Original subtitles

In his farewell speech to the nation in 1961, President Eisenhower warned the US

public about the dangers of the military -industrial complex.

He also warned them about something else.

In holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we

also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could

itself... become the captive of a scientific, technological elite.

A country is as strong, really, as its citizens.

And I think that mental and physical health, mental and physical vigor, go

in hand.

That more people each year die of cancer in the United States than all the

Americans who lost their lives in World War II.

Attention to physical fitness is one of those things that says something about a

nation and its people.

In fact, it is now conceivable that our children's children will know the term

cancer only as a constellation of stars.

Medicine is constantly improving.

Medicare must keep pace.

So they made a deal that was a handshake with the devil.

There's nobody on Capitol Hill who will stand up to them.

They are now out of control as an entity that is purely there to make money. A

psychopathic entity.

Between 2003 and 2016, fines imposed on large pharmaceutical companies for fraud

and other illegal activity amounted to $33 billion.

Hello. Good to see you.

Nice to see you, mate. Good to see you again. All right.

Becoming a doctor was a calling for me.

I had a medical background. Both my parents were general practitioners.

And that certainly had an influence on me in terms of the career I ended up

pursuing. But also, there was a very strong sense in my family that your

duty and responsibility is to the community.

And my father taught me that the ultimate purpose of knowledge is to

human suffering.

The NHS was brilliant. It was fortuitous that the doctor I went to see,

actually, I didn't know I'd had the heart attack at this point.

He was a young chap, a very charming chap, and he said to me, after he'd

examined me, I think you should go to A &E immediately.

I said, well, I can't. I've got a quiz tonight, and I'm the maths and science

expert, so I'll go tomorrow.

And he said, well, I think if you decide to go tomorrow, it might be the last

quiz you ever do.

And I thought, oh, that's a hint.

So off I went to hospital, and the A &E were brilliant. It was an Irish doctor

that saw me there, actually.

They did a few tests, and it was quite amusing there as well because she came

in with the ECG trace, and it looked really nice. I thought, oh, that's nice.

That's reassuring.

She said, yeah, that's fine, but this bit's upside down.

And so I thought, and she said, well, we've got to do some more tests based on

this.

And then they went off and did a troponin test, which looked at the

the heart. And that proved conclusively at that point that I'd had a heart

attack. And I was carted straight from A &E up into the ward.

And within 24 hours, a wonderful cardiologist had had a look at me and

stent in one of my, well, circumflex arteries.

There was an acute severe blockage found in one of his major arteries, which we

call the circumflex.

And you can see from this angiogram, which is a test where we inject dye,

something I did for many, many years, looking at the coronary arteries for

blockages, this artery is almost completely occluded.

And he had a stent put in by an interventional cardiologist. And this is

result of the stent where you can see the artery now is opened up.

is a potentially life -saving procedure in the treatment of an acute heart

attack.

Something that's massively overused in the non -acute or stable phase of

coronary artery disease.

So in those early days, in that acute phase of the problem I had, there's no

doubt that the medical interventions probably saved my life at that point and

was very grateful for that and for the care I received and indeed everybody I

came across was had that mentality of wanting the best for me but

as time went on after that it wasn't so good so that the sort of longer term

care I started to ask questions about what was going on and that was all

prompted by

a general decline in my overall health. I just started to go downhill very

rapidly after about nine months.

I had massive aches in my legs. I had no energy, no libido.

I just lost the will to live almost.

I felt dreadful. And it was that point where I started to question what was

going on. Either I was very sick with some other illness or my heart was going

downhill again, or it could be possibly the medication I'd been put on. And

that's when the questions started to arise.

One of the medications that Tony was on that he believed caused him quite

significant side effects such as muscle fatigue, erectile dysfunction, brain

fog, really limited his quality of life for many, many months was a statin drug.

This is a cholesterol -lowering drug that has been used for decades in the

management of heart disease and is actually prescribed, estimated to be

prescribed to almost one billion people worldwide.

Unfortunately, most patients aren't made aware and many doctors aren't aware of

the absolute individual benefits of statins. This is my area of interest.

my area of research.

And of course, this is at the heart of informed or shared decision making. What

I would say ethical.

evidence -based medical practice the first person uh in the sort of medical

realm who even sort of mentioned that type of thing to me was a c malhotra he

was the only person that came up with for instance numbers needed to treat

i was familiar with um and if you look at the numbers needed to treat for

statins that gives you a very different view as patient as to what might be the

best course of action because you get you have to treat so many people to get

one person benefiting from this drug. And then you look at the downside, how

many people are harmed by this drug in some way. And if you've got that balance

as a patient, you can say, well, is it really worth taking this chance?

But that information is very, it's lacking.

It's generally lacking from the conversation patients have with their

think. The NNT is shorthand for the number needed to treat.

And it's essentially a concept of if I give this drug to

100 people and then one person benefits, that would be an NNT of 100.

So if you give a drug that you have to give to 20 people and one person would

benefit, that would be an NNT of 20. The NNT, it offers a beautiful way of

really showing people how much benefit they stand to gain and if the

really worth it for them and if it's something that they're willing to

Take the time and effort to take a medication, come in for a procedure, and

on. I think that it's very useful for patients.

But from a doctor's perspective, it may make what they do feel

less significant. So they may not like to see, not like to hear that the

interventions they're offering.

Aren't these amazing life -saving interventions that are saving everyone?

think it makes us feel smaller than we like to feel.

So if someone suffered a heart attack like Tony, the absolute benefits of

a statin religiously over five years, based upon industry -sponsored trials,

which means there's a caveat that this is a likely best -case scenario, would

mean that you have to treat 83 people who've had a heart attack for one to

benefit. in terms of saving their life or delaying their death, and 39 have to

be treated for one to benefit in terms of preventing a further non -fatal heart

attack. This information should be conveyed to patients, as I always do, to

empower them in terms of making a decision about whether the drug is right

them, but also encourages an opportunity to discuss alternatives such as

lifestyle changes.

Remind me, how old are you now?

Yeah, coming up to 64 in a couple of weeks' time.

Wow, that's pretty amazing. So almost now 10 years since your heart attack,

all your cardiac medications, pre -diabetic before the heart attack, and

completely free of even pre -diabetes.

Absolutely. And remind me what you're on diet -wise these days.

Well, if I'm in hard training, I tend to go fairly hard ketogenic.

If I'm not in too hard of training, I tend to mix a sort of Mediterranean

diet with a ketogenic base.

That's how it seems to work for me anyway.

So you generally tend to stay off the starch and sugar most of the time.

presumably a no -no, right? Yeah, well, certainly the processed sucrose -type

products, but I tend to avoid the starchy carbs pretty much in the main.

very much a treat.

And how are things in terms of stress levels and everything like that? Stress

great, nice and calm. Obviously, that's a big driver of many diseases, so I try

and stay fairly calm.

Brilliant. Sleep good?

Absolutely brilliant, yeah. That's one of the benefits of a lot of fasting.

And when you're fasting particularly, you get a really good night's sleep.

Amazing. Interesting, in the pre -heart attack period, looking back now,

when I was stood in a bar with my friends, nothing seemed out of order.

Everybody seemed to be the same.

I think I've been lulled into this false sense of normality through the fact

that nearly everybody was suffering from this metabolic syndrome or metabolic

disease. And it became the norm.

So when you looked around, you didn't see anything abnormal.

And I think this is one of the main reasons the penny didn't drop at that

It's because society in general has normalised these abnormal conditions.

There are 24 medical royal colleges in the UK and Ireland.

Collectively, they form the membership of the Academy of Medical Royal

bringing together the views of their individual specialties to collectively

influence and shape healthcare across the four nations of the UK.

In 2018, as part of the Choosing Wisely campaign by the Medical Royal Colleges,

I published another article with the then chair of the Medical Royal

who just left actually that role, Professor Dame Sue Bailey, using the

of Tony Royal and how his case to...

give a good example to doctors of how they can introduce lifestyle changes and

be more honest with patients about prescription of drugs.

And that article got press released and it made the front page of the Daily

Express. It was covered by the Mail Online.

But on the back of that, I think because of pressure from people related to the

statin industry, because the headline in the Daily Express was ditch the pills

to beat heart disease.

I think that that put pressure on the new chair of the medical colleges,

Professor Carrie McEwan, to essentially

isolate me.

And without any discussion, I received a letter in 2018 in the summer that they

basically wanted...

me to have nothing to do with the medical colleges and the choosing way to

campaign any further, even though it was something that I instigated.

Dear Asim, I need to put on record the concern that I and others have about

recent media coverage in both the Mail Online and the Daily Express, which seem

to conflate our Choosing Wisely campaign with your own agenda.

