Hospitals Don’t Heal You, Your Body Does with Dr. Erica Schwartz

So I think that we can all agree that conventional medicine is lost and has been lost for a long time, and it took me a long time to wake up to that, and my own diagnosis and my own experience to see how lost conventional medicine is. But I'm gonna I can tell you who isn't lost and who has never been lost. Somehow, this brilliant woman has so aware, so have her finger on the pulse, no pun intended, of women's health, of how to do medicine right, of how to do medicine holistically. She was never distracted by the bad information, by the bad rhetoric, by the very intentional dialogue to draw people away from where they should be. So I want to welcome the brilliant Dr. Erica Schwartz to the show. Dr. Schwartz, I mean, listen, you are my colleague, you are my friend, you are my idol because you really have been that voice of truth, of reason, even when everyone else was saying the wrong thing around you. And you have several, like 7 bestselling books to, to prove it. And your voice is so important. It's been so influential for me and many people. And I'm just really delighted to have you here today.

You just made me cry.

Oh, stop.

Seriously.

Okay.

And you're beautiful. Thank you. Listen, I'm honored to be with you. I think what you do is beyond important. I think that your voice should be heard on every street corner, literally. I think that you coming into this arena, you coming into this life, and you helping women and telling the truth about breast cancer and about the misinformation that we're getting from the conventional world has been a light for me because you're right. For over 30 years, I've been alone in this space with a lot of men, and I have nothing against men, I love them, whatever. Anyway, but I have been the only voice who just stayed true to the truth. And finally you came to join us. There are a lot of good ones around, but your voice stands and I follow you with passion and with my heart open. And all I wanna hear is what you have to say and how you're saying it.

You're very sweet. And I want to hear more about you because you have conventional medical training. So how is it, is it that you are so enlightened? Because you were out there way before anyone else was out there saying that hormonal health is whole body health. When we're trained in medicine, we're taught to like silo things off and, you know, this belongs here and this has nothing to do with it. To do with this and this belongs here and this has nothing to do with this. But you saw, saw it differently. So tell us about your origin story. How is it that you, that you have been so wise for so long?

I don't know. I have no answer for that one. But I could tell you how, you know, I'm a conventionally trained doctor. I'm board certified in internal medicine and critical care. So I come from conventional. I went to NYU, I went to Downstate. I mean, I trained at Kings County Hospital. So I mean, more conventional than my training. They don't make too many of them. But what happened was that I think it was kind of a confluence of programming. I think it was really programming because my first job out was to be the director of this tertiary trauma center, Westchester Medical Center, and in New York. And I was 28. I was the first woman to ever run a trauma center, but also the youngest person to ever run a trauma center. And it was great. It was like, I, listen, I was cheap. That's why they took me probably. But the truth is I loved it. I loved it. But what I learned there started me on the way to becoming who I became. And what happened was that I saw patients being taken care of who we did everything right. And they died. And then we did everything wrong and they walked away. So after a while, I mean, common sense dictates for you to say, well, maybe it's not us. Maybe it's not the medical profession that knows what we're doing so well that we can make people live or die, but rather there's something else bigger than us, if you want to call it. But now you can call it spirituality. In those days, if you said spirituality, you'd be out the door. You know, if it's religion, if you believe in God, God bless you, whatever you want. If you believe a bigger universal thing, the point is that it wasn't just us. So when I understood that, I thought, hmm, this is an interesting concept. I don't get it. I was too young and there was no one around. So after 5 years of running the trauma center, I decided that I needed a relationship with my patients. So I went into private practice. So I went into private practice and I spent literally 10 years in private practice. In these 10, what I learned was that the way we were doing it was complete bollocks. Total bollocks. They were like—

You can say bullshit on my show. Okay.

It's total bullshit anyway. But I was like, wait a minute. What am I doing? You're coming in, I take your blood pressure. You come back in 6 months, I take your blood and I'm waiting for you to fall apart. And I started asking them about lives. I started asking patients about their marital issues. I was making house calls 'cause I was nosy and curious about their lives. And I was like, this makes no sense. There's gotta be something. We're great at acute care, kind of. But after that, what do we do? We wait for them to get sick. So I was like, this doesn't make sense. Well, today what I'm saying is like, of course, But then they thought I was out of my mind.

