"Medical F*ckery"

[00:00:00] The following podcast contains adult themes, gritty details from true crimes, and naughty language. Listener discretion is advised. There's no time now. I began five years ago in secret, working all night every night right into the dawn.

[00:00:17] A thousand experiments, a thousand failures, and then at last the great wonderful day. She's alive. Alive! Hello all you spooky nerds. Welcome back to Human Fckery, the only podcast that dumps a mixture of dark history, weird psychology, and true crime into the same syringe

[00:00:45] and then injects it into listeners' earholes for the betterment of humankind. I am your host, relapsed journalist and neurodivergent weirdo Kimberly, reporting to you as always from America's most fcked up city, New Orleans, Louisiana.

[00:01:01] Joining me as he thank God does every episode is my intrepid co-host, doctor of clinical psychology and enthusiastic teller of jacked up stories, Dr. Edward Simon. Edward, we've been away for several months. Please tell these lovely listeners how much you miss them.

[00:01:20] Not having the validation of regular listeners like Emmy in California, Chris in Oklahoma, Bobby in New Jersey, and Haley Sue here in Louisiana during break, it produced such emotional pain. I had to turn to Andrew Tate videos to learn how to stuff my soft beta male feelings.

[00:01:43] Just take all my yearning, grief and loneliness and stick it into a vice and smash it. Like a real man, an alpha for fck's sake. You signed up for his emails as well, am I correct? Truthfully, yes, I did.

[00:02:01] But it was more out of just morbid curiosity than like an actual interest in learning something as far as like content. No, no. Tell us the truth.

[00:02:13] Every day or so I get a little update from Andrew, ostensibly from the Romanian prison cell where he's currently being investigated for rape, sex trafficking, assault and tax violations like a real man.

[00:02:27] No, it is. I wonder sometimes if it's him actually writing it or if it's a friend of his or if he's somehow getting it out on a napkin or something. It's just like a sentient. He's sending a carrier pigeon.

[00:02:41] I was going to say it's like a sentient MMA dummy just like typing stuff. Chat GPT is writing Andrew's emails now. What have you learned from these emails? Mostly that Andrew, he's a really smart, really dangerous 16 year old boy.

[00:02:59] I like I would hate to be where he is and all that other stuff, but like his emails are wild. It does sometimes feel like everything he thinks says and publishes is teenager logic coming out of an adult body. It's not recommended, but fascinating nonetheless.

[00:03:19] I also I don't want to be a top G or an alpha male or at least not as defined by Internet celebrities of 2023. It honestly it looks and sounds miserable. Yeah, yeah, it does. I'm really, really happy to hear you say that.

[00:03:36] I was worried when you signed up to get Tate pilled that we'd have to have Gary the ghoul take you out back and shoot you like old yeller just sobbing and saying I'm sorry while putting you out of your rabid misery.

[00:03:48] Anyway, we are flying through this introduction today because we have a heck of an episode and some fascinating insight from two expert guest judges to get to.

[00:03:58] Usually the top of this show we do a whole hey, this is how the show works and this is how the voting works.

[00:04:03] Yada yada. But honestly at six episodes into season two, if you don't already know how the show works, that's a you problem which can easily be remedied by reading the show notes or listening to literally any episode before this one across two seasons.

[00:04:15] So let's jump right into announcing the theme of this month. OK, say the thing. The subject of today's podcast is medical fuckery.

[00:04:29] After going on three years of a public health crisis, medical gaslighting trending on Twitter over and over for months, the rise of people who believe vaccines are turning other people magnetic and better conversations about medical racism.

[00:04:46] It felt time to dig into our very long history of getting medicine and medical ethics wrong, which has in turn led to now tens of millions of people losing faith in the medical profession and science. It's true. We didn't get to this shit show.

[00:05:04] That is 2023 by doing everything right for the last century. Fair warning for listeners. This episode contains some graphic descriptions of medical experiments, chats about eugenics and the dehumanization of people. And it might not be appropriate for the very squeamish or the very young.

[00:05:25] Kimberly, who are our guests this month? Joining us today are two doctors, Dr. Lucas Troutman, a psychiatrist and addiction medicine expert out of Memphis, Tennessee, who happens to be a fourth generation doctor and whose master's in public health means he takes research and medical ethics very seriously.

[00:05:45] He's joined by Dr. Elizabeth Nicholson, another master of public health and a palpably exhausted practitioner of emergency medicine who's been slogging away in the ER saving lives during a global pandemic. Genuinely looks awful.

[00:06:02] I am the only non doctor on this entire call and feel very dumb and unaccomplished. You might be one of the most medically literate lay people anyone has possibly ever met. So don't feel bad when I go to my doctor.

