What Happens When a Doctor Refuses to Stay Silent

Welcome to Integrative Medicine with Dr. Leland Stillman. This show is for men and women who are exhausted, inflamed, living with brain fog, gut or skin issues, and who won't settle for answers like your labs are normal or just take this pill. Here we focus on the root causes of disease and on what I call repair deficit, the gap between what your body needs for optimal health and performance and what it's actually getting. This podcast is not personal medical advice. It is education to help you ask better questions so you can make better decisions about your health. Thank you for joining us and welcome to today's episode. Hello everyone, Dr. Stillman here, and today I am very excited to welcome my friend and colleague Mary Talley Bowden to the show. Dr. Bowden, welcome.

Thanks for having me, Leland.

Dr. Bowden is a board-certified ENT. Founder of BreatheMD and a leading voice in the fight for medical autonomy. If you don't know who she is, you should go listen to her podcast with Tucker and Rogan. They were both really, really good. She caused a lot of controversy and has gotten embroiled in a lot of legal battles over doing what she felt was right regarding her patients during the catastrophe known as COVID. We're going to talk about who she is, where she's from, and everything that turned her into a lightning rod for medical freedom, patient autonomy, and The ethics of medicine. So Dr. Bowden, I like to start by asking everybody who they are and where they're from.

Well, thank you. Thanks for having me. I, uh, I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, and my dad owned a hardware store and I learned the value of hard work at an early age. I was constantly working. I was working at a store. I babysat a family that had 4 young boys. And after that, I vowed I was not going to have children. And then I decided I wanted to go into medicine, internship, uh, interned at a lot of different, uh, places, a stock picking place. I did intern at a hospital. I tried to dip my toes into various fields to figure out what I wanted to do. Uh, and I landed on medicine and I started at, um, I did medical, I did my medical school in Georgia at Medical College of Georgia. And then I started my residency at UTMB, which is in Galveston, Texas. And then I ended up transferring to Stanford and I, I finished at Stanford. And then when I finished residency, I moved back to Texas. I worked in a small private practice for about 7 or 8 years. And then the memories of babysitting faded and I decided to start having children and I ended up having 4 boys in 5 years. And I had to take a hiatus from practicing medicine.

I can't imagine why.

Yeah, it was, it was brutal. It's harder than residency.

And for people who have no context about residency, especially in ENT residency, it's pretty common to work, what, 11-hour days, 14 days, 13 days in a row.

Well, it's similar in that you have zero control of when you eat or when you sleep or when you have free time. It's the same thing with having a bunch of young children. You were just on call at all times and you never know what's gonna happen. So, but once my kids got older and they got into a routine of school, I decided I wanted to go back and practice medicine. And I, with 4 young kids, I was not employable because I needed high flexibility. So I decided to start my own practice and I decided to start something different. So it's called Direct Specialty Care, but it's basically, you don't take insurance, you I only accept cash payments, but I like to call myself third-party free. So I don't contract with the, with insurance companies, the government, or hospitals. And the only people I work for are my patients. And that practice model served me well when the pandemic hit because I had total independence. I didn't have third parties telling me how I could practice medicine.

Absolutely. What was your first memory of wanting to become a physician?

Hmm. That is a good question. I remember thinking it's, it's beyond me. It's too hard. I could never be a doctor. But I made very good grades and I was very good in the sciences. So just little by little, I just, yeah, I wanted a career. I knew that. And I started rule— I knew I didn't wanna do law. I knew I didn't wanna do business. I didn't wanna do finance. Uh, and I was very good in the sciences, but I remember having that, that doubt, that self-doubt, like, I don't think I could do this. It's so hard. You think it's so hard, but I just whittled away at it and then it happened.

What would you say really drew you to having a career?

Well, my parents got divorced in high school. And my mom never worked. She didn't have a career. She had nothing to fall back on. And she advised me, she's like, don't end up in my situation. You know, you need to fend for yourself and be able to support yourself if something should happen. So that was probably the gist of it.

Was it about the life sciences and sciences in general that drew you in?

Curiosity about the human body. I mean, it's something that we are— it's a mystery, right? And there's still a lot of mystery to it. You look at brain diseases. I mean, we still don't have much of a grip on brain disease. So it was, it was curiosity and, you know, I found it very interesting and, and I advise anybody looking for a career, make sure you're very interested in what you're going to make a living off of, cuz it makes it a lot easier.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Y-E-N-T. And for those not in the know, that's ear, nose, and throat, otolaryngology.

So, yes. It's good. You can pronounce it. Most people can't pronounce it. I, well, I wanted something surgical. I liked, I liked that aspect of medicine, uh, working with my hands. And I wanted something that would not be boring. I wanted, uh, variety. Uh, ENT doesn't sound very, uh, interesting to a lot of people, but you have a lot of different modalities of surgery. So you have endoscopic surgery, you have soft tissue surgery, use a microscope. You also operate on all ages, so it's kids and adults. And the hours are manageable. You're not, you know, in the hospital all the time. I mean, I'm not in the hospital at all now. And it's a good blend too of medicine and surgery. It's not pure surgery.