For the avoidance of doubt, the Academy has no position on the use of statins

and does not wish to take one.

I also understand from colleagues that you intend to donate proceeds from your

latest book to the Choosing Wisely campaign.

For the reasons set out above, I am sure you can understand that this would

cause us some difficulty and I ask that no donation is made.

I do, of course, wish you well with your work.

but hope that from now on you continue it independently of the Academy or

choosing wisely.

Best wishes, Professor Carrie McEwan.

In 2023, an investigation by the BMJ revealed that Royal Colleges in the

UK have received more than £9 million in marketing payments from drug and

medical devices companies since 2015.

And I think that what probably happened is one of those royal colleges, most

likely the Royal College of Physicians, who previously made a complaint about

me, about me writing an article in the Observer about the fact that there's a

big problem around too much medicine, I think they had probably put pressure, in

my view, on the chair to basically discipline me and remove me from that

organization.

And only recently it came out through a BMJ investigation.

that the Royal College of Physicians, and even I was shocked by this, had

approximately one million pounds from Pfizer.

And this is the drug company that is responsible or behind one of the most

lucrative drugs in the history of medicine, that is Lipitor, also known as

atorvastatin.

Between 1997 and 2022,

Pfizer sold $172 billion of the statin drug Lipitor.

Controversy with me probably started many years ago.

Probably I became sort of, I broke into the mainstream.

uh around sort of 2011 initially because i wrote an article which was a front

page commentary in the observer newspaper which is part of the guardian

the uk basically as the cardiologist was saying you know why are we serving junk

food to my patients in hospitals uh and that was after i'd met with jamie oliver

who i'd written to so that's i kind of started campaigning on the issues around

obesity at that point um and not shortly uh after not long after that joe i then

um

had sort of went into a deep dive to try and understand why we had an obesity

epidemic, so what was driving that, what was the role of cholesterol in heart

disease, overprescription of statin, saturated fat, and essentially that

culminated in me publishing a piece in the British Medical Journal in 2013,

October.

basically, which was titled Saturated Fat is Not the Major Issue, and

we should be focusing on sugar. We got it wrong on saturated fat. We're over

-medicating millions of people on statins.

Cholesterol is not that bad as a risk factor for heart disease.

And that's really where I sort of broke into the mainstream. And that was, you

know, BMJ Press released it. It was front page of three British newspapers.

I was on Fox News Chicago, CNN International.

And that's really when I started my kind of activism.

to try and fight back against medical misinformation and a kind of deep

understanding that what was driving poor health for many, many people was

biased and corrupted information that was coming from two big industries, big

food and big pharma.

I think what is wrong with the food system, it has stopped being a food

Food is supposed to nourish you. Food is supposed to be healthy.

Food needs to become you. It becomes your blood, your cells, your brain.

And yet what we call food, which I call anti -food, is doing the opposite

of food should do. What food should do, it is creating disease because it is

creating disharmony and dysbiosis everywhere in the system.

A perfect example of this was shown by Dr. Kevin Hall at the NIH, where he took

20 normal volunteers.

admitted him to the Clinical Research Center at the NIH for four weeks.

For two weeks, they were fed an ultra -processed food diet, and for two weeks,

they were fed a real food diet in random order.

They got the same amount of protein, the same amount of carbohydrate, the same

amount of fat, the same amount of everything, except one was ultra

and one was not unprocessed. And it turned out that on the ultra -processed

diet, people ate 500 calories per day more and gained weight, whereas

when they were on the real food diet, they ate 500 calories less and

lost weight.

Now, ultra -processed food could be causing depression, anxiety and might

be related to early death.

That's according to a study by the British Medical Journal which found that

-produced products such as sugary breakfast cereals and microwave meals

linked to 32 damaging health.

We're still here with journalist and author Ella Whelan, alongside

Asim Malhotra. Now, Asim, you have been on this for a long time. I've known you

a long time. You've been campaigning hard to get this debated.

Talk to us about what's going on.

Well, I think let's look at it in context first. So if we think about

poor diet now.

is responsible for more disease and death globally than physical inactivity,

smoking and alcohol combined.

So it's a low -hanging fruit that needs to be addressed head on, the most

important factor, which I would also say is probably driving increased strain on

the NHS.

So within poor diet, what are the major culprits? Well, what this study has

shown, which involves...

10 million people.

It's an analysis of analyses, if you like, and it's shown that the

of ultra -processed food is linked to 32 health conditions.

The strongest bit of evidence comes from increasing death rates, types of

diabetes, and even things like mental health problems, heart disease, that's

speciality.

It's a big problem in this country because 57 % of the calories consumed by

Brits come from ultra -processed food. People don't necessarily know what ultra

-processed food is.

So in order to understand ultraprocess, first we have to define it. What are we

talking about?

My colleague and your colleague, Carlos Montero at the University of Sao Paulo,

did us all a very great service. He constructed a labeling system

called the NOVA system.

And it doesn't look at what's in the food. It looks at what's been done to

food, which is much more appropriate and much more relevant.

to its health consequences.

Nova is divided up into four classes.

The easiest way would be an example.

So let's take an apple.

So Nova Class 1 would be an apple picked off the tree.

Nova Class 2 would be apple slices, de -stemmed, de -seeded, de -skinned

possibly.

Nova Class 3 would be apple sauce, macerated, cooked.

possibly preservative added, maybe even a little bit extra sugar.

Nova Class 4 would be a McDonald's apple pie.

So the question is, does that Nova Class 4 look anything like the Nova Class

1? And the answer is, not even remotely. You can't even tell what's the apple in

a McDonald's apple pie.

That's ultra -processed food.

It begins with...

How we grow the food, and this is the beginning of industrial agriculture,

-war agriculture, which was really taking all the chemicals created to kill

people during Hitler's Germany and converting them into agrichemical

So synthetic fertilizers are the same technology, Haber -Bosch, that made the

explosives.

Pesticides are all derivatives.

of the early chemicals that killed people in concentration camps, like

or the poison gas that killed people in the war. So fertilizer and pesticides

are both war chemicals.

And when they're brought into agriculture, they are not just

diversity of this planet, but they're destroying food and contaminating

it right from the source.

And that's why we have just so much cancer.

I mean, cases in California have been fought on glyphosate as a carcinogen.

people have won those cases.

And the third is that the industries that are

pushing the poisons in food are also the big pharma. They're the same entity,

you know, buyer.

is a pharmaceutical industry, but it has also bought Monsanto and is also the

pusher of chemicals that are causing the disease.

And so they have created a perpetual motion machine of super profits.

You spread illness, you spread sickness, and then you have all the patented

drugs for expensive cures.

And that's why to go to the roots of what a healthy food system is, is not

a health imperative, it's an ecological imperative in our times.

I mean, the key thing as well at the root of all this problem, chronic

epidemic obesity, is the flawed hypothesis that lowering cholesterol

diet or drugs would curb heart disease.

Demonization of saturated fatty foods has led to this explosion of ultra

-processed, cheap, low -fat carbohydrate, refined carbohydrate

and sugar -enriched foods, as well as...

millions, millions of people taking statin drugs that are not going to give

any benefit. And they don't even know it. That's the worst part.

And you put that all together, that in itself can explain what is a root cause

behind the chronic disease pandemic.

Flawed science, exploited by powerful industries, big food, the big pharma.

The bad actors who have driven

the food system to a system that's causing sickness and ecological

begins with the players in Hitler's Germany.

At that point, it was the German cartel called IG Farben, who

were tried in Nuremberg for crimes against humanity.

But they had American partners.

So IG Farben had a partnership with Standard Oil, and the company was called

Standard Oil IG Farben.

But Bayer, And Monsanto in that time had a partnership, and they were called

MoBay. And they're back again as one.

Bayer has bought Monsanto.

So this small group of companies, largely German and American, which

created the chemicals during Hitler's time, are the ones still creating the

chemicals that go into industrial farming.

But then... They've taken control of the seed. 60 % of the commercial seed

distribution is now in their hands, the hands of 45 companies.

And they also are the pharmaceutical industry. One arm sells poison, the

arm sells cancer drugs.

And then you have the trading system.

Till the 70s, the trading system was really localized.

Everywhere there was local trade.

But the big trade had taken over the American system, the agribusiness.

And it used to be five players.

It would be Cargill, Continental.

Cargill bought Continental then. And then Conagra.

That's what they call the ABCD companies.

And they basically are the ones who don't produce anything, but they

drive the system through trade.

And the third category of these companies is the corporations that turn

into junk, the junk food industry.