[00:06:16] A lot of my sentences start with, well, Kimberly says, I'm sure your doctor loves that. That goes over great. It is worth mentioning that Gary, the ghoul kidnapped both guests about 12 hours ago and has since been torturing them by treating both with outdated 18th century medicine.

[00:06:36] They've had teeth pulled to release the demons hiding in their skulls, fed them flavorless wheat crackers to keep them from masturbating and stuck laudam suppositories up their assholes. All kinds of good stuff. They're having a blast. I just leave the laudam parts. Probably not so bad.

[00:06:54] Wow. OK, so you want to go first this month?

[00:06:57] I do. I spent the Christmas holiday reading about this story, which meant that while my family opened Christmas presents and played with my adorable nephew, I was paging through the memoirs of a man who handled no less than 10,000 scrotums during his illustrious career. Cool. It is cool.

[00:07:17] Yeah. Prove it. OK. Robert splayed both legs apart and presented his wrinkled nutsack to Leo. There was a click as the exam light flicked on.

[00:07:38] Leo put a pair of gloved hands on the elder man's groin, palpating lymph nodes where his patient's legs attached to a pale but meaty torso. He casually noted the ruddy color of the wrinkled flesh parcel before him, a fresh pink scar running down its center like a seam.

[00:07:57] Bob staring at the decades-old ceiling while he did. How was Robert's energy? Better, Robert said. How was his appetite? Much improved. Robert had even traded for extra portions recently. Robert said overall he felt positive and like there was more pep in his step.

[00:08:15] A development Leo earmarked for featuring in his next case study. The pair exchanged a bit more conversation as Robert redressed in his utilitarian uniform, sliding the worn shoes back on last.

[00:08:30] They agreed he'd return in another week, just like the week before that and the week before that one. Then he departed Leo's mostly beige clinical exam room.

[00:08:40] Only a handful of people on planet Earth knew that under the uniform, testicles carved from the body of a young, recently hanged murderer named Tom Belton had been implanted under Robert's crepey skin. Where they were, allegedly anyway, pumping rejuvenating hormones into Robert's retirement age junk.

[00:09:05] Dr. Leo Stanley was a huge fan of implanting dead people's balls into the living. Actually, that's not accurate. He was a huge fan of implanting mammal balls into the living. Goats, boar and bulls were other favorites.

[00:09:23] He believed the treatment would become the fountain of youth for modern mankind. A theory tested via thousands of unsupervised human experiments on the residents of San Quentin prison during the first half of the 1900s.

[00:09:39] Most of these experiments involved testes stolen from the fleshy coin purses of dead men. Almost none of them involved consent and some utilized outright lies. The San Quentin prison experiments, as they're now called, became a landmark example of how to not treat incarcerated people.

[00:10:01] And a reminder that Nazis aren't the only fans of a master race Americans have to worry about. We try to stress on this show that people contain multitudes. Very good and ethical people can do terrible and abusive things. Terrifyingly manipulative monsters can sometimes do kind and ethical things.

[00:10:25] Hierarchical systems often put power and prestige into the hands of utter nimrods, leaving the true geniuses living a life of unknown poverty. Because of this, I want to emphasize that Dr. Leo Stanley was both a community-minded advocate and a total fucking taint.

[00:10:43] His life story is a rollercoaster of deep love, good intentions, scientific study, overt racism, recklessly unethical conduct and toxic masculinity.

[00:10:55] It would be funnier and probably help me whoop Edward's ass in this episode if I leaned into what a caricature of the old creepy white doctor man this guy was. And he was, from his Stanford University education to his passion for fucking eugenics.

[00:11:10] But it's not the right way to tell this story. So let's start at the beginning. Leo Leonidas Stanley was born in 1886 in Buena Vista, Oregon, son of a country doctor and his stay-at-home mother wife. Around age nine, Leo and the fam relocated to California.

[00:11:32] He started Stanford University in 1903 but was flat broke by sophomore year. Forced to drop out, he began a stint as a newsboy on the Southern Pacific Railway. The experience, he would later tell interviewers, taught him to quote, merchandise and sell.

[00:11:49] A skill historians would note he later used mostly to sell himself. It's a testament to how affordable college isn't today that it only took about 14 months for young Leo to save the money needed to re-enroll in college. He graduated from Cooper Medical School in 1912.

[00:12:06] A slim young man with a long straight nose and an Ed Norton mixed with Colin Hanks kind of vibe. In 1913, ink on his diploma barely dry, Stanley saw a job opening for a chief surgeon at San Quentin Prison in San Francisco.