Well, it's of course to us, but do you think it's of course in that I think most, if not all, conventional medical practices still run on the wait for you to get sick model?

Yeah, they do. Of course to us, it's of course. To A4M, where you lecture faculty and I try to get you there all the time.

This is the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine. That's right.

And they have 20,000 members. And you know, it's very interesting that more than 60% of them that come to any of these conferences are new. So that means that there's a huge influx from the conventional world into this world. Yeah. And so maybe—

It's really amazing. I mean, my friend that I went to medical school with, did residency with, he was out there doing orthopedics, but non-surgical orthopedics. And, um, you know, he's in practice for 20-some years at this point, and he's about to renew his contract with one of the, you know, big orthopedic groups. And he calls me and he said, Jenn, before I renew my contract, tell me about this A4M thing. And so I agree with you. And we, we spoke at a conference not too long ago in October where almost every attendee was brand new. That was their first A4M conference.

So to make sure that people understand that A4M is for the providers, for doctors, for nurse practitioners, for PAs, chiropractors, it's for people who actually are the providers. So it's kind of a very like representative swath of what healthcare providers are doing and where they are. Having said that, you're right. Every single—

there's a lot of new people. Wondering about this and wanting to be better providers because they, they now know that there's a whole level of care to be delivered that they were completely missing that will only improve their outcomes. Even if they're not going to stop doing what they're doing, they're for sure recognizing that they could do their conventional role so much better.

So much better and get way better outcomes. Yeah. And the thing is that, is the goal to just keep you sick enough to take, to use the system, or is the goal to keep you healthy? And I think the goal is to keep you healthy because unequivocally. So you said how I got here is that as I was doing, you know, the spinning my wheels thing, all of a sudden I was like, wait a minute, I should be able, now that I left the trauma center, I'm not in, I mean, I was still doing acute care with all my patients, but it wasn't necessary, necessary for me to be in the hospital all the time. And I said, there's got to be a way to keep them healthy so they don't have to go back into the system. And that's how I got into trouble with the whole, you know, all the hospitals I was— I had privileges at, because they'd be calling me and saying— the administrator would call and say, why don't you have any patients in the hospital? What's wrong with you? Your practice is big. We know that. But why don't you put patients in the hospital? And the answer is like, why would I? If I can keep them out, if I can keep people focusing on living their lives well and enjoying their lives, why do I need to keep on bringing them into the hospital? What are you going to do there? You know, when, you know, as I wrote this book, Don't Let Your Doctor Kill You, that just came back out. And the point is like before COVID and COVID was the only reprieve they had really, that the number 3 reason why people die in America is medical errors. Now, during COVID number 3 reason was COVID, right? Now COVID left and we're back to number 3 reason being medical errors. Well, where do medical errors occur? They occur at the hospital. They don't occur in offices. They don't occur in private practices where there's a relationship between the doctor and the patient and the doctor cares and wants the patient to be well. They occur where nobody cares, where they are just on an assembly line, which is a hospital.

Yeah. Can I, can I interrupt you?

Because you didn't interrupt me. I stopped.

No, no, no, no, no. But I was just thinking about you saying that, you know, they don't occur in day-to-day practice. They occur in the hospital. I have just been like astounded lately at the level of gatekeeping that's happening with pharmacists. Oh my God, recently moved from topical testosterone, and I want to talk all about hormone replacement with you, but I recently moved from topical testosterone to injectables because I wasn't getting the results that I needed. And some people don't get the results that they want from topicals, and I was getting some unwanted results, like I was getting more hair and more acne, and like I didn't want that.

Some hair loss.

And yeah, yeah. So it just wasn't working for me. The topical wasn't working for me. I gave it 6 months. I gave it, you know, the old college try, and then I moved to injectables. So when I moved to injectables, you know, I was like really excited. Like when you make a decision, you want to, you want to move forward. And so I think my doctor looked it up and CVS said that they had it in stock. And so she called in the order to CVS and oh my God, they made me Not only did me going back every single day for 2 weeks not make them order it and get it for me, like literally every day they would look me up and down and look at the prescription and they were like, yeah, it'll be here tomorrow. And they never ordered it. Like they totally gatekept it for me. And then, so it literally took my doctor to call and have a whole exchange with the pharmacist that sounded like if this was a man—

no kidding—

would, would a man have to wait 3 weeks? There's no national shortage and it's nonsense. And there's a reason for everyone who wait. I ranted about this on social media, and thank you to everyone who weighed in and said just get it from a compounding pharmacy. And I'm a huge supporter of compounding pharmacists. I was just thinking in my head like, oh, I'll just get it in a day rather than waiting for, you know, a few days from getting it from the doctor.