But the so -called free trade of today is what is in the WTO agreements, World

Trade Organization agreements.

And the three new treaties in this are the Intellectual Property Rights

Agreement,

And Monsanto claims that we wrote it. We were the patient, the diagnostician,

and physician all in one. We defined the problem, and for them the problem was

farmers save seeds.

And they'd offered a solution. It should be illegal for farmers to save seeds.

And that's why I save seeds.

And then Cargill wrote the agriculture agreement.

There's not a word about food in that agreement.

It's about markets, subsidies, market access.

And the third is...

what I would call the junk food treaty, which is called the sanitary and

phytosanitary agreement, which deregulated all the food safety laws

sovereign countries had created, like India had created a prevention of food

adulteration. Anything that was not food added to food was considered

adulteration. And then you've got a junk food industry that only adds things

that are not food to food.

And that's where the metabolic disorders are exploding, because all kinds...

of chemicals are being put into the food that we've never tested, tried. 6 ,000

are untested chemicals, including high fructose corn syrup.

That is absolutely messing up our system.

So these were the three groups. But now, of course, since 2008, all of

this is now getting owned by the big financial giants, the Black Rocks, the

vanguards.

The state streets.

And I've written about this in my book, Oneness Versus 1%. So I would not talk

about them as bad guys. I would talk about them as the

imperative of greed.

To not know when enough is enough.

And to constantly appropriate the resources of the earth and the wealth of

people.

And basically turn it into destruction.

or the planet of people and profits, super profits for the giants.

This is an environmental insult.

This is a public health crisis.

This is because of the food.

Three months medicine.

One of the key moments that really...

made me a stronger activist in this movement was a campaign started

by the British Medical Journal in 2012 called Too Much Medicine.

And when I read the editorial, which was instigated by its then editor -in

-chief, Dr Fiona Godley, it was inspirational.

Established in 1840 and previously called the British Medical Journal, the

is one of the oldest, most highly respected medical journals in the world.

Hello, I'm Fiona Godley. I am a former editor, previously editor -in -chief of

the British Medical Journal.

When I became editor -in -chief of the British Medical Journal, the BMJ had

already run a theme issue asking the question, too much medicine, was there

much medicine? Had medicine invaded areas like death, old age, shyness,

those sort of things, where it was extending beyond its natural remit? And

I became editor... We decided that we would continue that question and take

the question mark because we began to see that it really was an issue, that

medicine was invading areas of risk, turning risk factors into diseases, so

-diabetes, pre -hypertension, pre -dementia, where just the very fact that

might be at risk of a disease was suddenly making you a target for

pharmaceutical intervention.

We see examples right across healthcare where what we're seeing is what I would

call medicalised prevention.

So taking away the treatment side of things, we've got people being given

treatments for preventive medicine.

And whereas we could be looking at the social determinants of health, housing,

education, clean air, clean water.

active travel, diet, we are instead offering people medication. And this is

happening at an enormous scale, in particular in the cardiovascular

with drugs like antihypertensives and statins, diabetes, obesity, those sort

things. And we really are medicalising and medicating the population on an

enormous scale, both adults and children.

Heart disease is still the number one killer in the Western world. It's the

number one cause of premature death in European men.

And I wanted to understand why we had not really managed to curb heart disease

when we were told, for example, in medical school, that high cholesterol

most important risk factor for heart disease and therefore the lower the

cholesterol, the better.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 1985 was awarded jointly to

Michael Brown and Joseph Goldstein.

for their discoveries concerning the regulation of cholesterol metabolism In

1996 Brown and Goldstein proposed that exploitation of recent breakthroughs may

well end coronary disease as a major public health problem early in the next

century But that didn't happen

So I started to question and try to understand what was really driving heart

disease. But in that process, I also found a huge discrepancy in one of the

prescribed drugs for cardiologists in the world, which are statin drugs,

cholesterol lowering drugs.

And there was a discrepancy between the side effect profile we were told, which

is extremely rare, maybe less than 1 % of patients getting the most common side

effect of statins, which is fatigue and muscle pain.

I was seeing that much more frequently in my own clinical experience or picking

it up with patients compared to what was published in the medical literature.

And that's where I started my journey into ultimately realizing that medical

knowledge has been captured by commercial entities.

Yeah, it's nice to be in the States, actually.

Especially Boston. It's my very first time in Boston.

and, you know, the home of Harvard, Massachusetts being the

origins of the Framingham Heart Study. So for me, there's a lot of

personal interest, actually, in Boston.

And it's a beautiful city.

It's lovely to walk around.

It has a lot of character, a lot of history.

So, yeah, really excited to be here.

Basically, you know, farm a nation. America is farm a nation. Like, it is,

is no other country on the planet in which there is so much influence from

biopharmaceutical industry as the United States. And now we have some, you know,

few years of data, you know, looking at how much, you know, money is being

spread around to physicians in order to corrupt the system. Because you cannot

have corruption, right?

in pharmaceutical corruption without corrupt doctors. They are implicit to

entire cycle.

So does anyone care about this?

I think you have people coming in for the right reasons. There's easier ways

make money than four years of med school, years of residency, years of

often after residency. There's easier ways to make money. We're actually a

magnet in the U .S. healthcare system for the best and brightest.

But as people get in, They have no other path to go down.

They're saddled with hundreds of thousands of debt.

Any doctor paying attention realizes they're part of a system where patients

not getting better.

Very excited.

Our history goes back almost 10 years when we both caused

controversy, writing articles in the BMJ suggesting that statin side effects

were underplayed and the fact they were much more common than what most people

were. or what was certainly being acknowledged in the medical journals,

saturated fat and the overprescription of statins. He wrote a separate analysis

piece on whether statins would benefit people at low risk of heart disease.

But we both cited the same reference, saying that the unacceptable side effect

figure from statins is likely to be closer to one in five people, almost

And that caused a huge backlash, specifically from...

scientists and non -scientists in particular that had essentially, his

had been built on his statin research, who thought that because of our

exaggerated claims of side effects, it would create unnecessary fear, people

would stop taking statins and people would die.

So this got a lot of press coverage, as you're probably aware, October 2013.

And leading up to March 2014,

Professor Sir Rory Collins of Oxford, considered probably the leading statin

researcher, or one of the leading statin researchers in the world, had actually

contacted the editor of the BMJ. I was made aware of this.

And he basically had asked for both our articles to be retracted because our

claims on statin side effects were not evidence -based.

And the editor of the BMJ, Fiona Godley, had quite correctly said, well, listen,

we're very happy to publish your critique.

Most people don't get the opportunity. We will publish it in our journals,

publish a full critique, and then, you know, let this debate continue.

For some reason, Professor Rory Collins didn't want to do that.

He just kept saying retract, retract, retract.

Statins controversy that the BMJ was involved in really began with news that

guideline bodies were beginning to say that more people should take statins,

that healthy people over the age of 50 with no cardiovascular risk should be

given statins to reduce their longer -term risk.

And that led to authors looking at the data and questioning this decision.

And we received an article from John Abramson and colleagues reviewing what

could of the data, what was available to them, and really coming to the

conclusion that the benefits were rather less obvious in this group of healthy

people and that there were unexplored adverse effects that needed to be

considered, which would rather change the kind of benefit -risk equation.

We published this article and it was very immediately under attack from the

trialists, the staff in trialists, namely those based in Oxford, really

the article was wrong and should be retracted and the BMJ should apologise.

I think what people need to understand about John more than anything else,

than the fact that he's an excellent, you know, he's a family physician who

been a Harvard lecturer for many years, is that he has done more.

or been involved in more drug litigation cases than any doctor

alive. So John's insights are unique, more important than anybody else's, to

understand exactly how drug industry has captured medical knowledge.

It dragged on over a few months while we were trying to get the Oxford group

to...

write publicly about their concerns, which they refused to do. And eventually

spilled out into the media because Oxford Group went to the media to say

this was a terrible thing that BMJ had done.

We also published an article by Aseem Malhotra making a similar point. And

two articles, the Abramson and Malhotra articles, became the subject of a review

that I launched, an independent review, to see whether the BMJ needs to retract

these two articles.

The BMJ got under so much pressure about these so -called errors that they

were...

almost forced to be in a position where they sent the articles for an

independent review for whether or not they should be retracted, because there

were calls for retracting.

And the review led by Iona Heath, who was our former ethics committee chair,

she was involved with the BMJ to some extent, but she has a very independent

mind. And some wonderful people on the panel, all independent, were given all

the information publicly made available, and they came to the view that we had

done enough.

in correcting the original article and that we didn't need to retract the

articles.