[00:12:24] The city-sized penal colony carved into mountainous territory. Leo had no surgical experience at the time. He applied anyway. This wasn't because he was passionate about rehabbing inmates or even general surgery.

[00:12:37] Leo had fallen madly in love with the young secretary of one of his med school teachers, a sweet brunette named Romaine. The pair were so smitten that they eloped in secret one afternoon, sneaking a check from a bank.

[00:12:51] But because Leo was penniless and unemployed, they couldn't start a public life as partners. San Quentin was offering $75 a month and providing a home to live in. Just what the couple needed. I felt San Quentin would be a good place to perhaps get some experience.

[00:13:09] I was a little bit worried about the future of the family. I was worried about the future of the family. I still had the idea in mind that I would like to become a country practitioner.

[00:13:18] This would be a fine thing for us for a few years to get really established. He wrote of the job. Despite a total lack of experience, Stanley got the gig.

[00:13:29] Being the full-time caregiver for 2,000 prison inmates, some of whom liked to fuck and or kill each other, wasn't easy. The Stanleys figured they'd spend a handful of years at San Quentin, then make for the greener pastures of Northern California or Oregon. But the move would never happen.

[00:13:46] Shortly after setting up at San Quentin, Romaine contracted tuberculosis, possibly from the prison itself. Dr. Stanley was missing. He was in a coma for a few days. He was in a coma for a few days. He was in a coma for a few days.

[00:14:02] Possibly from the prison itself. Dr. Stanley was beside himself. The condition was, at that time in history, a slow and difficult death sentence preceded by years of decline. Leo became fixated on tuberculosis, scouring medical books at night,

[00:14:20] corresponding with specialists, and observing the illness with keen interest in the dozens of inmates under his care already diagnosed. The research caused Stanley to establish the first ever standard medical entrance exam for every prisoner coming into San Quentin.

[00:14:38] And this genuinely helped the facility quell the spread of infectious disease. In short order, Leo caught 60 incoming TB patients. He pushed the prison hard to house all patients together, quarantined away from uninfected inmates.

[00:14:53] He also advocated heavily for the TB patients to receive healthier conditions than many modern inmates enjoy today, as well as better ventilation and more sunlight for all prisoners. With the permission of the board of prison directors and warden,

[00:15:09] Leo secured funding for a 4,800 square foot open air hospital ward, without depressing metal bars and with wide, sunny areas open to the blue sky above. The inmates with TB were placed in this elevated new real estate, built on the flat roofs of existing prison buildings.

[00:15:28] They were allowed to rest all day, bask in the fresh California air, and given healthier food than Gen-pop. Dr. Stanley watched how these changes slowed the progression of the disease, lessened symptoms, and improved daily functioning.

[00:15:43] Then prescribed a similar combination of relaxation, garden reading, daily sunlight, healthy food and vitamins for his ailing wife. San Quentin even assigned him an unpaid inmate as a houseboy to assist with Romaine's care. We had a little convict, a murderer, who was assigned to our place.

[00:16:03] And he became Mrs. Stanley's nurse and prepared our food. He took great care of her. Stay with us. We'll be right back. If you're listening to this show, then you'll actually love our Patreon. It's got all the best parts of the podcast.

[00:16:46] Weird stories from history's colon, underscoring and silly sound effects, dark psychology. And less of the other leftover stuff. Us, specifically. Less of us yammering. Every month, subscribers get either one or two, you get to pick, slickly produced, guest-free and banter-free episodes of Secret Story Time,

[00:17:06] our series covering wild stories and case studies ripped from the anals of human history. Subscribers also get long-form written stories, in case you're someone who still likes to read, early and ad-free access to the usual monthly human fuckery competition show,

[00:17:22] and the ability to pick what we'll write about or do new episodes on next. You can literally send us a link being like, tell this story, and we'll go, okay. It's the best way to make sure we can keep doing this show.

[00:17:33] And every subscription helps us keep Gary the Ghoul housed. It's hard to find a landlord who'll accept a demonic hellspawn with a torture fetish in this market. You can help us keep Gary housed and this show alive by heading over to www.patreon.com backslash humanfuckery.

[00:17:53] Just pick a tier, enjoy the dozens of already-released episodes of Secret Story Time, and wait till you see what we drop next month because, yeah, it's some entertaining fuckery. Leo wrote of their servant, a young man named Lim Phun. Phun was, in actuality, not a murderer.