It sounds obscene, you know, it sounds really obscene because it's not bad enough that we have, we have to fight for something that you absolutely need to keep you healthy. Now you have these self-appointed gatekeepers that I don't know how they got to that, but you know what? I ordered the other day some, I don't even remember what it was for a patient because I don't really order very often for, you know, regular medication, but it was regular medication. And they sent them back and forth 3 times, and it was nothing really major. I mean, I don't know what it was. It must have been, I don't know, some kind of maybe meloxicam.

It doesn't even matter. It's like, I don't need you to gatekeep me.

Exactly.

And I don't, I don't need you. Like, I have the relationship with the patient, which is what you were talking about in the first place. It's when the patient goes into the hospital and is cared for by someone that doesn't know them.

Right.

And there's so much whisper down the lane with the hospital because they have a doctor and then most of them are teaching hospitals. So then a resident is involved and the, the opportunity for error every time the instructions get removed is more like a game of telephone.

It's a game of telephone. And you're right. I think that I tell people stay away from hospitals. Don't go to hospital. And I work worked in hospitals for 15 years, literally. You worked in hospitals. You know hospitals are the worst places for a human being to be in. I mean, listen, you have surgery. My husband just had his hip replaced 2 weeks ago today. But I tell you something, I made sure— I spoke to the surgeon, it was at HSS, and I said to him, keep him overnight. And he said to me, he'll be fine because they do the anterior thing there now. So he said to me, Okay, if you want me to, I'll keep him. I mean, why not? So I kept him. The next morning when I came to get him, he said to me, oh my God, every hour on the hour they woke me up to ask me how I'm feeling. I'm like, because it's a very good environment to heal when they wake you up every hour. Exactly. But then I brought him home and it's now 2 weeks ago yesterday that he had the surgery. He's going back to work this week and we're talking about a 78-year-old man. We're not talking about the 40, 50-year-old man. Is in great shape. And I have to tell you, the surgeon was amazing. We got him out of there fast enough. And then what do you think we did? We stayed with the hormones. We stayed with the supplements. I brought IVs at home and I gave him IVs. And guess what? We fed him well. We made sure he slept. We took care of him. We put the whole picture together and he's in great shape. Yeah. Someone else could have been—

none of that. In conventional medicine. None of it. None of it. And in fact, a lot of the time they're getting bad advice.

Really bad. You know how pre-surgically they tell them, stop your hormones, stop your supplements, don't take anything for 3 weeks before, 3 weeks after. They don't even know what you're giving them. My patients, fortunately for me and them, ask me what they should do before surgery and after surgery. I gave a talk once at HSS to improve outcomes, to help them improve outcomes. But then again, you know, I was talking to orthopedic surgeons.

Yeah.

It was— I was talking about—

In their head, they don't have the time or the bandwidth to do this.

No, no. And it was how to optimize outcome by doing things before and doing things after. It's unbelievable.

It's so easy for them to even just get support. Support staff to help them to, but they don't, they don't even know.

They don't know where to start. Yep, because everybody, like you said, they're all siloed. They know how to do an anterior hip replacement, they know how to do a hysterectomy, but they don't know that there is the rest of the body that will actually either heal or not so well. So that's where we come in, and we've— I've been doing 30 years.

I know you have.

I have patients who've been with me for 30 years who are not gonna leave me, which makes sure that I'll never retire, who literally went through COVID. Nobody died, nobody got sick. Everybody was okay. They got COVID, but they were fine. Who go through normal things that everybody goes through, but they always come back to feeling good. 'Cause that's the goal. Life's a long thread of health. With minor interruptions when you're sick, as opposed to the other way around, which is what conventional medicine does.

