the. It's very important that we make medications look like medications and not candy. And because when there's this overlap, it puts children at risk. And that is something that we do not have governmental oversight. We do not tell pharmaceutical manufacturers. You need to make this look like a drug. Right. Just like we didn't tell the tobacco manufacturers, you can't produce candy cigarettes.

The. The.

The tobacco industry really wrote the book on crafting scientific doubt and creating marketing around it. And it's not just big pharma that has duplicated it, but it's Big sugar, even. Even big football. And, like, how you gonna deny that playing professional football causes concussions? Like, you're literally banging your head into someone as your job. And so it's. It's this way that we create doubt that leads to so many patients being at risk.

I'm so glad you're sharing this. Thank you. Because I'm. I'm really hoping that if. If listeners weren't already aware that you can become more aware and learn more. And really, if you see ads about medications or you hear about or you're considering taking a prescription to really learn more, dig in and learn more. Whether you're contacting your pharmacist or contacting Lindsay or searching online, like, really research this information before you even bring the substance into your home, because, you know, it's. There's so much more to the story than what you're being told in. In an ad or in necessarily in the doctor's office. And the doctors, a lot of times don't know this information. They don't have time to research it. They're just. They're just probably hearing about this latest new prescription, and they might not. May not be having all the rest of the background data. So you really have to be your own patient advocate. Would you say Lindsay?

Yes. And if you can't advocate for yourself, find someone who will. I talked with a woman who became a patient advocate because of her sister's journey through cancer. And having somebody who knows how to navigate the western medical system is a good friend to have, because Western medicine is complex. You know, you often are being offered. Do you want option one or option two? In a time that's very, very, very stressful. I remember when my grandmother had a stroke, and I walk in, and they've got. You know, my uncles are all standing there, and they were just like. They all sighed, like, this big sigh of relief because they're being. They're like, you know, would you like to give tpa? And they're like, do we want to give what did? Like, they don't know. You know, that's, I think, a part of a problem too about being an empowered patient. Sometimes we're so naive, we don't even know what to ask ask. And because we, where we live in a system where physicians are paid based on quantity, not quality or what is in, you know, modern medicine speak, called value based care, where you're actually showing a value to what you are giving to the patient. I mean, what a novel idea. Right?

Right.

You would pay by adding value.

I think patients assume that it's value based, but it's mostly not.

It's not. And I also think that Americans have, we have vilified governmental oversight of medicine in a way that has not been done anywhere else in the world. Requiring that government have some sort of control over the way that medicine is putting practice helps to limit spending. We spend so much on health care in the United States, but we are sicker than anybody else in the Western world because we're spending money on expensive new devices. We're spending money in the fact that we don't regulate pricing of medications. We're spending money by allowing Big Pharma to be the most notorious manipulator of patent law. We waste money on health care and patients are dying in the process. And it is, it is.

So painful when you see it and you realize how many people don't see it. And so that's very concerning to me because we need to be empowered owners of our own health.

Yeah, I agree. And I, I, I saw it too when, you know, when my father went through having strokes and I was, I became his patient advocate. And I'm, and I'm then in, as a naturopathic doctor helping him to navigate the medical system. And I was like, I mean, I'm just so glad I was able to be there for him, to help him. But I also saw that and I, and I think he started to see that the system, the pharmaceutical system that he had drained in all those decades before had really shifted over the years into something different. And, and, and so I just want everyone to be able to know that, that it's, you know, that, that the pharmaceutical industry is not the same as it was, let's say, 50 years ago, or pharmacies and pharma, you know, pharmacy training is not the same as it was 50 years ago, let alone 100 years ago. And that, that having, you know, me educating yourself or if, especially when you're not feeling good and you're having to navigate on your own, being able to have someone to help you can make a huge difference. Oh my gosh. Thank you so much for this conversation. It's really so informative, Lindsay, and I'm really excited for people to know about you and to be able to stay in touch with you. And I know you offer not only your podcasts and regular updates, but you also have a membership community. Tell us more how people can learn more from you and continue learning from you.

Sure. So you can find me on all social media channels. I'm at Lindsay Elmore on Instagram and Facebook and then at Dr. Lindsay Elmore on Pinterest and TikTok. And so you can find me there. You can find my website, Lindsay Elmore.com My Functional Medicine Wellness plan platform is called Wellness Made Simple. You can find it at wellness made simple. Us and your listeners can save $100 off of an annual subscription by shopping the code POD P O D. And so you can come check that out. We do monthly live calls and then there is a bank of dozens and dozens and dozens of videos to help with everything from stress management to thyroid symptoms to, you know what supplements are safe versus unsafe in pregnancy. The list goes on and on.

Oh, thank you so much. It's really so helpful for people to know about this and to hear it from your background and your experience. So thanks again so much for being here today.

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.

Thanks for listening to how humans heal. If you liked this episode, leave a rating and a review. And for more resources, visit drdani.com.