[00:18:15] He'd been an 18-year-old Asian kid in the wrong place at the wrong time and, quote, badly represented by his attorney. Someone else even confessed to the murder eventually, and Stanley took care to document all of these details in his questionably titled book,

[00:18:30] My Most Unforgettable Convicts, where he often noted, without fully comprehending, how the judicial system punishes marginalized people disproportionately. Stanley even got Phun a full pardon from the California state governor.

[00:18:46] Another thing Stanley did for the men of San Quentin was free plastic surgery to correct birth defects or old injuries. Crooked or flattened noses, oversized ears, misaligned jaws. Plastic surgery increased the inmates' chances of attracting a job or woman, he explained.

[00:19:04] Leo reasoned that his free makeovers would help reduce, quote, criminality by making the convicts more attractive to employers and mates. And he wasn't entirely wrong. Pretty privilege is a real thing. Leo was practicing plastic surgery on them without disclosing he had no experience with it,

[00:19:27] but some of his grateful patients did report better self-esteem after having their ears pinned or noses shrunk. But you've already been warned this is a yin and yang kind of story. And so to balance out his development of programs which improved quality of life in the prison

[00:19:43] and the great devotion to his disabled wife, Leo did just... Oh, fuck me. Just so much fucked up stuff. For starters, he was a big ol' racist who stanned him some segregation. There wasn't any at San Quentin when he arrived, but with his urging

[00:20:03] and some now fully debunked science about black men's brains being different from white men's, a new segregated wing of the prison was established. And maybe we could forgive him for his ignorance if he'd stopped there, but... No, of course not.

[00:20:19] Leo was also, as I mentioned, a fucking eugenicist. One who passionately preached that criminality was genetic and could be bred out of humanity forever with careful selection of, quote, desirable traits, you know, like whiteness and being tall and also being Christian,

[00:20:39] which is not genetic, but he sure wrote about it like it was. He took this beyond simple talk with the forced sterilization of anyone at San Quentin he felt didn't have those traits, specifically bisexuals and those with developmental disorders.

[00:20:56] He writes in his other prison memoir, Men at Their Worst, about how one guy convicting for forging a five-dollar check was, quote, the perfect specimen for any proponent of euthanasia, end quote. Stanley also set up a voluntary sterilization program,

[00:21:14] coercing mostly black and brown inmates to surrender their vas deferens by claiming it would make them feel younger. This, as anyone who has had a vasectomy can tell you, is not true. But it was a great sales pitch. By 1940, Leo had snipped the balls of around 600 inmates,

[00:21:34] more than any other prison in California at the time. Sterilization, when given its chance, will do much to stamp out crime. The right to bear children will, in time, be reserved for the fit alone.

[00:21:50] He wrote in his memoir, 600 scrotes were not nearly enough for Dr. Leonidas Stanley, however. See, in the late 1890s, some male doctors struggling with their own mortality started theorizing that testicle transplants, specifically sticking the family jewels of a young guy into an old guy,

[00:22:10] would restore muscle mass, energy, and rock-hard erections. Experiments were done. Many scalpels were pulled along many tender scrotums, some human and some animal. Sigmund Freud actually had the procedure done, probably while on a half cup of pure, uncut cocaine. A passionate student of this fringe endocrine science,

[00:22:32] Stanley declared his prison the ideal place for furthering this work, because of the abundance of men all living in a controlled environment. Leo lamented openly how the young men on death row's valuable tea bags went to waste with every execution.

[00:22:48] So he started emptying those sacks into living inmates to see what would happen. He believed the therapy cured not only depression, acne, infertility, erectile dysfunction, melancholia, and fatigue, but also pedophilia. Because pedophilia is just what happens to old men when their grapes turn to raisins, according to Leo.

[00:23:10] Which is not at all how that works. But Stanley started telling major newspapers, national magazines, and peers in the medical community his was a miracle treatment. And people bought it. In 1919, the United Press dispatch called him an international figure in the surgical world

[00:23:29] through his successful operations in rejuvenating old and senile prisoners. Magazines profiled him. He was asked to write for a bunch of newspapers. Joe Rogan would have Muay Thai kicked a human baby to get Stanley on his show, had he been alive back then.

[00:23:47] Whether the recipients of his experiments genuinely felt benefits from their transplants is debatable. We know some ended up hospitalized with horrendous nut sack infections. Because jamming a goat testicle into a human ball sack isn't without complications. The pain and swelling was tremendous, serious and well documented,

[00:24:10] and temporary disabling for some. Leo's test subjects did get time off from work duties, clean food, more and very attentive medical care. Things that would make any prison inmate feel pretty good. Which may explain why some reported feeling improvements.

