Research

We are aware of how challenging research can be. That is why there are several factors that you need to consider to make sure that your study is relevant and significant.

In Medical Insider, we aim to see an upward trend in our current medical system. The sad truth is a lot of published journals and research needs to be changed. So now, let us give you an overview of the ongoing medical research!

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Transcript

Intro
Welcome to "The Medical Insider" podcast, where we highlight real-life solutions to your health challenges, encorporate new technology and proven solutions from the past with a healthy dose of common sense while resisting the pitfalls of idiopathic classifications and economically-based medical doctrine. This is your host, Dr. Thomas Santucci. Let's get started.

Dr. Thomas
Today, we want to talk about medical research. And medical research is important because it's the basis on which we determine what is allowed in medicine. I had to write that down. It's so important because it's really the very first step where we go in, we assess a protocol and we say that it's valid, that it's safe, that it's reproducible. All those things that we like in science and that we especially like and presume in medicine. As part of my medical education, and even before that, I was told the statistics could undercover trends and deeper patterns that could enhance outcomes. I still remember my statistics class at Georgetown where we were asked to write out the definition of standard deviation on our final exam. In pen, in words. And so standard deviation basically will give us a pattern. You have these distributed points and it will tell you the relationship of the variance from the mean. That then gives you an insight that goes beyond intuition. That's what statistics are supposed to do. That's what research is supposed to do. And I think you're going to see in this podcast that we've gone a long way from there. Years later, now, we're relying on those tools to assess and in fact to prove what we deem acceptable in medicine. I pulled a number of articles and I'm going to excerpt from one, and it was interesting doing this research because most of the research that's talking about the validity of research isn't from the United States. Most of it is from Great Britain and, you know, sort of dating ourselves timeline-wise. If you wanted a really valid reporting on what was going on, then, you know, the UK was probably the place to get it. They had an international capability, they were pretty honest about what they were doing, and most importantly, they weren't overly influenced by drug companies. When we look at our research, we see a lot of tainted research because of financial interest. Now, this isn't a surprise to anybody, but I think most people fail to connect is that if a drug company is paying for a piece of research, it's going to come out of their way. And that's really what the research on the researcher is showing us. In this article, and this is from the Journal of-- not sure my glasses are helping or hurting, but Urogynecology Association International, this was 2017, in May, published online in July 2017. So you can look at this too. It says, "As much as 90% of the published medical information is flawed, according to John Lemanis, one of the true experts on the credibility of medical research and former BMJ Editor in Chief, Richard Smith has claimed that most of what is published in journals are just plain wrong or nonsense." So take a moment. So when we get patients that come in and say, you know, where's the research on that? They're assuming placebo-controlled, double-blind, major studies. Two problems with that. The placebo-controlled, double-blind, major studies are really expensive and the only ones that can afford them are probably major corporations. And in medicine, it's probably pharmaceutical companies. So on the other side is there are some parts of medicine that don't lend themselves to placebo-controlled groups. So if you're doing cancer outcomes, yeah, you can do that. This group of people live this many years with this therapy. It's pretty clean. But in other things where you're raising quality of life or changing a factor that affects a factor. Remember, one of the most important and interesting things about medicine is the interoperability of systems. So what happens when you generally increase somebody's immune capacity? What happens when you generally give them more muscle mass? What happens when you balance out hormones? What happens when neurotransmitters come in place? What happens when cellular reserves are all put in place? Well, we actually know what happens on the negative side. You eliminate any of those things and you are sick and you die early. So when we're talking about having a direct effect, half of the things in medicine do not lend themselves to the normal statistical kind of research that we would like to have. So continuing. "The poor quality of medical research is not a new criticism. However, concern has been expressed within a broad field of specialties in parallel which reports that studies are fraught with problems, including poor reproducibility." Remember, that's one of the big things about research criteria and methodology. It should be that another group can pick up on what you did and get the same results. That's not happening at all. "Published research is complex. It includes a wide range of steps and interactions of many collaborative authors. And this may contribute to problems including scientific misconduct, methodology issues, errors, and bias." So we're not talking about that. We're not talking about the fact that two people can exchange data and have a different take on it or not really be aware of the research methodology or not really handle the data correctly. As a matter of fact, I don't think that's that big of a problem. In general, the peer review process does pick up some