So in effect, myself and Abramson were on trial, and that sort of thing, if it

had gone the other way, would have been career -destroying.

But on the contrary, we then decided to push the message about statins and

specifically about informed consent and their prescription even further, and we

co -authored a couple of articles together.

There was also a request from the panel that the data for the statins trials be

made available.

And what had begun as a too -much -medicine story about over

healthy individuals turned into a campaign for open data, calling on the

trialists to make their data available, because it had been a huge surprise to

me in the process.

that these data were not available. I think, like other people, I had assumed

that the regulators had them and that the bodies like NICE and ICWIG in

had the data, but that's not the case. So we began a big campaign about trying

to get access to the data.

Harlan Krumholz, for example, at Yale, wrote a wonderful article looking at the

madness of the fact that only a few people could look at these data. He

about the Hubble telescope and how, you know, the idea that you'd have one

person looking at this and saying, none of you can look, only I can look, and

I'll tell you what's there, and how ridiculous that would be. And yet that's

way in which the whole of the medical literature works at the moment.

And it's even more serious because the drug companies own the data from their

clinical trials.

It's so serious, Joe.

When a drug company sponsors a clinical trial and they do the analyses and

they... write up a manuscript and they say what happened and they send it to a

medical journal and it gets peer -reviewed and doctors are trained that

should read and trust peer -reviewed articles that are well -conducted. And

that's how the system works.

The peer reviewers and the editors of the medical journals don't get to see

data. They have to take the word of the drug companies that they've presented

the data accurately and reasonably completely.

And you only get to see it in litigation, you know, five years later

it doesn't matter because everyone's formed their opinion. That seems insane.

It's insane. And doctors don't know this.

I mean, the whole staffing saga was very interesting and to some extent

radicalizing. I think I don't mean to misuse that word, but it alerted me to

this issue about over -medicalization linked to...

lack of transparency about the data. And that was quite a big, big shift for me

and for my colleagues on the journal.

I was called into the medical director's office of the hospital I worked in at

the time in London.

And I went there and essentially he said he was very angry.

He said he'd been speaking to the general medical council about me and

whether I knew my duties as a doctor and was essentially frothing at the mouth

saying that, you know, Do you expect our cardiac nurses to tell our heart

patients to eat butter instead of margarine? And I said, well, yes,

there is no clear evidence for it. And this has been peer reviewed. And he

calmed down a little bit.

On the back of that, one of the senior cardiologists in the hospital

essentially, I wouldn't say threatened, but he said to me

that if I continue to talk about anything negative about statin drugs in

media, that this would affect my job.

And I wasn't going to stop talking about the fact that I felt there was a lack

of transparency in their prescription.

And not long after that, I got a letter basically saying that my one -year

contract in the hospital had been cut short to six months.

I effectively lost my job.

We continued to call for the data on statins to be made available, not to us

a journal, but to researchers who would be able to scrutinize it.

And we did have promises from the trialists that those data would be made

available, in particular the data on adverse effects.

And to this day, that has not happened.

It has been estimated that the cholesterol treatment trialist

taken $700 million in funding from statin manufacturers since 1994.

The raw data from their trials has never been released.

The statin saga is still continuing. By the end of 2019, myself, a number of

eminent doctors, including medical journal editors, other cardiologists,

actually co -authored a letter to the then chair of the Science and Technology

Committee, Norman Lamb, calling for independent release of the raw data on

statins so we have a better understanding.

of the true rate of side effects from these very widely prescribed drugs.

This made headlines in the iNewspaper.

It sort of comes to the case that I was involved in, where the male on Sunday

attacked myself and Asim and Zoe Harkam by basically saying, because we were

critical of the cholesterol hypothesis and we said things about statins that

were not as effective as generally accepted or claimed.

The articles were written basically saying that we were statin deniers.

Comments such as there is a special place in hell for these people.

We were accused of being propagandists. We were accused of doing everything we

did because we wanted to make money from doing so, which is a bit of a joke on

the basis that it's the other side who make the billions and we make nothing at

all. Essentially, you are going to be obliterated if you take on this

And they tried to obliterate us. So we sued them for libel.

And the judges basically said that they, on Sunday, had committed libel and

had attacked us and defamation and blah, blah, blah. The trial is not

necessarily, the whole thing is not necessarily finished, but it probably

we felt we needed to fight back, in part to clear our names and in part also

because it's very important that we can kill people. You can't just...

attack and crucify people who are critical because sometimes they're going

gather the energy to get back at you. In this case, we did. Hurrah!

Hello!

Finally!

How are you?

Really good. Good to see you.

Thank you.

Ten years.

And we've never met.

Wow. John Abramson. I'm a medical doctor. I also have a master's in

degree.

I completed a family medicine residency and after that completed a fellowship, a

Robert Wood Johnson fellowship, in which I studied epidemiology, research,

design, and statistics, but decided rather than going into an academic

I'd rather go out and take care of people and function in the more pastoral

of a family doc in a community.

So I did that and became chair of family medicine at Leahy Clinic and began

teaching Harvard medical students in my office and had a lovely practice and

thought I would spend my entire career there.

And I started to notice that the journals were becoming increasingly

by the commercial sources, the drug companies.

Medical journals are businesses and they have to make money.

medical journals, editors and publishers work very hard to minimize the

conflicts of interest that arise because of their business model.

But a number of the ways in which medical journals make money really do

conflicts. And those include the use of drug advertising.

A lot of journals are reliant on that.

The receipt of sponsorship for educational congresses or conferences or

programs. And then reprint revenue.

And it's that third one which I think creates the most immediate and difficult

to manage conflict of interest because medical journals will publish usually a

pharmaceutical trial.

and then will be paid quite large sums for providing the pharmaceutical company

with reprints of that article.

And it's very hard for an editor to remove that conflict when they're making

editorial decision.

They know they might get a million dollars, for example, for publishing the

trial, and I don't really see how you can manage that as a conflict of

The vastly profitable commercial model underpinning the modern medical

publishing industry was established by the controversial British business

Robert Maxwell.

Maxwell recognised and exploited the appeal of scientific notoriety amongst

researchers and scientists to win their approval for hundreds of new journal

titles and their participation as unpaid peer reviewers.

With research content willingly provided by drug companies, the Maxwell model

married a free -of -charge content and peer -review process with a lucrative

subscription model to generate unheard -of profit margins for a publishing

business. Maxwell sold his empire for more than half a billion dollars in

but his fingerprints remain on one of the world's most profitable publishing

opportunities.

What changed my career was an article that was published in the New England

Journal that claimed that Vioxx was a safer anti -inflammatory drug than over

-the -counter drugs because it caused fewer GI complications.

And the article showed that there were fewer GI complications.

The article failed to report overall serious adverse events.

At the time we were dealing with this drug called Vioxx, which was a drug that

was a pain medication put out by Merck. Huge scan all the time.

They had cut their clinical trials short.

We found out later it was causing cardiovascular issues.

And this was prior to my coming on to the Senate Finance Committee.

But when we found out all the problems with Vioxx, the staff started asking,

like, well, how did this drug ever get on the market, right?

How did the FDA ever approve this? So, you know, you start going back and

looking backwards into, like, what had happened. What they found was the panel,

the FDA panel that approved Merck's Vioxx was just filled with physicians

who had ties to the pharmaceutical industry. They're like, well, this is

interesting. You know, so like what's going on?

Vioxx was not only no safer than over -the -counter anti -inflammatory drugs,

but it was far more dangerous. It was so much more dangerous that one out of 40

people who took Vioxx instead of an over -the -counter drug had a serious

adverse event, like serious enough to go to the hospital.

And the article failed to report the overall frequency of serious

complications, meaning cardiovascular deaths, strokes, and heart attacks.

But in fact, the FDA data, the FDA reports showed clearly that the data

Merck had submitted to the FDA showed that there was more than a doubling of

risk of serious cardiovascular events and that the risk of serious adverse

events rather than being lower with Vioxx was higher. And then finally that

Vioxx was no more effective as a pain reliever than the over -the -counter

drugs. So this was a drug that was a clear and present danger to people. The

drug industry have a legal responsibility to produce profit for

shareholders.

They do not have a legal requirement to give you the best treatment, although

most people would expect or hope that to be the case.

But the real scandals are these.

Regulators fail to prevent misconduct by industry.

And doctors, academic institutions, and medical journals that have a

responsibility to patients and scientific integrity collude with

financial gain.

Vioxx was the most heavily advertised drug at the time.

and the FDA knew that the New England Journal of Medicine article was wrong.