But if you're eating a conventional diet, if you're not moving your body, if you are not sleeping, not prioritizing sleep, if you have a lot of toxins in your environment, then your life is really declining health with maybe moments that you feel okay, but mostly it's declining health. Right. And symptom management. And it's that never-ending game of whack-a-mole.

Right. And you know what the sad part about that is? Life's really short. We know that. We hear it on lists, but we all think that it's not about us. It's about somebody else. And the funny thing is that we spend so much time getting tested, going to doctors, specialists, extra specialists, experts. For what? What are we looking for? We should look inside and see what we're doing to improve our health. We should look to a provider like you, like me, who cares and knows how to do the things that they need to help people stay healthy.

Yeah, I know, I couldn't agree with you more. I want to, I want to back up 20 years ago because you put out a book at the same time that the Women's Health Initiative announced their the results of their study, which said that hormones cause breast cancer. So talk to us a little bit about that.

So the book is called The Hormone Solution, came out in April of 2002. The Women's Health Initiative went bust in July of 2002. And that's why I think that it was a bigger force than me, because it was number 2 on Amazon in all books. And It was really funny because I never expected it. My goal with "The Hormone Solution" was to explain how hormones change across lifetime. Like when you're teens, 20s, 30s, postpartum, prepartum, whatever, menopause, perimenopause, just to show that it's a continuum of change in hormones and how to improve your hormone balance at various ages using what was then called natural hormones that now we know is bioidentical hormones. So that was the goal of my book. Well, my book kind of became more important because nobody knew what to do because the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the North American Menopause Society and the GYNs were immediately trained and told that hormones are bad for you. So you could stop giving women hormones. 7 million women that we know of stopped taking hormones at the time, and they were just basically thrown to the wolves. Because they became obsolete. So what happened was that I remember, and this like will blow your mind, I don't know if you know 'cause you're too young for that one, but—

I'm not as young as you think.

I know, you're young anyway. But the weirdest thing is that I was part of North American Menopause Society at the time. They send everybody a pamphlet, what to recommend to your patients who have issues with hormones. As in like, you know, we were giving them all Prempro, Premarin, Provera anyway. And what it said was, tell women to dress in layers, tell them to stay indoors in cool environments. I'm sorry I threw it away. I found it beyond offensive.

Because you want to frame that relic.

Yeah, I'd like to send it to Menopause Today and ask them how they feel about it.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Did you happen to catch the exchange that happened on The View yesterday?

No, I didn't.

With some advice from Whoopi and Joy being that if you're in menopause, just have a glass of wine and relax. This, this was there. And that all of this talk about hormones and hormone replacement is bullshit. And no. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, I was on The View with Joy and with, um, what's her name, Barbara Walters, two decades ago, and They are very conventional and they don't understand anything. So if you think that getting a glass of wine is going to help you, you clearly don't understand anything.

I mean, the only thing they did was promote alcoholism and increase people's risk of breast cancer because alcohol is one of the most major modifiable risk factors we have for breast cancer.

Weird that we just heard the Surgeon General came 3 months ago with information about how alcohol increases the risk of 7 cancers, right? How that night I was actually on Rosanna Scotto, one of the New York channels, talking about it. And then that night I went out to dinner and I looked around because I figured, oh, everybody must have heard what I said, what the Surgeon General said, right? And I looked around. That was a nice restaurant. Every table had alcohol. Nobody cares. Yesterday I saw a patient who was not my patient, just came to see me for consultation, who is a 40-something-year-old woman who has tremors, anxiety, can't sleep, has insomnia, has all kinds of symptoms. What's her— exercises every single day of her life. She's in the mid-40s. And guess what? She drinks 3 glasses of wine every night. And I said to her, "Do you think that some of these symptoms might be related to the alcohol?" And she said, "That's non-negotiable." This is, it's terrible.