of that. But the peer review process does not pick up is when people have massive assumptions that are wrong. So if we come in and we say that cholesterol is the cause of heart disease, which we know and have known for a long time is anything but true, you're going to get that result. You're going to go down that conventional kind of a thought process. In energetic medicine, if you say red light therapy is the basis of all of the therapies you're going to get those kinds of conclusions. You're going to get very weak conclusions. And we're not talking about that. That at least is out in front. What we're talking about is data being hidden, data being changed and research actually being vanished. You know, so shadow research is a big big problem that we're dealing with here. Sort of go on. "So most scientific research is not planned in accordance to generally accepted principles and many scientific methodologies fail but design, conduct analysis including statistical issues lack the power, multiplicity interpretation and reporting capability that they were actually set up to do." So this author comes up with five or six different things and when he's really talking about behavioral or methodology problems, he's talking about things that go beyond design and that is unpublished research and negative results. So we're going to delve into that. So unpublished or withheld research results even those withheld with the support of the professional society are not uncommon. And negative results are often not submitted or publicized. Think about that for a second. So when you say that a thing got through a rigorous research process you assume that you know what that process is and what that field looks like. When I first became aware of this there were congressional hearings on research and one of the companies had started 20 research projects. Two of them said what they wanted to say, they hid 18 of them and then hired two high-priced, you know, professors to say they did the research. You know, in fact, I'd never even seen it. Similar things happened recently when they were talking about the efficacy of organic food and they actually got a very large named Northern California university system to come out and say that they did the research that said organic food isn't any better. You just sit there and you go I'd love to see the data. And you'll never see that data. "A recent review found that only 52% of studies presented as abstract at scientific meetings had been published over nine years. Only 22% of the studies registered with clinicaltrials.gov which maintains reporting has been reported with one year of completion. This skews the body of evidence and may lead to a waste of money and effort exploring ideas already investigated by others." The point here is its financial conflicts have been found. They're saying 29% to 69% of published critical research studies. So lack of transparency. These guys are pretty optimistic. So they're kind of saying, you know, here's what we do to fix it. I'm not so optimistic. "A recent study of a random sample of 441 biomedical journal articles published during the 2000 and 2014 period showed that the majority did not mention anything about funding or conflict of interest." This is interesting to me because when I've been asked to speak at different engagements the very first thing they want to know is who's paying the bills? You know, have you ever taken money from a company? Have you ever taken money in support of a product? Have you ever advocated anything and are you advocating anything that you're about to be paid for? So just on an individual speaker basis, we know in medicine to look at conflicts of interest. When we're dealing with the thing that's supposed to be driving the entire process, we're completely mood on this. So this author goes on to say, "This is, of course, worrisome since stakeholders can operate in stealth mode and have a significant influence on the design, conduct, and analysis of biochemical studies." The early Monsanto work comes to mind in that. "It is encouraging, however, that the percentage of articles with statements about no conflict of interest decreased and the percentage with a statement increased between 2000 and 2014." So what this author is going on to say is that it's at least becoming a known fact that things are being funded by the people that would benefit from them. So bringing this closer to home are somewhat gallows humor statements about medical research. Research exists on-- so bringing us a little closer to home, our gallows humor statement is that if it has research behind it probably isn't any good, and unfortunately, vice versa. So in the last 20 years, we've seen a number of very good interventions either be discredited or defunded. And remember, if insurance doesn't pay for it, it's the same as killing it. And from the broad spectrum point of view. The first thing that I would like to highlight is neurotransmitter testing. So much of our world, when we're looking at it, we're doing at the physical, biochemical, neuro, and energetic is neurochemical. And how much of psychiatry is done, how much of psychology is done, you know, kind of holistic medicine is done with no knowledge, no information at all about neurotransmitter status, which is involved in every single one of those process. There was a lab, neuroscience, that was coming up, groundbreaking, wonderful stuff. They came out and basically published the real intervals of reporting. You know, and this is a standard problem in medicine. If you look at the accepted ranges or the norms within, like even regular blood work, that's going to be the average of the people that went to that lab. It's not normative, it's not healthy people. That's not the people that went to that lab. So in functional medicine, one of the things we've been working on again for a quarter of a century is establishing valid functional ranges. So these people did that for neurotransmitters. The