Fired. Smeared. Now Free. Why This Doctor Has No Regrets About Walking Away | Dr. Sam Bailey

Hey friends, James here, just popping in to give you a little bit of an intro to our next guest, Dr. Sam Bailey. So you're going to hear Dr. Sam bringing up some what could be seen as controversial topics. And you're going to go like, why did James not ask questions about X, Y, or Z? Well, here's why, because I interviewed her husband, Dr. Mark Bailey, in a previous episode. If you hear some of these topics and you're like, ooh, I want to dig deeper into those, just go check out that episode. This episode with Dr. Sam is more about, okay, what happens when I do take the red pill and now I wake up and I see that I've been in a matrix, like, how does my life change? What actions do I take to make a difference now that I see the world differently? So sit back, listen, watch, enjoy this episode. I really enjoyed both Dr. Mark and Dr. Sam. I find them extremely inspirational. I hope you will too. Enjoy and welcome again to Everyday Ancestral.

He sat me down and he said, once you say that, you're out of the club. I got fired from the TV show. I got smear articles. I got cut off from friends and colleagues. You don't want your kids to be prey as they become adults. But I'm also thankful. I'm glad that it happened and I would do it all over again. It really was a blessing.

As a chef of 20+ years, I've always been about taste. But it was becoming a father that made me really start to think about function. Because I want my kids to thrive and I want to be around long enough to witness it. And it was when my daughter became ill, my wife and I, we struggled to get the right nutrients into her. It was a true wake-up call. That experience is why I plucked was created. So Pluck is a superfood seasoning made with 100% grass-fed beef organ meats blended with organic spices and herbs. The beautiful thing is it doesn't taste like organ meats. It just tastes like the seasoning you're already using, but better, because when you add it, you're adding these bioavailable nutrients that your body can actually use. If you can salt it, you can pluck it. Learn more at eatpluck.com and save 15% off your first order using code EA15. My guest today is Dr. Samantha Bailey. Sam, welcome to Everyday Ancestral.

Oh, it's such a pleasure to be here. Thank you, James.

Yeah. Now you spent years, I mean, years inside the conventional medicine, emergency rooms, cardiology, right? Clinical trials. But at some point, the questions you were asking stopped being theoretical. Was there like a specific moment, patient interaction, or contradiction you experienced where you realized something about the system no longer fully made sense to you?

There was, I guess, 2 moments. So the first was a general unease with when things would go wrong when you'd see patients. I couldn't help the person no matter what I did. That was a general unease. But the real moment of truth, as it were, happened in 2020 when I really woke up. In 2020, when coronavirus was coming around. Mark, uh, he woke up first, my husband. He, he's a, he was a doctor too, and he was always my canary in the coal mine. He found this book called Virus Mania, which was about pandemics, and he'd been reading it and he sat me down and he said, Tam, I don't want to freak you out, but I think that viruses don't exist. And that was The moment where I really thought, oh my goodness, the foundations of everything that I've taught has just been flipped on its head. I can't even tell you how massive that what he said to me was, because I wouldn't have heard it from anybody else. It was just from Mark.

None of us really do the research ourselves. We're just trusting what we're being told. I mean, over the last few years since 2020, like, how do you even look at the science anymore? Because in my unscientific mind, I look at the science and I don't feel any trust around any of it. All the science that's coming out, at least from mass, you know, from the mainstream media, feels co-opted.

I'm so glad you said that, James, because I know I feel that too. And it has been. And you have to go into things, um, with a very critical eye. A lot of what we do now is going back to source, uh, publications from quite a long time ago. So 1800s time, 1900s, depending on what we're researching. There's usually one Or 2 foundational papers, and I go to that and I read it and I see what it says for myself. Contagion studies, you'd go back to the 1900s or so, 1800s. There's some amazing books that have been written where people have done all the work for you, like Can You Catch a Cold? Fantastic resource. Say what's happening right now with hantavirus. I know this play because I've seen it so many times now and I understand the production of it. You notice, I think, particularly in the media, When everyone's saying the same thing all at once, you know that this, this is too good to be true. Like, why is this happening? Why are they trying to focus my attention on this? And that's when I just have those little doubts in my mind and then I start going into it. And usually you can find, well, at least with science, older papers that are the original. You're totally correct in saying that most of the research now, it's just rubbish.

It's absolute Rubbish.