It's terrible. And I wonder like, so at what point does it become negotiable? Is it a diagnosis, a breast cancer diagnosis? Like then is it negotiable? It's really astounding to me. And I have even had women, I remember, I haven't been fired by many patients in my years, but I had this one woman who was a nutritionist, um, and she— it was during COVID or like right around that time. It was probably like 2021. And she's a nutritionist, gets a breast cancer diagnosis, and, you know, she's, she's really reluctant to work with me because she knows everything already. And so I know how to eat and I know how to do this and I know how to do that. Okay, let's just go through your history, right? And so what I discover is that she is literally drinking wine every single day, every single day. And I said, you know, that, that is one area that is exceedingly clear that we know that there is a direct relationship between what and how often you drink. And I don't mean like wine is not any better or worse than tequila or whatever. It's like, if you're drinking alcohol every day, and if depending on how many drinks that you have, there is a direct causal link with breast cancer and the increase in your risk is directly linked to what and how often you drink. Right. And she ended up firing me like a week after we were working together.

She didn't want to hear what you had to say.

No. No, it was a non-negotiable.

Non-negotiable. So I, I left the, uh, the room after she left and I went back to my team and I said, I can't see her again. And they said, well, what are we going to do with her? I said, we're going to tell her we're not a good match. And that's all there is to it. We're not a good fit. And if it's non-negotiable, it's your life. And I've seen it so many times. I've seen people who were at Sloan Kettering had been treated for the cancer, are doing great, and they're on tamoxifen, which is killing the rest of them. But that's okay anyway. And they're drinking every night. I went to dinner with people with breast cancer diagnoses, with pancreatic cancer diagnoses, with colon cancer diagnoses who would drink wine. And I would say, Did your doctor at Sloan-Kettering say anything about it? They'd be like, no, no, it's okay. No, it's not okay. It's killing you.

But are there doctors even asking? No, I don't. I don't know that they are.

Well, they have nutritionists at Sloan-Kettering. They have nutritionists. And those nutritionists tell you about the food pyramid that has just been gotten rid of. Thank God.

And the old food pyramid that looked like this.

Right.

That one.

Oops, right? They tell you, have pasta, it's good for you. Have bread, have dairy, it's really great for you. They never heard of the word microbiome. They never heard of immunology. They never heard of genetics. They haven't heard of anything. I don't even know.

They're also coming from a place where if you have a cancer diagnosis, weight loss is bad, right? So they're, they're thinking that weight loss is associated with cachexia, which is associated with advanced cancer. So I'm going to tell you not to lose weight.

So, but sugar—

in fact, that most people with cancer diagnoses, not everyone, but most people with cancer diagnoses like colon cancer and certainly breast cancer and prostate cancer, they are overweight. And being overweight is part and parcel to why they got cancer, because it's all part of a spectrum of metabolic dysfunction.

Right. Exactly. Yes. And I think saying to them, eat carbs. What fuels cancer? Carbs. We know sugar fuels cancer.

Yes.

You're sending them to death when you're saying to them, go eat cancer, go eat sugar. It's like, it's obscene. No, you know, the fact that I was watching actually a conventional medical doctor discuss in one of the— because I watch all the conventional stuff and she was saying how nutrition seems to be— gastroenterologist, mind you— the nutrition seems to be important and it could actually affect outcome. And I'm saying, are you out of your mind? Are you out of your mind? You're a gastroenterologist. All you know.

But we at the same time have to remember that what that means is that they're trained to do scopes That's it, right? And that's really it. And prescribe like proton pump inhibitors, H2 blockers. And to be honest, not doing that well because those drugs were approved for 2 to 4 week use and people are on those drugs on average 2 to 4 years. And you know what?

They don't know that the FDA approves drugs for 6 weeks. They don't approve it permanently. And then you have all these patients who the doctors don't know anything about. The patient definitely won't know anything about it, who are taking the same thing for decades. And you wonder how that is affecting them. Nobody talks about that, but we know how it's affecting them.

We know long-term use of H2 blockers, long-term use of proton pump inhibitors increases your risk for cancer. Increases your risk for infection. I mean, acid, though vilifying acid is really good for the sale of drugs, it's really bad for us and our body and our digestion and our nourishment and our, our immune system. Really bad.