state's attorney basically shut down the lab and discredited the head doctor, who was really a hero, in my opinion, and basically saying that he was threatening widows and orphans. It was spectacular. It was the exact opposite. He was furthering the profession. He was being really brave and he was telling the truth when everyone else was hiding behind 20 or 30-year-old conventions. Probably the oldest example of this is Rife technology. Royal Rife, I guess about 80 years ago, figured out, first of all, he built a telescope, a microscope that could see the same thing an electron microscope sees without killing the tissue. So really a spectacular thing which we do not have today. So then he figured out the resonance of individual tissues and figured out how to selectively kill cancer cells while improving the cell next to it. I learned about it in school. I didn't know anything about that kind of thing. Growing up in a medical family with a psychiatrist as a father and a med tech as a mother, we didn't know about alternative things and didn't think they were real, but it turns out they were very real. So this guy has this amazing technology. The head of the medical bureau at the time asked to invest in his technology. Royal said no, and they ended up putting him in jail 104 times, and the guy dies discredited and penniless. There are still some people in the alternative cancer world that are using that technology with very significant results. The fact that something like that isn't honestly investigated in this country when, you know, you have heart disease and cancer, still having a steady stream of deaths with 0% improvement over the last 50 years and trillions of dollars spent is amazing to me. You know, like, where is the common sense and actual pursuit of medical answers? On the other side, you know, we're looking at things like bioidentical hormones. And bioidentical hormones turn out to be one of those diseases of modern men thing. Turns out to be one of the things that we're experiencing. And it's unclear whether it existed before, but low testosterone in men is probably beginning to occur at about age 30 and then getting much, much worse as we get to be, you know, toward my age, toward almost 70. So when we're looking at that kind of a thing, instead of objectively going, oh, by the way, we've got something that is probably a really good intervention for most men that are beginning to either have cognitive or muscular coordination or just general vitality decline. Instead of looking at it, we lumped it all in and kind of just egregiously called it, you know, anabolic steroids and said, it's a Class-3 narcotic, and we can't really talk about it. If you go to study this, if you go to research bioidentical hormones, BHRT, so bioidentical hormone replacement therapy. If you go to look online, it's about 20 to one against it. The reality is-- this is my personal opinion is that it's one of the best things that there is out there and that it's just like Copernicus coming in and saying that the Earth is round. The medical board is not buying it. You know, the only thing that the super-specialists know is that one time one person might have gotten sick. The reality on the street is that no one has gotten sick from it and that the research actually bears it out. It's just not being allowed to surface. So that's an example where the research actually exists. But the preponderance of public opinion is so negative on it. You as an individual, you as a patient will never be offered it in conventional terms. Another thing, you know, coming from our roots is I would say that chiropractic care is in that same kind of a box. Chiropractors aren't very big on research mostly because they don't trust the medical establishment. With good reason because the medical establishment tried to stop them as a profession. Having said that, it is 50 years later and, you know, there is good research, really good research for chiropractic being the most effective thing for low back pain, probably headaches, probably cervical pain. The union that should have occurred between the physical medicine and the neurologic medicine and, you know, what I'll call internal medicine or generalized medicine never occurred because of bias and probably on both sides. I think one of the things that research could have done, should have done and needs to do is to begin to heal that kind of split. I don't think we can afford it anymore. The last thing I'll talk about is regenerative medicine. It's kind of interesting that you can take an anabolic steroid and put it in almost any tissue in the human body, legally. Anabolic steroids break down the tissue that they're putting in. They've got a ton of side effects and they're really kind of a last resort or, you know, last, you know, symptom assuaging solution. There are always applications for almost everything in medicine but as a general rule, anabolic steroids should be, you know, in a case when you don't really have a diagnosis and you don't really have any other tools in your toolkit. The reality is there are a ton of other tools. Talk about, you know, knee pain for an example. So we've gone the gambit in our lives of, you know, prolotherapy which basically was putting salt water in the joint. You know, it's a synovial joint so it's going to keep it in there and you're creating some scar tissue. And the thought I think was that you know, scar tissue was better than no tissue. So the whole purpose is to kind of recreate a meniscus in that diarthrodial joint, complex joint. So when we look at it then somebody came in with hyaluronic acid and hyaluronic acid is better than salt water. It's not as irritating and it creates some more matrix and you get a little more of a pad between the condyles and the tibial plateau. And then the next level is probably, you know, some kind of collagen or-- and there are different commercial products that do all that. Well then at a certain point the regenerative