So that's why I rotated through ENT. I don't know if you would know these people. You know what, now I'm forgetting the ENT surgeons' names, but I worked with Larry Borish and Tom Platzmills at UVA and they're deep in the allergy literature and lots of sinus polyp. I did sinus surgery rotations and did not want to do surgery at all. Um, but it's, it's fascinating. There's all this physiology and medicine that goes into the airway, the upper airway. And then there's also really high stakes surgical procedures that need to be done where some of them emergently, like I don't think people realize this, but in a true emergency where say the patient has like a terrible facial or head or neck trauma, you're not calling the pulmonologist, the critical care doctor to intubate the patient to get the patient on a ventilator. You're calling the because the ENT is the person who's used to looking at a totally traumatized head and neck and figuring out how do I get a breathing tube into this body that's been mangled. But I'll see that also with, um, you know, like people get infections like pertussis or laryngitis, you would call the ENT in a really extreme case. And it's scary because you're like, this person is in an outpatient practice 15 minutes away and this person's airway could close in 2 minutes. And I guess then I'll just cross my fingers and hope that they get the call quickly and maybe I'll have to crank cricoïd this person at the bedside.

I, I had to do one of those in residency and it was the night before my in-service exam, which is this annual exam that residents have to take. Yeah. It's highly competitive. You know, you get, you're publicly shamed if you make a bad score. And I was up all night and went to the ER and it was like 20 minutes away. It was a cancer patient and had to do the emergency cric in the ER. It was very memorable.

Yeah, absolutely. I think I've actually managed to forget to mention this until just now, but Mary's out with a new book, Dangerous Misinformation. You must read it. If you're subscribed to Dr. Stillman Uncensored, which is where the podcast is hosted, I mean, of course you understand why you should buy a copy of this book. I was telling Mary before we jumped on or hit record that I expected to like it, but I'm enjoying it even more than I expected. In part because you included a lot of wonderful stories about your training and what you thought and your observations and your impressions of medicine and practice even before COVID that I find. And you really, I don't know what kind of help you got writing this book, but it's A, very well written and B, it reads like you really wrote it. Like you really put time. I know, but not just like rushed it out. You really put time and effort into it. The sentence structures are not too complex, but they're also not overly simple. It's just a well-written book, which is—

anyway, I actually love to write. I've been working on a fiction book for about 20 years.

Get outta here.

No, I love to write.

I love that. It shows a lot. So then no wonder you blew up on Twitter roasting people for their ridiculous ideas about this and that. But yeah, I love that you opened the book, not just straight into COVID, but you know, who are you? Where are you from? What was your training like? And what I'm most curious about in your training and your mindset going into COVID was, I think that patients and the public at large, especially pre-COVID, had this idea that medicine was this kind of, we have a really firm foundation of what we know and what we don't know. And doctors at hospitals are truly on the up and up. And there's a lot of enormous trust and they are really taking time to read the literature and think deeply about what it means and how it should shape practice. And in my training, I looked at the way that things were being done and I thought none of this makes sense to me. I felt very like a fish out of water. I didn't feel like I belonged at all. When I hang out with chiropractors, actually, I feel very accepted. I feel like I, I was like, oh, I should have probably gone to chiropractic school as far as like my temperament, personality, and the way I think about medicine. But I felt very out of water because I didn't get the impression thinking through the problems we were presented with in internal medicine training, which was my training versus ENT. I thought, you know, a lot of this is just so— like the evidence is so thin. It's like this, a few studies. It's just expert opinion. Why are we doing this? Why are we doing that? I remember having attendings be like, they're like, why are you asking this question? It's like, because I'm a student and I'm supposed to learn and we move science forward by asking questions and understanding the rationale behind why we're doing what we're doing. Like, I thought the point for me being here was to ask questions. Is the point for me to just shut up and memorize what you tell me to think? So I'm curious what your experience was like in residency and what sort of conflict, maybe that's the right term for it, between you felt between say the values you were raised with and your inner, your inner sense of authenticity and how you were told to practice in the system you were supposed to operate within. Does that make sense? It felt like a very long-winded question.

Yeah. I mean, there, by and large, I was fairly compliant. I do remember in, when I was an intern, getting very upset, and this is, this is just the way things were run, but patients would be woken up at 4:00 AM to get their blood drawn. And that was because we needed the results back before we did rounds, before we went to the operating room. And half the time the labs would not be back in time, but they'd wake the patient up at 4:00 AM. And I was a little intern and marched down to the lab and, and told them, wait, we need to straighten this out. Like if we're gonna be waking patients up, we need to have the, the results back. And why are we waking Waking patients up.

I love that.

So that was sort of my, yeah, I got in trouble a little bit for doing that.

How did you get in trouble for that?

Because I, you know, you're not supposed to, I was an intern. I did not know my place. You're not supposed to.

But it's such a reasonable thing. Hey, if the whole point of you waking the patient up at 4 o'clock when they're undergoing repair, which is what sleep is, and they're in the hospital because they're broken and need to be fixed and have a surgery and need to heal, maybe the reason that you're doing it Maybe, maybe we should just figure out a way for us to get the outcome that we want that justifies this disruption of circadian rhythms.

Right, right, right, right.

And I remember—

I didn't put it that eloquently, but yes, that was— yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I, there were so many things that unsettled me and made me and frustrated me in the hospital system when I was there, but I could never have articulated it until, you know, now years later with all this experience in private practice, plus my experience within the system as, as later a hospitalist. But I wanna sort of make sure we, make sure I get an answer. Like what, what was it about your, your upbringing, your values that you felt really conflicted with this system?

I don't, I've always been very sensitive to inauth, you know, inauthentic people, fraud. I have always had a radar for that. I will say that. I just remember, you know, in high school there'd be certain people where I would just, just, okay, that, that person is not real. That person, you know, just very in tune to that. So maybe that's where it comes from. And then I think I grew up sort of blue collar, but surrounded by very white collar. And I think that also you see a difference, that difference in, in culture and being was formative in some way as well. I don't know.