[00:24:28] But we also don't know whether those who reported benefits were doing so to keep their one and only advocate happy. Decades of meta-analysis and peer review have never found testicle transplants to actually increase testosterone, improve lab values, or do anyone much good.

[00:24:46] Eventually, Dr. Stanley's supply of free walnuts dried up. San Quentin hit a period where the only men on death row were shitty donors. I use that word so loosely here. Because they were too old. So Stanley took a page from his 19th century predecessors

[00:25:03] and started butchering animals instead. Sometimes the testes were sliced out of deer or pigs and sewn directly into an inmate's scrotum. Other times, he mashed those family jewels into a thick paste, mixed them with saline, and turned them into injections shoved into the abdomen.

[00:25:23] They hurt like hell, didn't work, and were sometimes misidentified to the inmate receiving them as vitamins. If you're not already squirming at the Frankencock imagery, consider the ethics of this. When not doing junk stuff, Dr. Stanley would purposely, surgically remove the thyroids of healthy inmates

[00:25:44] who got into fights to make them lethargic. The lethargy ended the violence, but this was due to catastrophic hormone and gut dysfunction caused by a lack of a thyroid. It was an irreversible procedure. Leo called the involuntary organ removal hormone therapy

[00:26:03] and encouraged other prison doctors to do the same. All of this continued until 1928 when a young black man named Clarence Kelly was hanged for the murder of three people. After his neck was snapped and body autopsied, Dr. Leo took his cojones for transplantation

[00:26:21] and handed the body over to the morgue. When Kelly's family came in to claim it, they were horrified to find their kin's genitals desecrated. Clarence's mother sued Dr. Stanley and San Quentin for mutilation of a corpse and harvesting organs without consent. Leo escaped conviction,

[00:26:40] but was no longer allowed to play mixed nuts with the inmates. Dr. Stanley retired from San Quentin in 1951, in part because World War II had changed American views on eugenics. California was no longer allowing him to sterilize inmates without their consent, which he was super butt-hurt about.

[00:27:01] The attitude of the present Department of Corrections is entirely adverse to sterilization. He pouted openly to another post-Nazi eugenicist friend around 1949. There is much, much more to the life of Dr. Stanley, all of which you can read in his own books.

[00:27:22] A prolific writer with a dream of becoming a historical fiction novelist, he ended up writing mostly about himself. Leo spent his retirement years getting paid to cruise around the world as the official physician on luxury cruises and writing essays about all of that.

[00:27:38] He died at age 90, leaving no children behind due to his vasectomy. Unfortunately, the inmates of San Quentin did not stop being guinea pigs once Dr. Stanley departed. Two UC San Francisco medical school members, Dr. Howard Maybach and Dr. William Epstein, picked up where Leo left off.

[00:28:00] They used another 2,600 San Quentinites to test pesticides on during the 1960s and 70s smearing the noxious substances on skin and sometimes administering it intravenously. Prisoners were then exposed to boxes of live mosquitoes to see if those with pesticide in their blood would be bitten less.

[00:28:24] Some men got so sick they had to be treated for poisoning at the hospital and numerous others endured chemical burns. UC San Francisco only just, as in last month, apologized for any of this. Dr. Leo Stanley never really apologized for his work

[00:28:42] because he never saw anything wrong with it. In his heart of hearts, he truly believed what the world needed was more breeding between upstanding Christians and less procreation by non-whites, the disabled, and the amoral. A utopia awaited generations of the future, he felt.

[00:29:01] If only we could all embrace keeping white men virile, brown folks sterile, and sometimes open to yanking the thyroids out of people with abuse histories. The disease model of crime, as it was called during his time of study, has since been thoroughly debunked,

[00:29:19] rendering most of Stanley's thousands of experiments as pointless as a goat gland stuffed into your grandpa's hairy old nut net. You know, prior to this story, I really didn't think we talked about ball bags enough on this show. Yeah, no, I understand why.

[00:29:39] We've hit the quota. We've gone all the way. 600 scrotes. 600 scrotes was not enough for Dr. Leo Stanley is a sentence that I have now written. I understand why. I understand why. The assumption of so much power lying inside the bag of testes is it's been a fascinating thing,

[00:30:02] a fascinating mystery that has gripped human civilization for hundreds of years now and clearly didn't relieve its hefty grip during the time of Leo Stanley's tenure at San Quentin. For fuck's sake. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. What did you think?

[00:30:17] Will you be getting anything implanted into your ball bag to help your virility? No. No. No. Thankfully, with the advent of testosterone replacement therapy and hormone replacement therapy in general, we don't have to resort from the implantation of bull nuts into our bodies. So I don't know.