Yeah, it's really bad. And it's unbelievable that they continue doing it in spite of, you know, data that shows consistently, constantly that these things don't work and they're bad for you, you still have them telling you, you know, hormones. Let's go to hormones for a minute. And I keep on seeing patients who have been on hormones from Hims and Hers and Roman and whatever, because there's one on every street corner these days, who have no experience, no knowledge, nothing, whatever. At least they're giving them hormones, but they don't know how to balance it. They don't understand how the body works. But they're not any worse than the conventional world who doesn't know anything either. So these people come in and they're out of balance and nobody understands. Well, the reason they don't understand is because nobody teaches them. Medical education is a cult that is really limited to those who are pharmaceutically sponsored. That's it. There's nothing else. That was what you were trained. That's what I was trained. It didn't change. It hasn't changed since the Flexner Report. From Rockefeller. Nothing has changed. So that's conventional. Now, these guys who are marketing and making a fortune off of people hearing, oh my God, there's no more black box warning on estrogen, estrogen is good for you. Then they have you, they have me walking around with the banner and screaming in the dark. It's— they're good for you. They're good for you. They're good. I've been on hormone. I've been on estrogen and testosterone and progesterone now for 30 years. Look at me. I'm 75 years old. Clearly they work. Maybe they work on me only, but I doubt that that's the case.

But unlikely.

Unlikely. But they work. So what are you doing telling people that estrogens are bad for you? They cause cancer. I have patients coming in saying to me, my gynecologist said I'm not prescribing hormones for you. They're not good for you. They didn't prove anything. Do they live under a rock?

Well, it's not that they live under a rock, but that they are busy in their lives and you have to go out of your way to get the right information. You do, because it's not being spoken about at the— you know, everyone has to go to CME conferences, continuing medical education. But if you're going to your society's conference, they're saying the same thing year in and year out. I mean, I literally stopped going to breast surgery conferences because I was like, are you guys kidding? Are you ever going to talk about something new? And they, they didn't.

It's unbelievable, you know. And that's why I wrote Don't Let Your Doctor Kill You again and released it.

Well, I want to talk about Don't Let Your Doctor Kill You, but first.

Yeah.

I mean, let's just take this opportunity for you to say, why do women after menopause need estrogen? Why do they need progesterone? And especially, why do they need testosterone? Like, why, why was that guy who was gatekeeping me— why was he wrong?

Well, he was wrong because he didn't understand the physiology, right? The way—

I mean, I even, I even got responses on my Instagram post from women saying, why do you think you need testosterone?

Well, and I don't blame them 'cause they don't understand. It's sad, which is why I feel like it's even more our obligation to get out there and teach because we have the experience and we know the truth. And I think telling the truth is the key. So the truth is, and that's what "The Hormone Solution" told, and I said it without even realizing, hormones define who we are. Without hormones, we don't exist. From the moment we go into puberty until whenever— look at me, I'm 20 years, 30 years, whatever, that's menopause now, right? As long as you have hormones in your body, your body knows how to protect itself. Your body knows what you need and knows how to process things. Now, you need estrogen because when you're young and you're full of estrogen, if you think about it, your brain works well. You don't suffer with brain fog. Even if you stay up all night and party all night, you make it up really quickly. And that's estrogen helping you. Progesterone balances the estrogen and helps you. As you get older and you start losing— you stop ovulating and you start losing your balance, you start feeling badly. Think about women after they have a baby when they've been flooded by hormones, right? And all of a sudden now they have to rebalance their hormones because otherwise they'll get killed if those hormone levels stayed up, right? As they come down, you feel the effects of the hormone balance and how important it is. You need those hormones. Your brain, your heart, every cell in your body has hormone receptors. Those receptors absorb the particular hormone that they're about. Could be all three of them. and then they keep you healthy. If you're not giving them those hormones— and by hormones, I mean estradiol, the estrogen of youth, progesterone, which is the progesterone that your body makes, testosterone. Testosterone— we make testosterone. You make testosterone in your adrenal glands. You make testosterone everywhere. Testosterone keeps your bones healthy. They keep your brain healthy. They protect you from breast cancer. Testosterone is crucial. The fact, you know, women don't make as much testosterone as men, but if you look at the amount of testosterone they make for themselves, for the women, they make more testosterone than men do. So the thing is, testosterone is a crucial hormone. There was a study that looked at the testosterone patch for women in about 15 years ago, passed the FDA, got through the FDA in Europe. So now you can get a patch over there, but it didn't make it here. Don't ask me why, because honestly, as much as I know the truth about what caused the Women's Health Initiative, and I'll be happy to tell you the story, I don't know the truth about that one. The truth about that one is really mysterious because men have access to testosterone, like you just said, while women are told by the same gynecologist who tells you compounding pharmacies are bad for you, they're told to take a little bit of the dose that the husband is getting in the cream. I find that repulsive. That's not science. That's bullshit.