I totally agree. I grew up with, you know, like most of my family are professionals, but I ended up having interactions with, and a lot of, a lot of time with people who were just of all different walks of life. And I don't know what it was. Part of it is that my, in my own family came from sort of like a libertarian gold bug, conservative background. This like, we don't need the government. We just, please let us do it ourselves mentality. And when I got into the system, what I, you know, the healthcare system that is, I think what I saw was you guys are doing things that don't make sense. You don't have a good reason. When you do have a good reason, it doesn't even pan out. Like, oh, we're going to wake them up at 4:00 AM. So our labs are back by 7:00, but then they're not even back by 7:00. So why are you waking up at 4:00 AM? Like maybe we should just rearrange the system so that patient can get some sleep and we can get our work done. Like maybe we round at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. Would that be the end of the world? But there was just this total disinterest in improving the system. It was like, well, this is just how it is. And I think what most, I don't know, you know, before we jumped on, I asked you, you know, I think the thing that most interests me for some reason now about COVID and everything that happened is how did we go from, I think, a society of people who, you know, I thought we could all just have reasonable, calm discussions about this and maybe You know, maybe my values are not yours and I, and, and, you know, I'll cite a real example that's totally unrelated to COVID. When I was training in internal medicine residency, it was very clear that there were, there was a huge cultural gap between, and I trained in Maine and in Maine is a very interesting place to train because we had Somali and Iraqi refugees and asylum seekers. We had these old Mainers and then we had just other people, people who'd come in, move to Maine. They liked Maine, you know, they're from elsewhere. Or as the Mainers say, from away, which you're from away until you've been, until your kids are born there and then they're not from away. At least that's what I'm told. And you know, for example, like the sort of old Mainer, New England types, the kind of guys who like were born in the woods, grew up there and, you know, never traveled anywhere. It's like they were so stoic and so hard-nosed and like we would send them home. We're like, this person's going to die. There's nothing we can do. We're going to send them home. They're going to die in their sleep or they're going to die on their farm, but they're just like, I'm going to go back to the river or the mountain or the wood where I'm from, and I don't care if I'm going to die, this sort of stoicism. And that's a totally different mentality than like, no, I could die. Like, well, I've got to be in a SNF skilled nursing facility. I got to be in a nursing home. And I think one of the things that most bothers me about medicine right now is this is sort of like one size fits all. Like you should all have the same beliefs and all have, and then there's this weird creepy, like, oh, well, of course we should all be on board with, you know, doctor-assisted suicide. It's like, No, wait a minute. What, what are you talking about? No, some of us have deeply held religious beliefs that we think that's wrong and we should be able to have a real conversation about this. So I'm, I'm curious, how do you think our society went from what I thought was at least a reasonable consensus about some of these just basic principles, how society should be led, governed, and how medicine should be done to what ended up happening during COVID Because I don't buy that this was just this overnight switch flipped, propaganda machine came out, convinced everyone to abandon common sense and reason. I think this was a much longer, slower process, and I'm curious what your perspective is on now.

When did you graduate residency? When did you finish? I'm just curious.

2017.

Oh yeah. So you weren't there, uh, in the good old days. Medicine used to be much more diverse in terms of what types of practices there were. You know, by and large, the vast majority of, of Doctors now are employees, but that wasn't the case. And when I finished residency, I mean, it was unusual to become a solo practitioner, but it was not unusual to be part of like a 2 or 3 person doctor group. And that's, that's what I joined. Now it's like when you finish residency, I don't know what your job options were, but it seems like now you've either gotta join some, you've gotta join some huge practice or you're gonna go into academics, but it's It would be very unusual to finish your residency and become a solo practitioner. And it's that centralization making— it's like corporate medicine. And it's, it takes a patient-doctor relationship, it weakens that. And you've got these financially driven incentives guiding the, the whole thing, which is not good.

I agree.

Some of it's necessary because, well, it's, you know, you gotta be able to take care of different, but it's gone way too far.

Yeah. And I guess what I'm most What I just am so puzzled by is why aren't more of our colleagues bothered by this? Because to you and me, the problem is so obvious, it's undeniable, and it's extreme. This is not a minor, like, oh, well, we just disagree with our colleagues about, I don't know, how much prednisone to give COPD exacerbation, something very academic like that. Or should we use hydrocortisone in sepsis? This is like fundamental values. Seem to have been really systematically changed in medicine across the whole field. Like, I don't see a huge outcry of our colleagues saying, you know, we should fix the hospital system. We should do this. We should do that. It's just, and I don't know, do you think there's a huge, there's a lot of angst and frustration in the system? People just have these golden handcuffs. They feel like they can't do anything.

That and lack of time. I mean, I, you know, when I had young children and I was practicing medicine, I had zero interest in trying to change this, this massive system because I'm just surviving. I'm— it's so— you're so— doctors work very hard, I'll say that, because even when you're not seeing patients, there's all this other work you have to do. Um, and then when you're on call and, and I think that's part of it, it's just that we— it's lack of time. And then if, if you are not personally impacted by one of the issues of healthcare. Yeah. What's your motivation to really change it? If, if you're sailing along and you're making six figures and you've got a steady schedule and no one's really bothering you, it's, it's understandable why doctors aren't doing anything.

Don't you think the stakes though have changed now?

I mean, yes and no. I mean, I don't know. Pandemic, um, unfortunately you would, I would've thought the pandemic people, more people would've bucked the system. But it seems like it's even worse, worse than we realized, probably.

Yeah.

People caved. Yeah.

I mean, my, my conviction is just that this all started with the capture of the educational system and then a very gradual inculcation of totally different values through both public and private schools that really, you know, radically transformed people's moral compasses.

Well, since you got out of training a lot more recently than I did, uh, I mean, I'm curious, was Did you see a lot of the DEI initiatives? Did you see the woke? Did you see the transgender stuff and all? Because that was not part of my training at all.