And I, I don't trust it. And so you, um, I, you have to be a bit careful. So that's what I guess Mark and I specialize in because we were trained doctors and we understand how to do it. So we try and make it presentable for people so that they can understand it and hopefully trust that what we're saying is correct. But, um, and we provide the source references so people can look at it themselves if they want to.

I mean, in a sense for us non-doctors, is, is the solution really just Because most of us don't have the time to go to the sources, right? I mean, and you're so right, like, you have to, you can't just go to the paper that they're necessarily referencing. You have to go to the source source. Even sometimes the references are incorrect. But for those of us that just don't have the mind, don't have the time, how do you think people should guide this kind of new world we're in of mistrust?

I do believe that a sign of someone that's trustworthy, as it were, will reference everything. So you, they should, put it, give that information to you and you can look at it for yourself. I know most people don't wanna do it and can't, they don't have the time. And you do have to focus your energy because there's so much of a distraction, negativity online. You know, it's, it's just information overload that you think, well, where do I wanna focus my time and my energy? And I think it's being quite discerning about, okay, I'm gonna focus my energy right now on Sunscreen, or I'm going to focus my energy on something that's directly affecting me and go, okay, I want to know about this and get into it. For everyone, it will be slightly different. The people that tend to follow us, like it's a real mixture, actually. I love that too. That feedback, that dynamic relationship that you get where people will call you out and say, Sam, I think you've got this wrong. And I'm like, okay, yep, let's have a look at this. Thank you. You know, is there something I need to look into more here? or something that you're completely unaware of. And it's just that real growing that happens because it's a two-way street. The wake-up for me was reading that book, Virus Mania, that Mark first showed me. And then later on in September of 2020, I was making my videos on the theme of that book. The authorities came down very hard on me. So the medical authorities said basically I lost my— I couldn't work anymore in this job that I'd had for 12 years. I got fired from the TV show. I got smear articles. The medical council that regulates doctors came after me, and they still are, you know, to this day. It's been a very challenging journey. But then the author of that book, Virus Mania, who had no idea, I'd never mentioned the book, contacted me and said, can you interview my co-author, the German guys? And then I became an author of that book. Little things like that have happened across my journey, and I felt like this is the right way. And sometimes it's hard. Like, unlearning a lot of what I believed to be true about health has been the hardest thing because it makes you reflect on the patients that you saw, on the choices that you'd made for your own family. And you think, oh, I wish I'd looked into this. Why did I just accept it at face value?

Sometimes the hardest part isn't that you're learning new information. It's the reactions you get from your communities at the time. Was that the hardest part emotionally for you stepping outside of the conventional medical system?

The thing is when you're a doctor is that all of your friends are doctors. It's just the way it is. I had very close friends, um, who were all doctors, and as soon as I started questioning It was really COVID and germs and talking, speaking counter-narrative to that. I got cut off from friends and colleagues. And of course people think I'm completely crazy. I thought that the hardest part was probably what everyone else experienced at that time, where you thought that you had years and longer, you know, this history with someone and that that would trump the authority saying a different story, but it doesn't. They defer to that authority from whoever's saying that narrative, whether it's Tony Fauci or, I don't know, the government. I found that really upsetting, is just thinking, I've known you for 12 years and I've looked into this, why wouldn't you trust me? But I did also not really appreciate until I did it, when I said I wouldn't get a vaccine if and when it comes about, this is the coronavirus COVID vaccine, before it had come, Mm-hmm. I said that in a video and, um, I didn't realize what a landmine that was. I thought I could just say that. And I know that's really—

It's a hot topic.

Yeah. But I thought you could say that and that people would go, okay, that's her opinion. But I didn't appreciate that once you say that, you're out, you're out of the club.

How do you find inspiration and hope when you are somewhat isolated and bombarded with specific emotions from people that just don't believe you?

I used to worry more what people think about me, and now I really don't care. The only person that matters to me, the opinion, and I can say this truthfully, is Mark. I don't care about what anyone else says or thinks. It just doesn't affect me now. And I don't know if it's just been exposure where People will go crazy and write emails to you and say things. And I'm just like, oh yeah. I don't really have scars or anything from that time. It was just, it changed me in a positive way. I'm so thankful that that happened because it really was a blessing. It brought so many good things to me and my family. We live in a completely different location. Our lives are completely different to what they were. 6 years ago. And I think I needed that. I don't think I would've woken up in any other way. It had to be kind of harsh. And I found my new tribe, as it were, people that inspire me and are truthful and good. I don't really mean this to be horrible, but I'd surrounded myself with kind of sycophantic people, people that weren't actually good for me. Didn't really force me to say the truth, didn't support me at times when it was really bad. I don't want that, um, life that I once had anymore, but I'm also thankful. I'm glad that it happened, and I would do it all over again if it meant that I can be where I am today.