FDA didn't correct the article, and the New England Journal didn't correct its

original 2000 article until 2005, which was many months after the drug had been

pulled from the market. What most doctors and patients don't even know is

the medical regulators themselves take substantial amounts of money.

from the drug industry for example the medical regulator in the UK the MHRA

takes 86 % of its funding from pharma the FDA in the United States gets 65 %

its funding from pharma this in my view is an absolute scandal

those bodies are there to protect doctors

and patients from the excesses and manipulations of the drug industry whose

primary motive is profit, not to give you the best treatment.

There's no way they're able to do that if they continue to take money from

industries. They don't want to bite the hand that feeds them. In the meantime,

the New England Journal had sold $927 ,000 worth of

reprints back to Merck.

So they published this article.

that minimized the danger of Vioxx, maximized the purported benefits,

which weren't overall benefits.

And why might they have done that? They were making a fortune on selling

reprints back to Merck so Merck's drug reps could hand them out to doctors to

convince doctors that, according to the article in the New England Journal, they

should be prescribing Vioxx for their patients.

Doctors do tend to trust the medical literature. I think we've been

to have the evidence base, but they may have slightly misplaced trust in the

overall system.

And the biases and the distortions that come about because of the way

in which medical literature is created, I think often that won't be apparent to

most doctors.

We need to apply quite a big dose of skepticism to the medical literature.

Yeah. If we think about the awareness of doctors of research misconduct, it

rather depends which doctors you're talking about.

If you're talking about, say, GPs or clinicians who don't actually do any

research, many of them will not be aware of the extent of the problem. And, of

course, many junior doctors or most junior doctors will not be aware of the

problem.

speak to senior academics, of course, all of them know there are major

And in many cases, many of them are involved in the cover -up of the

These are not average doctors.

These are the most top -level, most, you know, prestigious,

influential physicians, like, in American medicine, right? That's who

are. You know, one of the leading physicians in the United States...

guy named Ralph Schneiderman, ran Duke Medical School, which is the number

research medical school in the United States.

What was Ralph Schneiderman doing, right?

Ralph, we know now from court documents, he was directly advising the Sacklers

on ways to increase opioid use in America and drive the opioid epidemic.

There is absolute proof that Merck knew about the cardiovascular risk.

not just when the article was published, but they knew about the cardiovascular

risk the day that the data from the Vigor trial were unblinded.

Their chief scientist is quoted in the Wall Street Journal in an email that he

wrote to his colleagues saying, I'm paraphrasing now, saying, it's a shame

cardiovascular risks are there, meaning he knew that there was an increased risk

of serious cardiovascular complications.

It's a shame the cardiovascular risks are there, but the drug will do well and

we will do well.

We will do well, meaning the executives with their stock options will benefit

from the sale of Vioxx, which on the first day of unblinding, they

understood.

doubled the risk of serious cardiovascular complications.

How do you explain this kind of behavior?

Isn't it unethical? Isn't it evil? What would you say this kind of behavior?

How can a scientist act in such a way?

It's mind -boggling. I was on the front lines of family practice. We work hard.

We read our journals. We try to practice evidence -based medicine.

And it turned out that...

One of the chief executives at Merck, the head of research at Merck, actually

knew about this danger and yet was having the drug reps come in and tell us

prescribe Vioxx, ostensibly because it was safer when it was more dangerous.

And I think that these executives are embedded in a culture that

accepts the goal of maximizing sales of drugs, and yet it's also a culture.

that's quite confident that people won't be held personally responsible.

So the head of Merck Research, who knew about the cardiovascular events, not

only was he not held responsible for his participation, his...

facilitating the harm of so many Americans.

But he ended up fine, and he went on and was promoted to a prestigious position

in another organization when he left Merck. There was no penalty.

You buy stock in a pharma company, right, and they have a fiduciary

responsibility to their investors to make money, no matter how they do it.

That's their job. Like, it's implicit within a corporation that you're going

invest in me, and I'm going to make money for you.

Their job is not to behave ethically.

Their job is to make profit, right?

I don't want to throw the baby out of the bathwater here.

Modern medicine has a very important role to play in

improving people's health, curing diseases, treating people acutely and

lives.

But what has happened is they are now out of control as an entity that is

there to make money.

And we are now, in my view, doing more harm than good.

Well, we don't know exactly how many people are killed by research fraud in

medicine. But we do know that there's an estimate that the frauds in six papers

by Don Polderman's may have resulted in as many as 800 ,000

patient deaths, excess patient deaths.

So if one research fraudster can cause that many.

excess patient deaths and we think about all the very many research fraudsters

with a significant proportion of research being fraudulent 30

percent of gynecological randomized trials containing false data we're

talking about many millions of people killed by research fraud in medical

science

Between 40 ,000 and 60 ,000 Americans died. So this is approximately equal to

the number of Americans who died in the Vietnam War, died from taking Vioxx.

And most of those people died after the New England Journal was aware and the

FDA was aware that the drug caused significantly more serious problems than

prevented.

It is possible for regulators who decide whether a drug should be made available

to use in a certain country to be really much more muscular about how they go

about this. And a really good example is Equig, which is the German regulator.

And they were deciding about whether to make Roboxetine, which is a drug used in

mental health issues.

available more widely.

And Pfizer was the drug company involved.

And they said, we need all the data. And Pfizer said, we've given you all the

data. And then they said, no, you haven't. And eventually they said, we're

going to make your drug available. Give us the data.

fessed up with all this data.

75 % of it had never been published.

And when they reviewed the published versus the unpublished data and put them

all together, a drug that had been considered effective and safe was found

ineffective and harmful.

So it's a really good case of a regulator doing what it should do. It

of effort, a lot of backlash from industry, but we get a result that

really matters to the public.

and regulators around the world need to do this work. That's their job.

Ultimately, Merck was found guilty in two different arenas.

In one arena, the federal government sued them, and Merck had to pay almost a

billion dollars in fines for under -reporting the cardiovascular risk of

Vioxx, of which they were fully aware.

And they were also found guilty in civil litigation where there were 27 ,000

plaintiffs. And that case was settled for approximately $4 .8 billion.

The CEO of Merck went on to teach at Harvard Business School as if he hadn't

just overseen.

one of the most profitable drugs in history at that time that killed 50 ,000

Americans and that it was known that it was going to be, that there were going

to be serious cardiovascular consequences.

He didn't go to jail. He went to Harvard Business School.

Pfizer lied.

Then Woody died.

I'm Professor J .S. Bamra.

I'm a consultant psychiatrist, senior NHS consultant psychiatrist.

I'm the past chair of the British Association of Physicians of Indian

and I've had various other senior roles in the NHS, such as medical director of

a mental health trust and various other positions, board positions.

My name is Kim Witzak, and my background is I'm a drug safety advocate. I also

like to call myself having a portfolio career because I do a lot of different

things. My profession is I'm in advertising and marketing.

And I also sit on the FDA's Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory

consumer representative.

But most importantly, I like to call myself the accidental advocate because I

drug safety work. I never set out to do this work, but I'm extremely passionate,

and I've been now doing it for 20 years.

My life looked very different than it does today.

I was happily married to my husband of almost 10 years, traveling the world

our professions. We both had successful careers.

And on August 6, 2003, I got a phone call that changed my trajectory of my

forever. My dad called to tell me when I was out of town on business that my

husband, Woody, of almost 10 years, was found hanging from the rafters of our

garage, dead at age 37.

So antidepressants have a valid usage for depressions. What we do know

also is that antidepressants are greatly over -prescribed, particularly in

primary care.

They have been used, sometimes very wrongly and often very wrongly, for

problems, for eating disorders.

for anxiety, for pain, and of course, you know, there is the risk in the

stages of antidepressant prescribing that patients might have increased risk

suicide.

Woody wasn't depressed. He had no history of depression or any other

illness.

He had just started his dream job with a startup company and was having trouble

sleeping, which is not uncommon for entrepreneurs.

And I think it's very important that we address those causes or the triggers by

non -pharmacological means before we decide that antidepressants are

And so he went to his doctor and after a short visit was given Zoloft, which is

an antidepressant for insomnia, and five weeks later took his own life.

Lifestyle changes should be our first port of call, both for our physical as

well as our mental health, and we don't often do that. We also know that...

Other interventions, you know, such as Pilates, yoga, you know, meditation, all

these are very important in terms of combating stress and depression.

But we don't do that enough in the NHS.

We need to know all information.

We need to know the good, the bad, the ugly.

Also, like, what would happen if we did nothing?

Right? So I don't think Woody should have ever been given an antidepressant

insomnia. For Woody, some of the other things that could have been, we could

have looked at, what are you doing, like, for exercise? What are you doing

meditation? What are you doing?