No. I mean, the DEI stuff was there in the sense that like we had very diverse medical classes and I trained with some foreign medical grads. They were always very professional. They were always very polite. But I also recall after residency working at a medical center that will remain nameless where there were, it was like all foreign doctors and I saw rapacious billing and financial practices. And it really disturbed me to the point that I actually called my recruiter because I was— you asked me what kind of job did I— could I get? I got a locum tenens job because I wanted a job that would pay me well and give me flexibility and allow me to then start my own practice so I could escape just the misery and the nightmare of managed care, which is the euphemism for people who don't know, for like hospital-based, large group-based care, they call it managed care. Yes, we're going to manage your decline into some kind of miserable, terrible pseudoexistence on a bevy of drugs, getting lots of injections that will rot your brain. But anyway, so I became a locum and I traveled the country. I've worked in some very out of the way, like critical access hospitals and this place, it was like, it was like, but I got this distinct feeling like because they weren't from there and it wasn't like their community, they didn't have deep roots. They didn't care. And I, I think that's just human nature. You know, I almost, I mean, I almost don't even judge them for that. And I, but it stands in such stark contrast to the kind of, I can think of more than one family doc who I met during my UVA time who just like, like they ran their practice basically at a loss. They made like $100,000 a year less than they could have if they just signed on with like, you know, some big whatever. And they did it. Why did they do it? Because they love their autonomy. They love their patients and they wanted to be able to take, you know, 20 minutes. Like, oh my gosh, 20 minutes. What a, what an insane amount of time to want to actually talk to another human being about their complex medical issues that might require nuanced understanding to make the right decisions. And they refuse to compromise on that. And it's like totally, totally different. And so it upsets me and I want to see us fix this problem, even though it seems so large. And so, yeah, why don't we go ahead and jump into COVID? I know you've told this story probably a thousand times. And so in fact, before you tell it, I'm actually curious to ask you about— you write about this in the book very eloquently— the wonderful piece of advice you got before you came out of residency. Into private practice from one of your mentors?

Yeah, it was a pivotal moment, as you mentioned, that I didn't realize how important it was until 20 years later. But the second to last day of my residency, which is a grind— I joke it was like a prison sentence because you have zero time. You have no control over your— when you eat, sleep, or have time off. Zero control. You're, you're at the mercy of your program. So second to last day. Our attending comes in, Dr. Fee, and he has his golden retriever with him because the golden retriever followed him around everywhere in the hospital. And he was not disabled. That was just, it was. And he said, guys, I have two pieces of advice for you. And the first was when you get out into the real world, find out who the best doctors are in your area and refer your patients to them because you will be judged by the doctors that you refer people to. And then the second thing he said was, do not be one of the first to prescribe the new drugs that come on the market. Give it time because a lot of these drugs, there, there are issues when they first come out in the market. Be patient and, and hold off until it's proven that it's been safe and effective. And that stuck with me.

How long had he been in practice at that point?

I talked to him 2 days ago and he's 82 right now. And this was 20 years ago, so he was in his early 60s, probably late 50s when he told us that. So, he was seasoned and he was the wisest of my attendings.

I think it says a lot that of everything he could have told his graduating resident class, of everything he could have told them, he decided to tell them those two things. I don't know if they quoted Osler a lot to you when you were in your training. But they quoted him, people who don't know, he was one of the, he was the founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School. So a big, a big name in, in medicine because of that and the history of medicine in the United States. Osler said something really funny about, he said two, two really funny things that came, come to mind that I never heard anyone quote in the hospital. I started reading Osler when I was far from training and I just, this guy, the things that, that doctors have forgotten in modern medicine. He said, the patient who takes medicine must recover twice, once from the disease and once from the medicine. And he said, "One of the chief duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine." I hadn't heard that one. But isn't it just so ironic that one of the titans of American medicine, who is quoted ad nauseam in medical schools to this day, said things like that? And yet the kind of behavior we could see during COVID around the vaccine could emerge. I think it's amazing.

Yeah.

So for people who don't know, because I know you've told this story a million times probably by now. What happened for you during COVID And of course you go over it in the book in more detail. I encourage people to buy a copy and read it, but you know, what were the highlights for you and the turning points and the things that really stuck out to you as important moments?

Yeah, I started my little practice 6 months before the pandemic hit. And I remember watching the news and thinking, this won't affect me. This is just going to be something that happens in the hospitals. I had a very quiet practice. But I was doing a PCR test on patients with chronic sinusitis that tests for bacteria and fungus. And the same lab came out with a PCR saliva test for COVID and encouraged me to try it. And because testing was so hard to come by at first, LabCorp was the first to do it, but it was taking 2 weeks to get the results back. And it was kind of pointless because people were quarantining for 2 weeks if they got exposed. So my little clinic became known as the place in town to get a rapid turnaround swab-free COVID test.

Quick pause. If you're listening to this and thinking, he's talking about me, I'm tired, foggy, inflamed, and it feels like no one can figure out why, then your next step is not another random protocol. It's a structured assessment with myself or a member of my team. Go to stillmanmd.com and click book a call. Pick a time that works for you and add it to your calendar. On that call, we'll look at your story in more detail and see whether our framework work is a good fit for your situation. If it is, we'll outline what a realistic path forward could look like for you. This is not emergency care, and it's not a promise of cure. It's a calm, structured way to stop guessing and see whether our approach is right for you. We have a limited number of these appointments each month. If this conversation is hitting close to home, visit stillmanmd.com now and book a call with myself or a member of my team. Thank you for listening. Now back to the episode.