[00:30:41] Maybe the mashed up nut paste could have some merit to it. But no, other than doesn't seem to. Maybe they should spread that on a wheat cracker as well. Oh, what? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, the primary listeners of the true crime demographic tend to be women.

[00:31:01] And we've got a lot of dudes that listen to our show, but largely our audience are females. And so, you know, most of you, and I do say most of you don't know what it's like to have a ball bag.

[00:31:16] But oh my God, the amount of just phantom pains that I felt in my taint throughout listening to this. This entire story. It was it wasn't a fun one. I did laugh, sure. But it was just, oh, this bastard. My God. Yeah. I mean, and so you're somebody

[00:31:36] who takes like ethics and integrity like very seriously. She does not. To get right to answering your question. No, there was no. No. Fuck no. This was beyond the pale. So when you were in school and they were teaching you

[00:31:50] about ethics, did they say like, hey, if a prisoner is executed and you're in charge of his autopsy because you're the doctor at the prison, don't mutilate his genitals without telling his family. Like at least check with his family before you take his nuts.

[00:32:12] That wasn't specifically covered. No. No, but I can say at least in today's standards, our discussions around ethics are very, very stringent. I don't think that they're routinely upheld. Yes. But for example, one of the things that really

[00:32:28] blew my mind when I was in school, you could be considered in breach of your ethical duty. Say, for example, if your doctor's office was too far away from a bus route because you have restricted access to marginalized communities or people who cannot have

[00:32:46] or can't afford cars, et cetera, et cetera. And so if we're saying, hey, this is an ethical consideration, man, you need to get an office closer to a bus route, discussing taking people's nuts off and putting them in someone else's body without

[00:33:03] no data whatsoever to say that this is a thing. I mean, maybe he was aiming to discover if this could be a thing, but I don't understand how maybe after that, how many was the total you said? 10,000 total experiments, 600 sterilizations.

[00:33:25] OK, that's fine. After like the 10th nut implant where I'd be like, yeah, this is dumb. This isn't working. He really believed that it was working in part because his, you know, the inmates were saying, hey, it works. But the problem with being an incarcerated person

[00:33:43] is that the power dynamics there, you know, like we like I mentioned in the story, it's not entirely clear whether these people actually felt better or whether they were telling Leo that they felt better because they wanted to keep him happy because he was an advocate

[00:33:59] for them, because, you know, he did things for them because he helped people get released if he liked them. So, you know, and the other thing is and I didn't put this in here, but I probably should have is that like placebo effect is a real thing.

[00:34:13] It is a desirable thing very often in medicine. Like there have been many people whose thesis statement has been look, if it's placebo effect, shut the fuck up and get out of its way. Don't tell your patient that you didn't do anything.

[00:34:30] You know, there's a famous study when people talk about placebo effect where they took people who had knee pain, put them under, said that they did knee surgery on them, didn't actually do anything. And then when they woke up, they were like, oh my God,

[00:34:45] my knee pain's gone. And this was desirable not because it was like, oh, ha ha, we tricked these people into like admitting their pain wasn't real. That wasn't it. It's the power of suggestion is so potent and has so many fewer side effects than pharmaceutical medications

[00:35:02] or surgeries do. If you can make someone believe that they are better to the point where their brain starts producing more opiate like drugs that control their pain better, calm their nervous system down, makes them feel that they've actually been handled like great.

[00:35:17] And so it's entirely possible that being an inmate stuck around thousands of other dudes, you know, getting gen pop food, being segregated from your loved ones, being disconnected from a community, all of a sudden you're being told, I want you to get better. I'm invested in your recovery.

[00:35:35] I'm going to do this special surgery on you. You wouldn't even have access to it or be able to afford it normally, you know, businessmen and people like Sigmund Freud have done it. You know, we're going to give you better food.

[00:35:46] We're going to give you you're going to be off work duty because your nuts are going to be blown up like you wouldn't believe, you know, like it's totally possible that some of these men really genuinely did feel better. But causation versus correlation, right?

[00:35:59] Like it's not necessarily the implanted bull testicle doing it. It might have just been that you were getting good community attention. You had an advocate, you got good food, you're getting sunlight, you're getting a break. And, you know, that felt nice.

[00:36:15] Yeah, I'm going to venture to say, though, though, I may be ignorant to some extent, like I'm going to venture to say that the the technology and the ability to test for free testosterone in a man's body wasn't around at the

[00:36:29] time. And so I think this doctor's ambition far exceeded the tools available to measure outcomes with any sort of just there weren't a lot of lab values. Clinical. It was all anecdotal feedback, qualitative data of somebody saying like, yeah, yeah, doc, I feel better.