products come in and the regenerative products, you know, if you talk about the autologous products first, you know, you're talking about PRP, Plasma-Rich Protein. So taking 60mL of your own blood, spinning it down get 6mL of very pure-- and really peptide and enhancing stem cell, enhancing liquid with some matrix in it. It's not a bad thing. And then going into that tissue. And then the next level I would say are the amniotic products. So when we're talking about the amniotic products, if you talk about, you know, amniotic fluid, it's probably on the equivalent of PRP, but maybe a little bit better. So amniotic products are taken from a day zero umbilical cord or in this case, you know, amniotic sac. You know, and this is all considered medical waste. So these days zero cells probably are more virulent than the cells coming from a 50-year-old person, you know, because of senescence and because of damage in those cells. You know, so I would have that amniotic cell a little bit higher up on that level. And then the next level would probably be Wharton's Jelly. And then the last level would be or the highest level would be stem cells. There are stem cell concoctions that were available a year ago that aren't currently available because of FDA restrictions that had stem cells, Wharton's Jelly, and Exosomes in it. And really I would view that as like the highest level product. So as you look at that continuum, in terms of virulence, in terms of efficacy, they're all pretty safe. So I'm not going to, you know, put one against the other on that, but just in terms of what works better clinically, like for sure. If you had an arthritis, if you had a joint problem, even if you had an autoimmune imbalance, then the stem cells are the best. The stem cells are currently illegal. The thing that's the worst and it actually hurts you, you can get it all day long. And so this is a failure of the approval and the research process. And a lot of this is, does anyone have the funds to go justify stem cells and who would it be, and what drug company could benefit from giving a natural product? And you're going to get a bunch of null sets when you go into that. So it's not a surprise that if a person really wants to get good regenerative care, they have to go out of this country. And the amazing thing, you know, this is where the common sense thing just makes you crazy. The amazing thing is it's the doctors from the United States that are just going down to San Diego, taking a bus across, and providing the exact same service that they would have provided here. So, you know, at a certain point, we have to look at the research and say what is actually the outcome and, you know, take a step back. So not just what's your standard deviation, what's your Chi-squared, what's your research methodology, even how much data was lost or forgotten or stolen or hidden, but what's the clinical outcome and what's the safety? Because at the end of the day, these things are supposed to be protecting us, but also introducing the new technology. I'm going to read this author's conclusion. He says, "The present status of research is misleading, exaggerated or plain wrong is reminiscent of the news media." That's got to hit home. "The attitude that scientists are always right should be changed. They're most often wrong. Instead of trying to make cosmetic changes to their results, they should openly and frankly recognize the weakness of their results. Research needs to change from a butterfly behavior to a more altruistic approach so that an issue can be fully exploited in search of a breakthrough before moving on to the next flower." So the butterfly approach refers to flitting from thing to thing to thing and kind of seeing what hits. What this offer very, very positively is putting out is that the system can be fixed. I'm not a big regulatory person because I actually think most realities happen at a level beyond or aside from politics. But this is an area where truly the politics are driving everything. So when we're looking at the FDA, when we're looking at situations where clearly the way the rules are set up are driving everything, we have to realize that the FDA as an organization is like a big university with 100 little colleges in it. Some of those organizations and some of those people are just as pristine, intelligent, and really well-meaning and effective as they could be. Other groups of it, we've seen it with the Monsanto interlacing of the board of directors, and the FDA employees are in bed with the people they're supposed to be regulating. From a human point of view, a doctor's point of view, and a medicine point of view, we need to depoliticize the FDA, and we need to make medical research have the patient's outcome, not the monetary outcome of the person generating the income. That's a little bit high in the sky, given our current political and economic environment. But one of the things that I think we can all strive for is really more of a unification of people and organizations within functional medicine that can actually provide an alternative truth that can at the beginning, go up against in contrast with what's going on, and then ultimately merge in. I'm seeing little hope of that as I go to different medical conferences. I'm seeing stuff that we did in functional medicine 20 years ago and sort of being discovered by these people. And I think that's part of the process. What I think is now necessary is more of a groundswell where we say, you know, yes, there are some complications, yeah, there is some history, but there's also some common sense. And just like we did with some of the Covid research, if we accelerate this kind of thinking that says the research, manipulation, and fraud are just not acceptable in this country, we're going to get much, much better outcomes. All right, I appreciate you hanging in there. Look forward to seeing you on our next podcast.

Outro
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