So my little clinic became known as a place in town to get a rapid turnaround swab-free COVID test. And that's where it all started. And initially I didn't have much demand for treatment because people would just go to their primary care doctors or they would just go to the emergency room. And, but when people asked me for treatment, I did my best. I just used common sense. I used breathing treatments, tried steroids. I tried antibiotics. I tried hydroxychloroquine, but then the Texas State Board of Pharmacy shut that down. We were prohibited from prescribing it. And then I moved to monoclonal antibodies and those worked really well. And I could get as many doses as I wanted and people turned around quickly with very few side effects. It was great. And then the government shut that down. And so I started using ivermectin and I was a skeptic about it at first because of all the negative media attention, but I dug into the safety. I made sure it was very safe. And then I started using it and found it worked. And so I ended up treating over 6,000 COVID patients during the pandemic and, uh, You know, I've never treated that many patients with one disease in my career, and I'm sure I never will, but you quickly become an expert. You quickly learn what works and doesn't work when you see that many patients. But because I was doing so much testing, I was seeing that these shots weren't working. And I had privileges at Houston Methodist Hospital. They were the first in the country to mandate the shots. And this was April 1st, 2021. It was 5 months before Biden. And I went to them because I was actually collaborating with them. I was doing research with them.. And I said, hey, what's going on? These shots, I'm seeing all these breakthrough cases. Are you seeing what I'm seeing? I was innocent. I was not, you know, attacking them. I was genuinely curious. And they gaslit me and said, well, we just think the lower severity. And I never heard from them again. They basically stopped talking to me. So I started tweeting about it, but I didn't have a big following. Post something and get maybe one like, but on one day I tweeted out vaccine mandates are wrong 25 times. And I put a patient testimonial with each tweet and they didn't like that. A few days later, I got a text message from a reporter at the Houston Chronicle saying, can you please verify that your privileges at Houston Methodist have been suspended based on comments you made on social media? And I did a double take. I'm like, I don't know what you're talking about. Check your sources. And I go to Twitter and there, Methodists, Houston Methodists, tweeting about me saying that I'm spreading dangerous misinformation, hence the title of my book, harmful to the community. And they suspended my privileges. They reported me to the medical board. In turn, I resigned. I hired a lawyer. I hired somebody for PR. I held a press conference and I sued them. And I'm actually still in a legal battle with them.

I know. And I haven't finished your book, so I don't know exactly how the story runs in the book, but I'm really curious your perspective. After all the lawfare you've been subjected to on really the state of the American justice system?

It's, uh, very slow. It's very slow and very expensive, and it doesn't feel fair. I sued Methodist First to try to get their financial information. I thought that was an easy win because they're a nonprofit, and I wanted to see who was funding their attack on me. And you're supposed to be able to access financial records of nonprofits, but the court did not agree. And, uh, they shut down that case. I even appealed, they still shut it down.

Was this a judge in a blue district?

Oh yeah. Harris County where I am.

Shocking.

And you know, Houston Methodist are, when you rank nonprofits in the state of Texas by income, Houston Methodist is number one. So they are doing very well. They hide their money. There are about 22 different EINs that they, you know, hide their money in. But I couldn't get hold of that information. So then I sued them for defamation because they called me dangerous. And as a doctor, you don't need, you know, the, a highly prestigious hospital in town telling the world that you're dangerous. But then my attorney made a, a critical error. He did not have my affidavit signed. He didn't put my date of birth, and then they struck the affidavit. And then he had a stroke.. And so I lost that. I paid them $166,000. Now they're going after me for interest. So we're still, we're still at it.

It's so grotesque. I mean, this is like David and Goliath is not the right analogy because they're like a multi— what is it? Million? Billion?

They're bigger than Goliath. Yes. Yeah.

I mean, it's just the scale here. I don't think people have any concept and I also don't think they understand, at least a lot of them I'm sure don't understand the economics of running your own medical practice. Like you are lucky. If, I mean, I just mentioned my mentors in medical school who were making like $100,000 less. Like another extreme example is I know a doctor who's losing $100,000 a year on his practice, but he, I don't know. I tried to help him fix that problem. He wouldn't listen to me, but hey, what can you do? I mean, it's just very disturbing to see this happening. And then it's clear what they're doing. They're just intimidating people to create silence, which is the illusion of consensus. And that's why I think it's so important for us to not be quiet. And that's why I'm really grateful that you were as loud as you were on X. And also that people started to really wake up to all this and start to become aware of it because I really do see some changes happening that are really encouraging. Something that you said, you cover this in the book, which is another reason why people should get it and read it. But, you know, in my residency, and I'm sure in yours, they sort of hammer into you evidence-based medicine. You should be reading the double-blinded randomized placebo-controlled crossover clinical trials and the consensus statements and the guidelines. Guidelines and blah, blah, blah. It's pretty clear to me that you didn't follow that playbook during COVID And I'm really curious what your journey was like from really the indoctrination sequence of what was it, 10 years, 5 years of residency, 4 years, call it 10 years. That what I look at is very much an indoctrination sequence into that way of that belief structure, that way of thinking. What was it like or what was your journey from, okay, RCTs, placebo studies, whatever, to I'm going to practice medicine the way it makes sense to in the parking lot of my strip mall practice?

Well, I don't know what your training was like, but I will say during my training, I walked away with a sense that these studies were not to be trusted for the most part, that most research is flawed. I mean, we would meet for journal club once a week and it seemed like the prevailing message was the studies are— they don't have enough power or there's conflict of interest or they're poorly designed. I mean, that was my gestalt. Of research, and I learned to rely on my attendings and what they were teaching me and on my own clinical experience. And that using these studies is sort of this background information that you can justify, but you can really find a study to justify any position you want to take in medicine for the most part.