[00:36:48] And it's like it seems like a very fruitless and meaningless thing to devote your life's work to. But, you know, he really felt like he was studying and forwarding the the field of endocrinology. And I understand why he he was passionate about that.

[00:37:05] Like endocrinology and hormone medicine is really important. Longevity medicine is really important. But he he was not doing a great job of doing it ethically. It's one thing to be a eugenicist and to be a doctor. But to be a eugenicist in 1913, it's another thing.

[00:37:25] And I didn't include this because there wasn't time for it. But he took a break to serve in World War Two. OK, you know, a lot of men. He was working on military bases and stuff. But like he was an active participant in World War Two

[00:37:40] for you to be a eugenicist after World War Two, after seeing the consequences, after reading about the consequences of applying eugenics to an entire group of people. Like, I can't stress enough how fucked up it is to be a eugenicist

[00:37:56] after you learn about the Nazis and what they're doing. Like it's one thing in 1910 when you're like, maybe we can breed criminality out of people. Like that sounds like a very 1910, you know, decent talking point. But after you've seen the consequences of mass application

[00:38:10] of eugenics, be like, I'm still on board with this. You're like, Leo, my dude. You could have the conversation of like, oh, Leo wasn't necessarily a proponent of something like the Holocaust. So it wasn't as bad. But then you, you learned that he was

[00:38:22] actually having discussions about like the validity of euthanizing people. Yes. To weed them out of evolution. Yeah. It just like he didn't learn anything from his time overseas in the war or what have you. If he even did fight on the front lines, I don't know.

[00:38:37] But it. He was not on the front lines. No. Yeah. He wasn't really down with the cause. I guess it was more of just an obligation. No. And he really he was like, you know, white Christianity, good brown people and people who are not Christian, bad.

[00:38:53] And that that is that man, that's not even a slippery slope. That's a cliff that you just drop off of. Like, that's just, you know what? You're doing good. Mm hmm. Yeah. You know, I mentioned the obsession that people have had.

[00:39:08] Not people. Men mostly have had with their own nutsack for hundreds of hundreds of years. Yeah. It obviously wasn't just Dr. Leo that was fascinated with his ball bag and everyone else's ball bag. You mentioned in the 1800s. You mentioned Sigmund Freud going through a procedure like this.

[00:39:24] It's not really a thousand percent clear. Yes, but it's not I'm not entirely sure whether he got the injections or whether he got the testicle implanted in his nutsack. But he was rolling. He was fascinated with nuts. He was fascinated with nuts.

[00:39:39] He dissected four hundred eels because he wanted to know where their gonads were and he wanted to be able to. So like they're not on the outside. Like when you see an eel, you can't necessarily be like, oh, look at the big dick on that eel.

[00:39:55] Like he wanted to see where their where their testicles were and he wanted to be able to. Now this is debated, but it seems like he thought if you consumed more animals testicles, it was kind of like this, you know, the liver king talks

[00:40:10] about this a lot. Sigmund Freud was the liver king of his time. Well, he was part of this testing. There's this group of people in wellness for the like the last several centuries that have said if you have a thyroid condition, just consume more thyroid from animals

[00:40:28] because you can actually get thyroid hormones by ingesting. But then that started being wildly over-referenced or applied and it was like if you have intestinal problems, eat the intestines of animals. If you have heart problems, eat the heart of animals.

[00:40:43] And then all of a sudden it became if you want to have rock hard erections and be able to, you know, plow ladies without Viagra in your 70s, just eat and consume a lot of testicles and you'll get a lot of free testosterone that way.

[00:40:57] And so he got kind of obsessed with fertility and virility and sex and started dissecting all of these eels to find their testes and he was playing with gonads and he was rolling with these dudes who were like, you know, hey, let's just like dip these goat testes

[00:41:14] in some buffalo sauce and eat them and then we'll have like real. Yeah, it was like it was like Fear Factor for a hot second fair only with no prize money and no rock hard erections because none of this science ended up being true.

[00:41:26] Worth it. Yeah. Worth it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So ethics of prisoners and not using them as testicles. Look, I am not condoning this. Yes, but I do understand what Leo was saying when he was like, this is kind of a great environment because they're all eating

[00:41:46] the same thing. They're on the same sleep schedule. We can track them. A lot of the problems with scientific research is follow up. So you can't it's really hard to get people to show up for their follow up. So you lose data.

[00:41:57] So prison actually is a really good controlled environment. But would it be safe to say that when when people have had their power and agency stripped from them as punishment, that they maybe are not great subjects for ethical medical research?