Obviously, it was anxiousness around a new job.

What are we doing? What does your food look like? What's your health like?

There's a lot of other things we should have started with.

And, again, I go back to an antidepressant, and it was used off

insomnia, and that should never have been first -line treatment.

But we didn't know. There was no conversation.

missing key information.

And I remember, you know, at these FDA advisory panel committee meetings where

we got to, as a member of the public, I got to go and get my three minutes and

tell Woody's story, but also what I wanted the FDA to know and the advisors.

And I remember saying, don't you decide what information we need and don't need.

We're not, like, we are not afraid of information.

But what we're afraid of is when we don't have the information and then we

out after the fact that you knew something.

A lot of the research is done in research studies, which, as you can

many of these are fueled by pharmaceutical companies.

So it's very hard to actually come to good facts in terms of life -limiting

effects. But we see that in clinical life. You know, I can't tell you how

might suffer these, but a significant proportion of the patients will have

significant problems with antidepressants. There were no warnings

drugs. We didn't even get a warning.

And I don't even know that he knew.

to ask that it was an antidepressant because, you know, even that in itself,

might have said, why am I getting an antidepressant? I'm not, you know, I'm

depressed. You know, there are significant areas of concern about

usage in various age groups. For instance, in children, and now we see

antidepressants are prescribed in children.

There have been cases, particularly, you know, the case of paroxetine, which is

quite famous now.

where they conceal data of patients experiencing suicidal thoughts within

of starting paroxetine. And other SSRIs, by the way, are implicated in this, not

being aware of that, and actually those patients then going out to recurrently

harm themselves and sometimes sadly die by suicide.

And in the elderly, we know that antidepressants are a significant cause

risks, and risk, as you know, then increase the...

morbidity and mortality for that particular patient.

Any fall, the risks of fall is significant. And a lot of older patients

informed about this, you know, that there is a risk of this. And many of

remember, live on their own.

So risk of fall leads to them, I've seen patients who have a fall, gone into

hospital, had a hip operation, can't go back home again.

So one of the things that we did when we got all these documents released is we

marched them out to anybody and everybody in D .C. from the members of

We hand -delivered them to the FDA officials that were actually in some of

documents, as well as the media, and really to help. Because when you

see in black and white what the companies and the FDA knew,

Didn't tell the doctors, and my husband's dead, and countless others,

kids, are dead. You have to do something. We are considered acceptable

collateral damage.

Patient began to verbalize feelings of killing other people, and then himself.

To me, this is fraud, because they know.

that they owe a duty.

They're committing a tort. They're committing an injury because they are

presenting themselves to medical professionals as an arbiter of truth and

as a neutral referee and a reliable referee of the truth.

And they know that those medical professionals are relying on journal

to treat patients.

that if they tell a lie, if they're committing fraud, that they can injure

kill people.

They know that. And so we have all the ingredients. They have a duty.

They knowingly violate that duty of care.

And so I believe they can be prosecuted, and not only can they be prosecuted for

those injuries, but they can be prosecuted on the racketeering statutes

promoting fraud.

So I'm going to do that as soon as I get in there, and I'm going to bring them

all in.

And I'm going to say, you have to come up with a plan to show us to bring the

editors and the owners in. You know, a lot of them are owned by giant companies

like Elsevier.

There's thousands of them.

To bring them in and say, you know, we're going to prosecute you under

racketeering statutes, criminal statutes, and civil statutes.

unless you come up with a plan to show us how you're going to start

publishing real science again rather than bought and paid for science, phony

science.

Most recently, there has been a lot of hype around Alzheimer's drug licanumab,

which John Abramson has studied in great detail.

And what's become quite clear is that the efficacy is extremely poor. The side

effects are... quite significant and potentially serious.

The cost is through the roof.

And this has not had any good deal of scrutiny at all from the mainstream

I think this is giving people false hope. And really, it's just another

of the fact that, I'll just say as it is, I think it reflects again very

that the business model of Big Pharma is one of fraud.

deliberate deception in order to make money.

You know, one of the really interesting things about how pharmaceutical

companies have operated the last few decades is that rather than focusing on

development of drugs that treat a disease in particular,

What they'll do is they'll find an animal model or some kind of sort of

model that identifies a biomarker that correlates with the disease.

A good example of this is Alzheimer's disease.

In Alzheimer's disease, there was a long sort of line of research saying

that people with Alzheimer's disease have a certain protein in the brain

amyloid protein.

that produces plaques in the brain.

It took a long time, but eventually people figured out how to measure the

amyloid or a correlate of the amyloid. Now, amyloid is very far removed

from the thing you care about. The thing you care about is I don't want to lose

my memory. I want to be able to do the things I normally do in life. That's

Alzheimer's robs you of.

But it's much easier to develop a drug that treats amyloid.

rather than treating the thing you care about, which is losing my memory, losing

my ability to function.

There's a new drug that was approved in June of 2023 by the FDA that supposedly

decreases the rate at which people with mild Alzheimer's disease progress

towards dementia, a drug called Lekembe.

The drug company did a study where they gave Lekembe to some people, half the

people. And they gave a placebo to half of the people.

And they measured what's called a clinical dementia rating scale.

And they found a statistically significant lower decline in

mental status in the people who were treated with Lekembe. The company that

manufactures Lekembe has brilliantly designed this study.

To have a statistically significant difference, 0 .45 is statistically

significant, but not have a clinically meaningful significance.

Now, there's another point that's really essential.

The New England Journal published this study.

They didn't include a breakdown in terms of the response by sex.

Turns out that two -thirds of the people who have Alzheimer's disease in the

United States are women.

And it turns out that study that was buried in supplemental data in the New

England Journal article that is not talked about, I've never heard it talked

about in the media, women had significantly less positive effect than

And the effect on women wasn't 0 .45 points, it was 0 .2 points, which didn't

even reach statistical significance.

The FDA did not make...

the drug manufacturer put the lack of efficacy of this drug for women in the

label.

So that two -thirds of the people who are going to be taking Lekembe happen to

be female, and the best and only study that we have shows that it's not going

be effective. Not clinically effective, but not even statistically effective.

This is very common with drug companies. So companies will develop...

that treat the biomarker that supposedly correlates with a clinical outcome

people care about, but they won't necessarily measure the effect on the

that people actually care about. And so they can get regulators to approve the

drug because it definitely reduces this correlate, but who cares about the

correlate? What we really care about is the outcome.

My conclusion is that the rules of this game haven't changed, but the ante has

gone up enormously.

So that now we're playing these games not for $2 ,000 a year drugs, but for

drugs that are going to cost the system $100 ,000 a year, and yet the game is

the same. You can manipulate how many people are in your study and what

dementia rating scale you're going to use, and you can get a...

statistically significant difference, but not a clinically meaningful

difference. And the FDA is not going to protect doctors and the public and the

insurers and Medicare from this deception about the clinical value of

In July 2024, Dr. John Abramson contacted the UK regulator, the MHRA,

to voice his concerns regarding the Canemab.

It was too late.

The MHRA had already fast -tracked the drug for approval into the U .K. market.

So when I came on the Hill in 2007, we had been dealing with, on the Senate

Finance Committee, the Senate Finance Committee oversees Medicare and

and these are the two big health care programs for the United States federal

government.

23 % of federal spending.

So, you know, it's a big chunk. It's right up there with defense, right?

are the two big programs for American spending.

And we were dealing with constant, constant, constant drug scandals. You

we had Vioxx was one that, you know, was a big one.

The thing I think is funny about drug scandals is I think people forget.

Which drug schedule is which? Like, you mix them up in your head because there's

so many of them. There's, like, another one coming, right? I mean, the latest

one now is Ozempic, you know, which is this weight loss drug.

And, you know, when it was just being all over the media and people were

Ozempic, I was just like, I know.

I know this story. Like, we're going to find out there's huge side effects. And

sure enough, you know, they've come out now in the last month, you know, but,

like, hey, they had a good run of, like, three months with all these constant

positive stories in the media, people tweeting crazy about Ozempic, and I've

lost so much weight over Zempic, and then all the side effects start coming

right?

This new set of drugs, Ozempic and Wagobe, which, by the way, are the same

It's semaglutide in two different doses.

Not two different drugs. There's a third drug called Monjaro, which is about to

come out, made by a different company, and it's a slightly different mechanism

of action.

Bottom line, they work.

They do.

16 % weight loss, median.

Yeah, that's good.

And as an endocrinologist, I've known about this for a long time.

I'm also glad they're here because they can help patients with diabetes. They

can help patients with obesity.

However, we have to then take that 16 % weight loss and balance it against

the problems.

And there are several.