Absolutely. Yes.

I, you know, I, I find these studies helpful at times, but it certainly does not— it's no substitute for clinical experience, especially when you— so I was seeing every, all of this firsthand and, uh, there's no way I would've continued treating people the way I was treating them if it wasn't working. I mean, you know, as well as I do, like, I know you want your patients to get better. That's, that's how you get job satisfaction. If your patients are not getting better, that's how you pay your rent. Well, yeah, but even psychologically, right? No, I know.

I know.

Yeah. Psychologically, that's where you get your job satisfaction is when you actually help patients. I wouldn't treat 6,000 patients the same, you know?

Yes.

If they were all doing poorly, I, I would change or I would just stop treating them. Um, you know, I, I had some patients coming to me wanting cancer treatment using ivermectin. I had a few, I, I tried it and, you know, these were people on stage 4 cancer on the verge of death. And it, I quickly saw that it was not working. I'm like, I'm not doing cancer anymore. I'm not taking cancer patients.

Yes.

I'm not gonna do something that unless I can see that this is actually working, I'm, I'm just not gonna do it. So I could have shut down, said I'm not treating COVID patients. And if, if I was seeing bad outcomes, that's what I would've done.

I love to ask this question. So, and I actually wanna ask it about two different distinct, I don't know, let's call them areas of practice. So before COVID I think you, you would tell an interesting story in the book about using PCR-based testing to look at the I would call it the microbiome of the sinus. And it seemed clear to me that you found a lot of value in that. And yet I didn't see anybody doing that when I was training in allergy or when I was in internal medicine. I like to ask clinicians, was there a story or a case or a moment, like a patient that you can think of where you thought this technology or this way of practicing is so much better than what I was doing before? Sometimes I put it to patients and I'll ask them this when I ask them, hey, did this help or did this work or did you find this valuable? I'll say like, and they'll say, well, you know, maybe I'm like, that's a not really. I'm looking for, did the heavens open and did the angels sing? And now they repeat that back to me like, Dr. Stillman, the heavens opened and the angels sang. I'm like, oh good.

Yeah. I can't think of a specific patient, but I will just say, yeah, I came out of training taught that you just threw a very broad spectrum, potentially dangerous antibiotic at patients with chronic sinusitis. Usually it was a fluoroquinolone like Levaquin. We would give it to them for an entire month. And then if it didn't work, we would operate on them, even if the x-ray, the CT scan looked normal. I mean, it was kind of, and there wasn't a lot of data supporting this. It was more just sort of, this is how it's done. And that just didn't sit well with me. And so we have cultures, but the cultures for sinuses weren't usually very helpful. And even, yeah, the PCR test has a flaw in that you'll pick up too many bacteria. Right. So you kind of have to figure out like, which, which are the harmful ones and which are not. Not, but I've had situations where patients required 2 antibiotics to really get rid of the infection, whereas normally you really wouldn't do that unless somebody really is struggling. And that's changed the whole situation just by giving them 2 antibiotics, but that's by seeing it on the PCR test. Say, I am much more conservative about operating on people now than I was in residency for sinus disease. You know, surgery doesn't fix inflammation and people with horrible allergies, surgery's not gonna fix your problem, but—

Right.

I saw that people were being operated on way too much during my residency. I'd have multiple sinus surgeries. I'd be like, okay, what else is there to operate on?

You— Really?

—cleaned out. There's like one hole left. I don't know what you're doing, but—

Did you, uh, did you see that mostly in the practices of, of private physicians or in academics? Academic.

And after that, you can get away with a lot more because there's, there's a team, right? You may not even see the patient after surgery because somebody else may see that patient. So you're not, the buck doesn't stop with you the way it does in private practice. Wow. You don't wanna operate on somebody and have them come back and say the operation didn't work. And especially, you know, if you are a solo practitioner, you're not going to enjoy your practice very much if you have patients coming back to you and saying, well, this elective surgery. I mean, it was somewhat elective, but yeah, I was suffering and I'm still suffering and I went through all this surgery for nothing. But I felt like in residency it was easier to get away with that.

Yeah, I, I couldn't agree with you more. What I've found both myself and then my team is that just what you, you mentioned, which is when people come to us who are not the right fit for us, if we accept their case and usually it's, well, they want our help and we want to help them and maybe sort of could be a good case for us. Now, increasingly, I just, if I don't think it's a good fit, I just say, hey, listen, I'd rather you get better care somewhere else. I don't think we're the right fit because it's so demoralizing to take care of people and have them not get good outcomes. And it's one of the things that really, you know, our academic colleagues cast a fair amount of aspersions at us. They're pretty nasty. I find on social media in particular, they don't understand. They have no concept of what it's like to practice outside of the hospital system. And it's exactly what you just mentioned. They're very hands-off. They don't really know their patients. They have this constant, just giant river of referral coming to them because they're all employed by the big, you know, massive tertiary care facility that owns the whole— like, it's like people don't even know where else to go for care. And the other thing that I like about what you did is that, among other things, is that you quickly iterated what you were doing. When you say, hey, I have this great thing that I'm already doing, the PCR gene testing, PCR testing, And now I have this new disease. I'm going to start testing people in the parking lot. Right. The reason why there's not so much innovation in American medicine isn't the doctors don't want to innovate. It's that these giant healthcare systems, it's like if you went to the CEO and you said, we'd like to test people in the parking lot for COVID, they'd be like, well, I have to talk to the health department and we'll have to have a committee meeting and we'll get back to you. And then we'll, you know, we'll think about it and then we'll consult legal. And it's like, My gosh, like you get nothing done. That's part of why healthcare is so expensive. Like, I know you've walked through these wings of hospitals and you're— there's all these offices and there's people walking in and out of them in nice clothes and you think, what do you all do here? You clearly don't see patients. Someone's heating this building. The electricity's on. Like, you all have a salary, I'm sure. Maybe even have a bonus structure, but what do you actually do? There's so much waste in American medicine and it's all because it's become so bureaucratic. So as you were treating COVID cases, though, as you got into that, you mentioned already that you responded well to hydroxychloroquine, or maybe you didn't, and I'm just pulling that from your book, which I've been reading. When did you really start to suspect that something was really, really wrong in terms of how the medical community was responding specifically?