It is not science. I mean, I can tell you where I think that narrative comes from, which is that if you look at Rebecca Glazer's data out of Dayton, Ohio, And you compare her, you compare her patient population's incidence of breast cancer to that of the general population with the knowledge that she has everyone on testosterone and her breast cancer incidence is like 800 times lower than the general population.

Yes.

And it all starts to like feel really uncomfortable. It does. We had something that is known to decrease breast cancer incidence, and we decided to not give our women access to it.

But you know why? But you know why?

Yeah.

Because if we don't get breast cancer, think of how much money is lost by the industry. I know how much money. Think how much more useful we are if our hormones are balanced as we get older, how much of a contributor we are. To society, how much wisdom we've accumulated, and how much we can share. And think of, is that what they want? Is that what our society wants? No. They want to perpetuate and continue the lie that they created that they know better. Why haven't they cured cancer? Explain it to me. Why is it so difficult? Because I could tell you I cure it every day. I'm sure you do too. I have no doubt you cure it more than I do. And I would like to know, Why haven't we cured it? Why?

It's an inconvenient truth, right?

It's the truth.

It's a very inconvenient truth. Yes.

But I think it's time for the truth to come out. I think it's time for people like you and me who see it every day, who take care of patients every day, who together have 50 years of experience at least, to tell the truth because the truth will set you free. The truth Well, see, you have somebody who's agreeing with us.

Yes, Teddy is definitely asking for his moment in the—

He should come in. Hi, Teddy. Hi, Teddy. Hi, Teddy. Well, they're good. They actually help us cure ourselves. They heal us. They heal us.

So I know I don't have too much of your time left. So I want to hear about Don't Let Your Doctor Kill You.

Well, I think that, you know, I wrote Don't Let Your Doctor Kill You 10 years ago and it did okay. It did well. It was a good bestseller for 10 minutes. And then somebody said to me, now with the change in, you know, politics and the way people are and what they're seeing, maybe people are more likely to listen. And the goal of Don't Let Your Doctor Kill You is to help you don't let your doctor kill you.

Yeah. Literally, don't let your doctor kill you.

It's about taking responsibility and people don't wanna take responsibility. It's about not being afraid. It's about asking the questions without being adversarial, but actually caring about yourself and finding the doctor who cares and working together. And I tell the truth about medical school. As I told you before, it is a cult. Why are you listening to somebody who's a product of a cult? You want people who are awake. You want people who are there, who are coming from the heart, who actually care about love, who actually want to give you everything they know to make your life better. But that is a really tall order because in our society, people don't particularly wanna hear that. They want to say, I'm sick, I have a diagnosis. Let somebody else take over. But do you really want to give up this life that you have and turn it over to a stranger who doesn't live inside your body? The doctor doesn't live inside your body. I love you, Jenn. I think you're the best, but I don't live in your body. I can only hope to help you with my open heart and my love for you. And I know that you know you don't live in my body. I feel the same of about every patient I take care of. And I think that the goal of Don't Let Your Doctor Kill You, it sounds really harsh, but it's not harsh. It's about being kind to yourself. And by being kind to yourself means being kind to yourself means not listening, not listening if it doesn't make sense, walking away, not reacting, finding out various options. And there's so many options. And they work.

I have a friend, I don't know if you know, Sachin Patel. Have you ever met Sachin?

No.

He has a saying that sounds like the patient is the doctor of the future.

Of course.

And the future is now. And this is not to say that we need to be wholly responsible for our own health, but I think what you're saying in Don't Let Your Doctor Kill You is that most doctors are trained with a very paternalistic mindset, right? And they are totally uncomfortable with you driving the conversation, with you driving the care. But you are, as the patient, are the only person that's appropriate to drive the care. And doctors now should be— or providers, I'm, I'm not singling out doctors, but providers should be trusted guides. Right. But the only person who can make you healthy is you. And as providers, we need to be okay not being the hero. Right. The patient is the hero.