You guys go down this new path of questioning things. You're, you're now leaving your careers as you knew it and forging new paths. But how did that play out in your, uh, home and with your family?

We lived in the city, in like a city of 400,000 people, just in the suburbs kind of thing. We were trained medically, so we used to at one point have nannies for our kids. We'd both work as doctors, um, and we'd see our kids, you know, they went to school, all that sort of stuff. I thought kind of what I ate was really healthy. Oh my gosh, James, that's embarrassing in itself. I used to go to the supermarket and I'd buy the food and I'm like, what's the difference? What's organic? All this kind of stuff. It's embarrassing. And I wouldn't look at packets or anything like that, what was in them. I was into medications for the, for our children. That was if they had a fever, I would give Tylenol, paracetamol in New Zealand. That was a normal thing that I'd do. So I assumed Infectious diseases. You needed really good, you know, not masks, but you'd be coughing and stuff with your arm and all that kind of thing. At one point we were thinking of leaving New Zealand because it was getting really bad. Just the authoritarianism that was happening, and it was really overt. And we thought, huh, every week something's changing. What are we going to do? How are we going to survive this? And so we thought about moving to Mexico in all seriousness. Like, that was a plan that we had. You couldn't hide from it. This was everywhere. We thought, okay, we can't do that. We have to, we have to just dig deep and just work out what we're gonna do. And I had been wanting to live on our own place, like a block of land for a long time. And, um, but Mark quite rightly sort of said, Sam, we've got young kids. How's this practically gonna work? I don't think that's a good idea. So it was gonna be pushed to the line down further to where we're in our 50s maybe, and then we'll do that. We really wanted our own water. 'Cause we'd finally looked into water and what that meant. That was, that was the beginning of it. And that was from Tom Cowan that really pushed us into looking into water. And we thought, okay, we need our own water. So we thought we'll start looking for places. And so that was in 2022. And by 2023, we had our own little farm. So a little 10-acre block and we didn't have any animals yet. And that was, that was all coming and kind of exciting. We also wanted to homeschool. And this again had been a slow kind of process. It wasn't an immediate thing, but it was the realization that the control of what kids are taught at school, it's really just a preparation for how to be like a slave. And it's kind of harsh to say it that way, but it is the truth. And I didn't want that for our kids. And in 2020, with Bill Gates kind of saying these things, I said to Mike, well, if Bill Gates says we can't have any more kids, I think we should have another one.

From doctor to homesteader.

Yeah. Decided to have another child. And he was our first real experiment of no medications, no vaccines, nothing, no blood tests, no, just, he was fully out of the system. And it was so empowering because another thing I did, which In reflection, I can't even believe this was so normalized for a doctor. And general society, women, mothers, I see this all the time. They're obsessed with monitoring numbers and how tall their kid is, how much they're speaking. They talk like doctors do about their development. And I realized I'd really bought into this. And with our youngest son, I never measured him. I didn't care about the weight. I didn't care about the height. I just let nature do its thing. And it is so empowering, not monitoring everything and doing this process. So it's only a couple of years ago, James, that I woke up to organ meats, you know, your territory. This is, this is new for us. And it has been amazing. I can't believe how, how far it had to come. Raw milk, that was completely new. And again, I don't want to be blaming it on other things all the time, but you sort of, you don't know what you don't know. I didn't even know to think about that, about where, what our milk was, where our meats come from. I had never thought about it until it was others. It was the Weston A. Price Foundation, Tom Cowan, others that we were kind of working with. And I'm like, this is really important. And so we thought, actually, we're not just going to Talk about it. We're going to do it. And that was a really positive step for our family. So yeah.

I'm sure this is going through everyone's mind. So you make these changes, it's now been a few years. So what are you seeing from these changes?