Yeah, so I wasn't even on X initially. I was on Facebook and Instagram. And I would post my percent positives every week. And I had this, this running graph, which I believe is in the book. And I would post it to these private group groups on Facebook. One was Houston Women's Physicians Group. Another was this neighborhood group called West University Information Trading. And I would just post a graph, no commentary, just showing this is what I'm seeing in my clinic. Cause we were doing a lot of testing. And people would completely freak out on me over this graph saying I was either fearmongering if the percent positives were too high, or I was downplaying the severity if cases were too low. And I was like, I'm not even, I'm just posting. And every, you know, it actually corresponded with what the health department was seeing too. So it wasn't like, but that's when I was like, wait, this is weird. Like, I'm not even, I'm just posting what I'm seeing and people are attacking me. For no reason. Absolutely. And that was pretty early.

When you first started seeing the cases, you know, you mentioned using nebulizer treatments and a number of other things. What was the sequence of events that led you to the sort of treatment regimen that you ended up prescribing for most of the 6,000 patients that you treated?

Yeah, I mean, I, I started off just common sense 'cause we didn't know what we were dealing with. So if people have difficulty breathing, I'm gonna try breathing treatments. Mm-hmm. And breathing treatments don't work, then I give 'em, uh, oral or even IV steroids and antibiotics to cover for secondary infection. And in And then I used hydroxychloroquine too, but then that got shut down. And then, and then monoclonal antibodies came about and those worked wonderfully. And then the government took those away. And so I started using ivermectin, but I also, it was usually, it depended on the patient, but in the higher risk people I would use a cocktail. So I would use ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and a Z-Pak. Of course the zinc and the vitamins and that sort of thing. And then sometimes breathing treatments and steroids on top of that. But yeah, by and large, it was pretty, it was pretty easy. Like it, I had some really challenging cases come in though. Mm-hmm.

So I had a patient with the oxygen saturation of 68%, which for the record is like not really compatible with life. Right.

Like normally you'd try to intubate the guy on the spot, right? Or call the—

if it's like you would, I mean, I would expect them to be laid out on the parking lot tarmac.

It was very interesting with COVID that people could tolerate these very low oxygen saturations. I encouraged him to go to the hospital because it was so low, but he refused. So I had to allow him to possibly die in my office, which is not good. Scary. But we threw the kitchen sink at him and he survived. He came back every day and got, he did, you know, I didn't, I didn't have a hospital bed for him. And I had a handful, I probably had about 6 or 7 patients like that that were seriously ill and otherwise would've been in the hospital and we saved. And that was, you know, I learned so much from those cases that these hospital protocols were probably not the way to go.

Having treated so many people with such a long list of interventions, what stood out to you as the most powerful of them? Because it's, I think it's very hard to know when you're using vitamin D, vitamin C, zinc, quercetin. You know, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, you know, what's really doing the work?

Well, I'd say the most straightforward was monoclonal antibodies because it was a one, one treatment and the next day people wake up and feel tremendously better. So it was very, it was one drug and you saw the outcome very quickly. With the ivermectin though, I would say that would be the next best. And even when you used it just by all by itself, Yeah. To this day, I still see people improve on it because it has a lot of anti-inflammatory effects. So even if you're not treating it for a viral infection, it could be helpful in the second or third week when you're dealing with the cytokine storm. I've seen some patients with severe rashes after these COVID shots that did not respond to, uh, antihistamines or steroids or even Zolaire. I've seen them respond to ivermectin, and that's one of those, you know, cut and dry. Okay. Well, they've tried all the traditional things. Yes. Nothing's working. You give them ivermectin. Ivermectin, all of a sudden the rash is gone. I would say, and ivermectin's so safe and it, it should be cheap. It's not, it's not as cheap as it should be, but, uh, it's cheap if you buy the horse dewormer, right? Or, or buy from India. But yeah, I think it's a staple that I still continue to use even though the pandemic is long gone.

What fascinated me during COVID was to have a mentor, because we started to talk about ivermectin being used for COVID and they made an offhand comment. This was an integrative physician, not a, conventionally trained doc. And he said, oh, we've been using that for everything from cancer to autoimmunity for decades now. Not everyone, but like, he's like, no, there's this very, very thriving community of doctors who know that there's all kinds of other uses for these drugs. Not just sort of, you know, like there's a lot of off-label prescribing in even conventional and academic medicine. But, and I think one of the things that's most interesting to me about ivermectin is just, and part of why I wanted to ask you about what you think of it is it's so effective in so many different ways, but it's also not— I don't find it to be predictable. Like, I'll give you an example. Did you listen to my podcast with Bob Benson? Oh, it was so fun. So for people who don't know, Bob was a patient in my practice before he ended up going to Japan and getting stem cell factors and plasma filtration. Yeah. So anyway, he was a patient of mine and we got him some really great progress. And the thing that really interested me about his case was that he came in and the only thing he'd tried was low-dose ivermectin. We tripled the dose and his severe depression lifted basically overnight. And I mean depression, like this guy's job is he's a fishing guide. He couldn't go out and fish. Like how I say this in my book that's coming out in August, how depressed does a guy who's a fishing guide have to be to not go out and fish? This is extreme depression. And it waned over time. Unfortunately, it, I also noted in the podcast that it waned as we went into the winter when vitamin D levels drop. And I was just reading about vitamin D's effects on the brain and depression and. But what I think is so interesting about ivermectin is you'll have like depression goes away, rashes go away. Colleague like, oh, we're using it on psoriasis. I'm like, this, what does this drug not do? But then you'll also have cases where you use a high dose for a prolonged period of time and they're like, I don't know. I didn't notice anything.

Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah. I mean, it's, yeah, sometimes I wonder though, okay. Is there something else going on? It's not long COVID and it's not vaccine injury and perhaps that's It's, you know, we're, we're just going down the wrong path because I have this, you know, patients come to me with this, I've got long COVID or vaccine injury and I'm not internal medicine. And I, and I wonder, am I missing something? Is there something else going on? And maybe that's why, but yeah, I mean, no drug is, is 100%, right?

That's why there's an art to medicine. I totally agree. I'm curious, have you, as you've gone through this, as you've written the book and everything, what's the most important thing to you about what happens next? What do you most want people to come away from this podcast with?

Well, I think there's been a huge loss of trust in the system, which is totally understandable, and we've gotta figure out a way to fix that. And unfortunately, current administration doesn't seem interested in fixing it. And so, you know, it would help if more people could stand up and do stuff. For example, there is a man in Arkansas. He's not a politician. He's just a concerned citizen. It's because of him that ivermectin is now available without a prescription in Arkansas because he met with his representative and pushed it. And it, you know, and same thing, there's a man in Iowa who has— I have an organization called Americans for Health Freedom, and basically we're recruiting politicians who are willing to state that the COVID shot should be pulled off the market. You would think it'd be easy. It's been very hard. We do have 299 elected officials that have signed the pledge. Thomas Massey was one of them. Unfortunately, that's— I guess we're now at 298. But this man, Dan T., I only know him from X. I've had one FaceTime conversation with him, but he's probably recruited 12 people from Iowa to sign this pledge. And then Iowa just announced that they're allowing ivermectin to be sold without a prescription now. So one person can make a difference. It's just somebody that has the time and the energy to meet with your representatives and try to sway them to take a position on this.

I totally agree. And I think where the next battles are going to be won or lost that really have an impact are going to be at the local level. I think that people need to look at their district and say, okay, because it's very clear that there is more exploitation constantly being engineered of the public, whether it's You know, and I hear very different things from different people, but you know, like data centers and H-1B visas and you know, it's just, the list goes on and on, but it's really clear to me that while there doesn't seem to be much chance at electing people who maintain their integrity when they go to DC and then they just get chewed up and spit out like Massey or Marjorie Taylor Greene. And even the, I mean, the Democrats had some really fine representatives. Like I liked a lot of what Dennis Kucinich had to say, by the way, just to be bipartisan about it. But guys like Dennis Kucinich have been totally sidelined from the Democratic Party. But I see at the local level, there's still this opportunity to have these massive— that really get meaningful change enacted. Like in Naples, where I lived in Florida, we got fluoride out of the water. It was me and some other doctors and dentists and a lot of concerned citizens. And it just takes showing up. And especially as civic engagement drops, Showing up is easier and your voice becomes much, much more— your vote, your opinion, your action becomes much, much more valuable and it counts for more. So I hope people will do that. Mary, how can people get involved? Because, you know, one thing I struggle with is, and I'd love you to do more content on this, by the way, like what exactly should people do? And on that note, because I know you can't give them all of this in like 2 minutes, how can they stay in touch with you so that you can give them your advice over time?

Well, first of all, most people, a lot of people don't even know who represents them, so figure that out. And their email addresses and their phone numbers. You can— yeah, there are a lot of organizations that track medical freedom bills. My organization is called americansforhealthfreedom.org. You could, you know, send that website link to your representatives and ask them to sign the pledge. There is, um, Vaccine Safety Research Foundation. I'm on the board of that. You can follow them. They're not politically minded, but I would just say, find out, first step, find out who your representatives are. And if you have medical freedom concerns, send them a note, send them a, you know, make a phone call, ask to meet with them, show up at meetings where they were, they're speaking and form a relationship. And then that's your bet, the first step in trying to get things done. Got it.

And how can people subscribe to your newsletter at Americans for Health Freedom?

Well, I haven't done start.

Well, how about you can get my Substack.

Your Substack is Dangerous Misinformation, Mary Bowden, MD. And then I'm also on X.

Great. We'll include a link to all that. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. And I'm sure we'll talk again soon.

Thanks so much.

Thank you for listening to Integrative Medicine with Dr. Leland Stillman. If this conversation felt uncomfortably familiar and and you're ready for someone to take your story seriously, your next step is to book a call with myself or a member of my team. Go to stillmanmd.com and click book a call. Choose a time that works for you and confirm it. On that call, we'll look at your story in more detail and see whether our framework is a good fit for your situation. If it is, we'll outline what a realistic path forward could look like for you. This is not emergency care and it's not a guarantee of results. It's a calm, structured assessment where we'll create a plan to help you achieve your health goals. We have a limited number of calls available each month. So if you see a time that fits your schedule, book it right away. Again, the link is stillmanmd.com. If you find this podcast helpful, subscribe, leave a review, or share this episode with a friend or family member who needs help getting their health back. I'm Dr. Leland Stillman. Thank you for listening. And until next time, be well.