Absolutely. It's the patient's life. It's their life. It's not ours. But this is the thing. So there is a doctor at Johns Hopkins who has done a lot of research on medical errors. And for some reason I can't think of his name right now, but I wrote about him in the book anyway. And he found out— I mean, he found out about a lot of ways to improve health care in, you know, in hospitals. But, you know, like Semmelweis with the washing your hands kind of thing. Anyway, but he also said that the main reason— and this is research-backed— that the main reason for medical errors is physician arrogance.

It hurts my heart.

It hurts my heart too, because you know what? I tried to avoid being called a doctor for a long time because I was so embarrassed by how I was trained and how it was all about me being important because I'm the doctor, because I was there to heal, to help, to quarterback. And being the doctor took away a lot of those abilities that I was developing. And now I use it and I'm fine with it. And I came up with the Dr. Erica thing, so that worked with the first name. But you know what? It was horrible. It's really horrible to see that physician arrogance is the number one reason for medical mistakes.

Yeah, but you can, you can understand it. And so many, so many providers hide behind that. They just hide behind the, this is how I was taught and this that's how it's done, and they use it. And not to say that, you know, anyone is sitting around and not doing what they were trained to do. They are, they are doing exactly what they were trained to do. But you know as well as I do that if you don't maintain curiosity, you cannot be a good provider. If you can't admit that what you did 6 years ago, even 6 months ago, was wrong, then you are not serving your patient and being a good provider. And it takes a lot of humility and a lot, you know, that is something that arrogance that you're talking about, that is a quality that most, most providers have and have a really hard time abandoning.

Well, you're right. You're right. You know what it is? It's the ego because to become a doctor, as you know, is a pretty rough road. And you're following and you're being brainwashed in the process because when I was on the board of admissions at Downstate and I interviewed people for medical school, nobody came in and said, I want to be important. I want to be famous. I want to be God's gift to humanity. They all said they wanted to help.

Right?

So in the 4 years from the time you get admitted to medical school, accepted to medical school, to your graduation is the time to brainwash you. To take away that whole desire to help and turn it into, I am so smart and I know better and you're just the patient.

But also they get convinced that this is the only way to help.

Of course. Yes, of course. You know what? I was teaching medical students, you know, a few years ago and they give you an evaluation at the end, right? They all evaluate you. And one of them and one of the questions was, would you want to be a doctor like this? Like your teacher, right? And one of them wrote that he didn't want to be like me. And I was curious, obviously, it was my ego, of course, but I was like, huh, why not? And the answer that followed was, she cares too much about the patients. She doesn't have enough space between the patients and her. And you know what? It made me put even less space between me and the That doctor could never do the kind— give it the kind of care that I give from the heart. They can't. But that's what they're trained to do. And it's really sad. And this is what you get. And we're going to change that. Yeah, we are changing that.

Well, your patients are so very lucky to have you. I am so lucky to call you my friend and have you be a mentor to me and just a beacon of light and hope and what, what a doctor should be. So thank you so much for the work that you do. Where can people find you?

They can find me at Dr. Erika Schwartz on Instagram and Facebook and things like that. D-R-E-R-I-K-A Schwartz. And the practice name is Evolve Science. Yes Health. They have a, you know, you could just call them. They also have an Instagram. I don't think it's hard to find me. I'm happy to help in any way.

And your books are still available on Amazon, so make sure that you pick up a copy of Don't Let Your Doctor Kill You and The Hormone Solution. And we'll have to bring you back because I know that you have office hours to get to, but I have so much more to talk to you about. So we'll schedule another one.

Let me tell you, I love you. I think your message is beyond the truth. It's the absolute truth. And I would hope that your message gets out to every single woman on this planet because we need to help them and we don't need to cut off their breasts. We don't need to make them feel like they're going to die of breast cancer. Your message is huge and I support you with every cell in my body. And I'm so grateful to be with you today.

Thank you, my dear.

Thank you, my love.

And I am grateful to have been with all of you today. Thank you for joining us, and make sure that you share this conversation with someone that needs to hear it because you have so much more power than you think. And I'm here every week to help you step into that power. And with that, I will say it's Dr. Jenn. See you next week, same time, same place. Bye for now.