Our family is so healthy, James, just so healthy. They don't get sick. They don't get colds and flus like they did. They're just very strong and healthy. It's not just that they're eating differently, they're thinking and they're talking differently. The way we communicate as a family, we don't hide stuff from them. We're quite honest about what's going on. And I think that you have to do that to prepare them, that they, you don't want your kids to be prey, you know, as they become adults. So it's been a realization that we can have these conversations with our kids. and say, you know, this is what you need to eat. This is what it is to be healthy. And particularly our middle son is just, he's been so curious and it's to watch him change towards this kind of cusp of flipping over to the good side, the light. I noticed he'd go, he'd get invited to a birthday party and he'd eat nothing there or drink anything there. And I was like, oh my goodness, like, this is quite powerful that he could see he didn't want to have the fizzy colored drinks and the— it was just all hype. He wanted to be there, but he didn't want to be part of that, what the food was. And I'm like, he was young by the time he got home to us. I said, oh, do you need something to eat? He was starving. He made that choice.

All his choice. I mean, this was— he imposed this. You didn't tell him not to eat anything. He just chose.

Yeah, in everything that we do, that they're part of it. When we do like the home kill, they want to be out there. And I'm not, I kind of, for me, I find it quite hard and confronting. I'm like, I don't know if I can watch this, but they want to be in it and part of it. And like, we just had some sheep done last week. It's all normal for them of what this is. And it's being more resilient. That's what it is. It's the resilience and health. And the way they are, their lives, the way they see the world, the way they live, their general health is just amazing. Another example, my 4-year-old, again, it seems to revolve around birthday parties. He got invited to a birthday party, maybe he was 3 at the time, and it was like a crazy birthday party, like bouncy castles, you know, full-on madness. And he didn't really have much food there. He might've had a few things. And then when we got home, As soon as we walked in the front door, he vomited all over the floor, and I was like, "What is going on here?" And I realized I don't even think it was the food. I think it was just the whole hype and the whole environment. It was just crazy, and that was his reaction to it. He vomited, and then he was fine. That's kind of an event that happens. So now I see it from a different lens. Like I would have thought, "Oh my gosh! Has he got food poisoning?" Da da da da da. Has he caught something from someone else? That was my old. Medical school brain. Now I've realized, no, something else is going on. Why am I feeling like this? Why do I have a headache? Rather than just accepting that I just take some Tylenol for it, I go, okay, maybe it's that I haven't been having enough sleep. I've been worried about something. You know, it's a tension headache. And just instead of taking, reaching for pills and tablets, I go, okay, I might just go and lie down for a little bit or just be somewhere dark and quiet. Go to bed a little bit earlier. We don't use medications anymore at all. Like I've got a big bucket, like a big container of buildup of pharmaceuticals. Mark wants to keep it in case it becomes like Armageddon and we need to trade. I'm like, I don't, I think that's kind of smart.

Well, it almost sounds like you went from becoming, you know, uh, symptom soothers to, uh, root cause, uh, crusaders.

Definitely. And then you reflect back on your own health and your kids' health. things that happen to you. Like, I had a perforated appendix when I was 10, and I think, why did that happen? That didn't just happen to me, you know. That was the reason I decided to become a doctor, strangely enough. But it was the realization my diet wasn't great. You know, we had what would be a very traditional Western diet, but full of junk and preservative. You know, basically the fridge was open bar for juice and fizzy drink. It just didn't stop. And I think maybe that was one of the reasons I got sick when I was 10. My own children don't get sick at all. They're just— the only thing that might happen to them is accidents because they're physical and they're outside, but that's it. There's nothing going on.

I love hearing that. So there's a lot of people though listening, and as we mentioned earlier, they're feeling overwhelmed by the conflicting health information. They're They're disconnected from their own instincts around health. So for someone who wants to take more ownership over their health without becoming fearful or obsessive, where do you think they should begin?

It's such a good question, James, but it's quite hard to answer because it so depends on where they're at themselves. One of the things I found over my own journey has just been slowly cutting things out. And this might be too much for some people, but deregistering from your doctor because it's the externalization, it's this constant reliance on someone else making decisions for your health. And I know people kind of criticize me when I say that and say, well, you are a doctor, so you know, I don't use any of the stuff that I was taught on myself or my family at all. It's stuff that I've learned since is what I use now. So it wasn't what I was taught at medical school. I think you've got to stop doing things like screening tests and blood tests and this reliance of external validation of what your health is. We all sort of do that where we think we need someone else to tell me that I'm healthy. You know, when you're healthy, it's what your grandma, you know, would say, you need to go to bed and just lie down and have some chicken soup. Cutting things out and making it simpler. The body is so simple, really. It only needs a few kind of ingredients for things to be well. Concentrating on where you get your food from, that is massive. Looking at ingredients lists and going, well, can I just make this myself? Can I just get some pluck? Thinking about what I can do with my thinking, that's another area. We have a book called Terrain Therapy. It was not written by me. It was written by a New Zealand physician in the early 1930s. And we republished it because it was so amazing. And he calls it right living and right thinking. That's what you need to do is just remove doubts and fear from your mind. Like if you're making a decision, think, well, what would I do if I had no fear?