There's the physiologic problem.

There's the side effects problem.

And there's the economic problem.

Physiologic problem.

Yes. there is a 16 % weight loss. What is that weight?

Turns out it's equal amounts of fat and muscle.

Now, if you're trying to lose weight, you want to lose fat. You don't want to

lose muscle.

Ask any little old lady who breaks her hip whether or not she's happy that she

has a little extra muscle or not.

Sarcopenia is one of the things that causes early demise.

So losing as much muscle as fat, is not a good thing.

Now, side effect profile.

These two drugs, hemagglutide and also the third one, terzepatide, lead to

nausea, vomiting, pancreatitis, and

now there's a warning label on Ozempic for gastroparesis.

which means stomach not moving, stomach paralyzed.

Stomach turns to stone.

And guess what? It lasts way beyond the discontinuation of the drug.

Now, do you think that that's a good idea? In fact, that's why the drugs

is because you can't eat.

Because it delays gastric emptying. It delays your stomach from being able

Move the food along.

You think that's a great way to lose weight? In fact, if you can't eat,

starvation. Well, the fat in the muscle shows that's how it works.

Is that a good idea? Are you going to starve to death?

That's not such a good idea. And not only that, but

the company...

is now touting it as a treatment for certain types of addiction because you

get people off alcohol, you can get people off opioids with Ozempic. Yes,

can. The reason is because it's suppressing the reward pathway in the

Well, when you suppress the reward pathway in the brain, you get major

depressive disorder and suicide.

And we learned this the hard way back in 2006 with a previous obesity drug

called Romanobant.

which never made it to the American market because of the suicides.

So reward is what gets you up in the morning. And if you basically

paralyze reward, you're not doing anybody any favors.

And then finally, the economic problem.

If everyone in America who qualified for Ozempic got it, That

would be $2 .1 trillion added on to the health care system, which is currently

at $4 .1 trillion. So this would be a greater than 50 % increase in health

dollars. And Medicare is going broke by the year 2026.

Now, do you really think our health care system is going to be able to survive

that?

Conversely, a 16 % weight loss for $2 .1 trillion cost.

If we just took the sugar out of the food and brought

sugar consumption down to USDA guidelines of 12 teaspoons per day

we would lose 29 % body weight and we would save $3 .0

trillion.

So, better weight loss, $5 .1 trillion difference.

Which do you think is better?

Yeah, so no one knows is very interesting because they're very

based and really had control from a nonprofit board for their history.

And there's actually been a war.

Among the governance structure of Novo Nordics where they feel like growing and

making as much money as possible, even going against the principles that they

held where obesity is a much more complicated issue than an injection,

been overtaken by just the desire to make as much money as possible where

feel like that's in the best interest of the nonprofit.

The righteousness they feel about.

being such a prominent nonprofit, has led them to be one of the top 10

spenders and advertisers in the United States of America, literally paying

Harvard doctors to say obesity is a genetic condition not tied to lifestyle,

literally buying off medical journals, being one of the top donators to U .S.

members of Congress, saying that it's racist and classist to not government

subsidize obesity shots.

We're actually really coming after anyone who suggests that obesity and the

cause of it is tied to food, not a lack of ozempic. It's against the principles

that they would have wanted. For most of their history, they really wanted to do

the right thing and help people. They wouldn't overcharge for their insulin,

they fought to make things affordable.

But I really think that many people at Novo Nordisk feel that they've lost

way.

Denmark, where the company is based.

Where are we off to?

We're off to Constitution Hill to meet my friend, Jay Naidoo,

freedom fighter, the man who...

instigated the release of Nelson Mandela from prison by organizing a strike of a

million people as a trade union leader.

And he has some, I think, interesting insights and wisdom to share with us on

this battle and this journey to take on and expose big pharma

corporate tyranny.

Any parallels?

I think there are lots of parallels.

Hey,

so what you saw in the development of modern medicine was a capture in

the first instance of the training facilities

medicine and so once you control the container that produces the

people that are implementing a medical system then you're in control of the

system and as we've seen the evolution of the system it may have started with

good intentions but what modern Western medicine has done and it has a right to

exist and it has useful value in what it delivers to us as citizens of the world

but it's gone to a point of view where it believes that it is the only way we

can heal ourselves it's the only way in which we can deliver a modern medical

system and so gradually they've they've conditioned us away from the traditional

way in which we healed ourselves if you take countries like india and and china

where oh africa as a whole they were at powerful systems of healing

and delivering human well -being, of being able to treat

many of the challenges we face at the level of medicine and health.

But it's done from a perspective of human well -being that is part of an

environmental well -being. The only large body of evidence on reversal of

disease has come from India from cardiologist Satish Gupta's work I had

and see it to believe it myself and looking at the angiograms of patients

had gone through his lifestyle program and to see actual reversal of those

blockages in the arteries and even some arteries which were completely blocked

and then opened up was extraordinary for me extraordinary to see that

the medical model

is in part perpetuated by suppression of some of this ancient

wisdom as well, you know, and also the issue, again, around, you know, what

actually is behind your health, what really determines your health.

Okay.

I want to tell you about two types of stress.

We know that chronic stress, that means that we're dealing with some ongoing

situation every day.

we don't get a break. We don't get time to restore and recover.

That's the type of stress that wears our biology out and promotes accelerated

levels of cardiovascular disease as well as really risks for any type of chronic

disease.

Basically, the diagnosis was that I had a heart sickness, which I've never heard

of. My body rejects my stunts, and my heartbeat rises to 240.

My lifestyle was irregular.

I was a drinker. So that was a problem with me.

So we're here in the Indian state of

Rajasthan on route to Mount Abu to meet cardiologist Satish Gupta.

He's done some fascinating work.

He published research in 2011 in the Indian Heart Journal, in which

he attempted, through healthy lifestyle changes,

to reverse heart disease.

And he actually managed to do that.

So I'm fascinated and excited to find out what was the secret

behind that heart disease reversal.

I'll start with one minute of meditation.

So that everything goes with vibrations, not without vibrations.

I am Dr. Satish Kumar Gupta.

I am the director of Department of Cardiology and Medicine at RMM Global

Hospital Trauma Center, Shantivan, Abu Road.

See, Mount Abu Open Heart Trial was started in February 1998.

And it was a non -randomized pilot study, open heart trial, in which we

patients who all of them were caught.

had angiogram done, and many of these patients had already intervention

done, or they had diffuse disease, not operable, or borderline disease.

Or they had chronic, all of them had chronic stable angina, and who were not

willing to undergo bypass surgery.

It was a seven -day in -house program in which patients were coming with the

spouse. If the wife was suffering, the husband has to come.

As an attendant, and if the husband is suffering, then wife has to come with

During this seven -day house program, patients were trained.

It was a program from morning till evening.

It was a whole -day program, and on the day one, patients were given

psychological analysis. As they entered the campus after some time, first thing

they were given was psychological analysis, in which they had type A

anxiety content, anger content, depression.

score and the overall lifestyle, healthy lifestyle or unhealthy lifestyle or

overall feeling well -being, like that. Those different six, seven parameters

were taken on the day one.

And then along with that, on the second day morning, we did their EEGs.

EEG was done, heart rate variability was done, and the hormones, the happy

hormones and the stress hormones.

We did their epinephrine levels, the norepinephrine levels, dopamine levels,

cortisol, ATM and 4PM samples. We did in the blood as well as we did 24 -hour

urine samples that were collected.

We did the melatonin levels in the saliva overnight. We took those and we

did the lipoprotein levels.

And along with that, we also did the...

The endorphin levels and serotonin levels were done.

And all the patients had their lipid profile, hemoglobin, blood sugar,

post -prandial levels. All these patients had come with their angiograms.

In his particular healthy living program, which really focuses on quite

Hindus, it was a high -fiber vegetarian diet. It was two 30 -minute brisk walks

a day.

And then it was 40 minutes of...

something called Raj Yoga Meditation, which involves breathing techniques, but

also it's a spiritual transformation.

And that spiritual transformation really just changes the focus of the way

people go about their lives and trying to help them think in a way which is

going to have the least negative impact on their mental well -being as well as

their physical well -being. And that, I think, is a huge component.

not just for potentially reversing heart disease, but actually for managing and

preventing many chronic diseases.

You know, all those factors, lack of sleep, smoking, alcohol, all the

addictions, you know. So they were told in detail about that, you know. And

along that, they were taught about mind. What is the mind?

Mind -body connection.

We call it mind has got four aspects, thoughts, emotions, attitudes, and

memories. That is called a team, right?

So how this negative team or positive team, from where it comes up, right?

with this, they were taught about Raja Yoga meditation.

What is the basic concept of Raja Yoga meditation?

And how to use Raja Yoga meditation to modify their personality, their

psychological behavior.

And also because it has been seen that the people have got, you know, their

habits of smoking and...

taking junk food you know and they get used to that they go to bed late and get

up late right so those how to modify those things you know with that rush

king and according to this tradition the king of the body is the mind so for

russia yoga we do need to understand our mind we need to understand our thinking

models and our cognitive process in order for us to attain awareness or or

confidence so The real type of meditation that looks for the self is

Now, when we talk about reversing heart disease related to meditation,

especially rush yoga, I'd like to be very clear that there are certain

that happens when we meditate.

So there are also changing in habits. We're much more aware of what we eat.

We're much more aware on how we breathe.

And the interoceptibility on our body increases.

Therefore, we are much more in tune with what we do.

As I said earlier, what we eat, what are our habits, what is our stress levels,

right? So by practicing rush yoga, we increase our neuroplasticity, therefore

having immense effect on our stress and our anxiety.

As we know, when we reduce our stress and anxiety, we also reduce our

inflammation in the body. Therefore, here you have the full circle completed

around how meditation can benefit the heart.

And what we think now is stress.

is that people tend to keep their stress response on as a default.

And we need to consciously bring into our life

safe environments and safety signals and telling ourselves that we're safe to

turn off the stress response.

The good news is that everything that stress does to ourselves is reversible.

So we know that mind -body practices.

lifestyle behaviors, meditation retreats, these reverse the very

that stress accelerates. These can reduce levels of inflammation.

Lots of studies show that meditation can reduce gene expression of

pro -inflammatory cytokines.

There's no pill that can reduce pro -inflammatory cytokines without bad side

effects. So just actually letting go.

relaxing, training ourselves to be present is the best medicine.

This can reduce those feisty chronic levels of inflammation.

What could be better news?

And it's pleasant, but we just don't allow ourselves to slow down. We don't

allow ourselves the time to take mind -body practices seriously.

But our body takes them very seriously. It doesn't matter what you practice. It

could be tai chi, yoga, meditation.

Some hobby yoga nidra is magical when you're lying down and you're literally

allowing yourself to be guided and let go of stress, tension, control.

These are the practices that our bodies respond to so beautifully.

So we just need to realize that these ancient practices have

been developed over thousands of years because they work.

I'm going to show you some angiograms pre and post of the Mount Abu Open Heart

Trial, right?

And in which, you know, we have done the angiograms after two years of the

study. And the first angiogram shows about 80 % block in the RCA, right,

coronary artery, right? This is here near the crux.

And the repeat angiogram in the same view, in the same view, you can see

significant regression, right?

Significant regression is observed in the same artery, right?

Similarly, this is 80 % block here. Can you see this?

80 % block here, about 78 % block as per the electronic digitometer.

And this is opened up, right? And similarly, ejection fraction here, 20%.

the repeat angiogram after one year, it becomes 50%. This again shows that how

the agiogram meditative lifestyle, this three -dimensional healthcare lifestyle

for healthy heart, happy mind, healthy body works.

And see this, another 100 % calcified block has opened up. See this?

flow is so nice.

So, the people who had less than 50 % adherence to the program, actually the

blocks had increased.

See this?

This is the baseline and this is the blocks that are increasing.

This is a pre -angiogram in which it is the RCA, cryo -corneal artery,

mid. This is 100 % calcified block. This is total cut -off cryo -corneal artery

here. You can appreciate this here, right?

Total cut -off.

Here it is seen.

Okay, let's cut off.

And this is a repeat angiogram where it is seen that the whole artery territory

has come up beautifully.

Okay, so I've had a look at the angiogram findings from Mount Abu and

surprise me at all.

I'm a professional speaker. I go around the world talking about all aspects of

health and stress management.

And one of the big comments I make is that so many people are climbing the

ladder to success.

on the wrong wall.

And I really think we've got to get on the right wall and spend more time with

our patients discussing the vital importance of lifestyle.

Lifestyle is king, but unfortunately, most of our colleagues would just prefer

to write a quick script, tell people to go on to the generic statin, ACE

inhibitor, aspirin, beta blocker, and then say, oh, by the way, lose a bit of

weight and do some exercise.

And that's the extent of the lifestyle discussion they have. I have a...

husband and wife sitting in front of me and say, look, the most important thing

I can see for your health is that you two have a good relationship.

Much more important than whether we're reducing your cholesterol to targeted

levels.

These statin trials are designed by the companies. So they pick a population

they're going to study that will...

from their point of view, optimize the benefits of the drugs. And they do their

study. They give the statins to half people and placebo to half people, and

try to create an outcome measure that will be statistically significant so

they can then get FDA approval and sell their drugs.

What these studies don't include is a lifestyle arm. It would be very simple

not very expensive to have three arms, to have a placebo group, a statin group,

And a lifestyle group.

And you could even have a fourth group, which is a statin group and a lifestyle

group. And then you'd find out how best to prevent heart disease, not how best

to sell statins. So the purpose of the way all of the statin studies have been

done so far is to sell statins, not to prevent heart disease.

Lifestyle modification, diet, exercise, medication, and meditation.

This helped me reverse my heart disease. And my heartbeat has become normal.

Irregular beads which are 44 ,000 in a day.

They are only 2 ,000 and then 1 ,000.

Right now I am very okay.

See, when I came down here, I used to walk hardly you can say 500

meters. That was the maximum.

Even less than that.

So after that course here, Dr. Shatish Mukta said you have to dance.

And I danced for 45 minutes in my life.

That changed.

And now I am regular in the morning. I go for a walk around 2 to 3 kilometers.

In the evening also I go for a walk. And daily going for the meditation in our

center at Jaipur.

Mount Abu has since completed a randomized controlled trial which

their findings. The data from this trial was shared with the US Cardiology

Association, but the study has not yet been published.

I think what's quite clear is you can't solve socially driven disease, which is

predominantly what drives disease in populations, by just giving someone a

The pharmaceutical industry want you to believe that their pills are very

effective and they come with minimum side effects.

But as we know, nothing can be further from the truth.

In his London cardiology clinic, Dr. Asim Mulhatra continues to advocate a

lifestyle medicine approach to manage, avoid or even reverse heart disease.

Keep walking.

So you all, it's a beautiful day to save lives.

to capture hearts and minds.

There was a shared decision -making process when I was talking to a theme,

is very important for a patient.

Do doctors read research papers? No, they don't. Do they understand

analysis? No, they don't.

Are they being given the information in a way that helps them to prescribe? No,

they are not.

Is the entire medical research framework just about completely, utterly useless?

Yes, it is.

So there's no way around it unless you have really stiff things.

And once you get a few people in jail, I think things will change.

If you knew, why didn't you do anything?

Why did you wait for me to do it?

The key thing is the regulator creating a system where the pharmaceutical

companies want to do the right thing.

In general, medicine is best for sick people.

I

think

we

have to keep pushing on these issues and we have to really try to...

ensure that accountability is received and the public interests are best

We have seen an over -medicalisation and over -prescription of antidepressant

drugs.

I didn't mention pets at all. I didn't mention pets, though.

It's a remarkable situation.

I love it.

But you know, in the same breath, it's an opportunity.

Because never before has so much been revealed. And what is revealed must be

then known.

I'm happy I told my story.

It's just crazy.

The one key to health and happiness is to have someone else in your life who

loves and cares for you, who you love and care for.

I was training to be an arrhythmia specialist nurse and I was doing a

in cardiology and it became my passion.

for my whole life.

And what I can say here explicitly, that these organizations have been captured.

One of the things that I remember telling my law firm is, it is not about

it's about uncovering documents, because that is the benefit of having a

lawsuit, is discovery.

See, basically, yoga means connection.

Yoga means connection, right?

Connection with what? Connection with the truth.

There are so many strategies to help us manage daily stress, and none of them

are pills.

Our minds are unable to relate to the richness of this

planet. with the capacity of living systems to grow, to heal and repair,

and to regenerate.

With a stroke of a pen, a president can root out corruption in scientific

guidelines.

Don't you want a safe environment for your children?

All you want to know is that the food that you're feeding them is not filled

with chemicals that are going to give them cancer and chronic disease.

Make America healthy again.

Hi Dr. Malhotra. I am doing great thanks to your advice at your clinic five

years ago.

I followed your recommendations regarding diet and exercise.

My carotid artery block was 65 -70 % post -operation.

After roughly a year following your advice, my block was down to 50 % and

years later it was down to 20 -30%. I am forever grateful to you.

for my good health today.