Yeah.

And sometimes that just takes away the pressure of thinking, I need to do what other people expect of me. I think back to my own wake-up. It didn't just all happen at once. It was actually a slow process of going, okay, maybe I won't take paracetamol for a headache. That was a first maybe decision I started doing is going, I'm not gonna do that now. And then from there, looking at all the food. That you get, not making excuses, because I think that's another thing you can— like, we used to get takeaways and stuff. And then I remember Mark saying to me, Sam, I don't want to get takeaways anymore. If you don't want to cook, if you feel tired, I'll do it for you. And I'm like, okay, we're going to make this a thing now. We're not going to have takeaways. And that was big in itself because you're busy, you do things because It's easier rather than it's the right decision.

That one piece is huge. And I love how you're positioning this is that sometimes it's not about adding something new. It's about just removing something that you think is not working. And in a sense, kind of following your first instinct around what's not working. I have a couple of kind of quick reflections I want to do as we wrap this up. So what's been the most healing part of farm life for you?

It's being outside in the sunshine and in the crisp air, planting food and then, you know, or harvesting. It's just a sense of joy.

What's one thing you think modern culture is getting wrong about health? Just pick one.

I don't know why this, but this popped into my mind is, um, I really think it's this digital overload that we are exposed to. I got rid of my smartphone. That was a big thing too. I have a dumb phone now. And I think removing yourself from that forced interaction, like something that's attached to you, that's a, that's a real addiction. It's a great tool. I'm not saying it's, it's awesome. I love the internet, but it's just, it's taking over our lives in a really negative way in our health.

I think. This kind of beautifully segues into the final question I now ask everyone, which is if you could wave a magic wand And bring back one ancestral practice that would improve modern health, what would it be and why?

I wish that, um, milk was not pasteurized. That's a big thing for me. We had our own house cow. I think pasteurization of milk has just really made us sick. Yeah.

Because when you look into the history of why we pasteurize and what was going on, it's not too different from the current narratives that we're being fed around other things like the viruses. Basically, in a, in a way, it's like modern society is trying to accuse nature of being wrong. They're using the argument of like, oh, well, the raw milk carries this and this and this, but it's carrying that because of the modern techniques of the time, which then required it to be pasteurized because they were raising cows incorrectly. They were mistreating them, you know? So it's, it's always interesting how The industry positioned things to justify their actions.

James, you articulate it so well. I can't even, I can't beat that.

It's so hard to break from the norm for anyone. You know, a lot of why people do what they do is out of fear, right? And I think instinctually we want to be a part of community. It's just part of human nature. And so to break from that and be willing to risk the community that, you know, and then open yourselves up to brand new communities is really a beautiful And I agree with you, a divine journey. And so I'm just so grateful that you're willing to come on the show and share yours. Where can people find, because you, they can't find you in the normal things because you probably keep getting shut down for some of the stuff you share. So where, where can people go to get your truth?

My journey did start on YouTube and I still have a YouTube channel. It's holding on by a thread, but it's there. Um, so yeah, people can search for me on YouTube, Dr. Sam Bailey, but we have our own website where we have all of the content. because there's a lot of content we can't post on there. I always laugh. I make a joke to Mark, my husband. I say, it's all about me. So it's under my name because he came in later, even though he was behind the scenes from the beginning. So it's under drsambailey.com. We talk about all sorts of stuff. So natural health, gym theory, some political stuff of what's going on as well. Um, but just generally it's about how to be well.

Thank you for, uh, opening up that world to us for this, this brief time. And I wish you both well.

Thank you, James. Thank you.

And thank you all for joining us. And remember, stay curious. Thank you so much for joining me on Everyday Ancestral. If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe so you don't miss the next one. You can find the show notes, links, and resources mentioned at eatpluck.com. That's E-A-T- tpluck.com. And hey, if you know someone who'd get something out of this, share it with them too. Stay curious, live well, and keep it ancestral.