[00:42:11] It doesn't justify his decision that he had access to these men who are all living under the same roof, eating the same thing, sleeping the same way, having the same schedules, et cetera, et cetera. So he could just surreptitiously do all these studies on them

[00:42:24] so we could advance civilization. We did not advance. We went backwards from the nut studies. So you do not think that yanking the thyroids out of people who get into fights a lot so that they become more docile is a good treatment for violence?

[00:42:41] No, no. I mean, I certainly don't think that it's a good first line treatment. You know, and then you always you get into these deeper, complex social conversations where it's just like, well, don't you want to preempt them from ever doing anything worse, et cetera?

[00:42:56] I mean, if you're going to treat people, you got to try and treat people while doing the least amount of harm to them as you can. And if they go on to do harm to others, that's not on the practitioners. And like it's not it's not there.

[00:43:09] They're not accountable for not having done some extreme measure, like cut their legs off or something so they couldn't hurt somebody. It's it's that's not how things go. Right. You know, you have to progressively work with people. And obviously, when people commit egregious crimes,

[00:43:25] still in some states we have death penalties. We have discussions about chemical castration for pedophiles, et cetera. I mean, you know, it's still very much a modern day discussion as archaic as his decision seemed to be at the time. Like we're still batting these things around.

[00:43:43] Yeah, of course. And speaking of pedophiles, no, old age does not cause pedophilia. And putting a young old me, putting a young man's testicles into a pedophile will not make him less of a pedophile. I don't know why Leo thought that that was true.

[00:43:59] I don't know why he told he did tell other prison doctors this works. This cures pedophilia. And he did go on the record in a public interview to say, you know, it's not their fault that they're pedophiles. It's just what happens when your testosterone gets low.

[00:44:12] You get confused and your dick starts to get hard when you look at children. And that's just what happens. And I think the problem is that when you have low testosterone, it doesn't get hard at all. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. A lot of questions there.

[00:44:24] You think you can beat me? I'm quite positive of it. Yeah. Fuck it. You seem very confident. I have to be. Why? Because that's the name of the game. You know, competition posturing. OK, like Alpha. Oh, you're being top G. I'm very top G. Yes.

[00:44:40] Yeah. Yeah. OK, cool. This is what Andrew is teaching me from jail. I'm so, so nervous. I'm a silverback. Oh boy. And I'm about to run roughshod all over that ass. Oh God. The year is 1940. Manchuria, northeast China, is the city you call home.

[00:45:02] Things have changed here significantly since 1932. That's when the Japanese arrived. What began as a minor dispute between nations devolved into a full-blown invasion, eventually seeing Manchuria morph into what is now the Empire of Manchuria, a puppet state held by hostile occupants.

[00:45:27] It was a blatant act of aggression, largely without global consequence, one that inspired fascist dictators of Germany and Italy to move against their surrounding neighbors on the other side of the world. War tends to have far-reaching effects, but you, you're no soldier.

[00:45:47] Largely having kept your head down for years, a civilian farm worker making every effort to stay out of the crosshairs of Imperial soldiers. Yet somehow, on this most unfortunate evening, you found yourself abducted alongside your family and held captive in the back of a blackened, windowless vehicle.

[00:46:12] Given zero insight as to what your offense might have been or where you're being taken, you can feel your accelerated pulse rapidly throbbing in your ears. The muted thump is eventually blotted by the rumbling of military-grade tires, pogoing the weight of a vehicle not exactly built for comfort.

[00:46:35] Hands and feet bound, you can faintly make out the faces of loved ones and strangers alike as a hazy cast of moonlight slices through air vents in the roof. Surely this couldn't be an assault against harmless civilians.

[00:46:53] You comfort yourself with the idea that if the Japanese wanted you dead, you'd likely have been executed by now. You hear brakes whimper as the vehicle creeps to a tentative halt. The muffled voices of your captors secure some sort of authorized clearance,

[00:47:14] followed by the sound of iron gates scraping open. You're driven a short way further before the engine is finally killed. As the doors are thrown open, you expect to find the night sky overhead. However, as you emerge from the transport, only the dim glow of industrial lighting

[00:47:36] gives you some orientation of your surroundings. It appears to be an underground tunnel system leading to the intake doors... of a prison. Your head snaps reactively as you hear the first screams of families being separated.

[00:47:55] You watch your own family cry helplessly as they're taken in a different direction. You're funneled into the facility, escorted past labs and examination rooms. You steal glances around doors and through windows. But your mind... it must be deceiving you.

[00:48:14] You could have sworn to have just seen the body of a man, cut in two, pickled and floating in a large enclosure of formaldehyde. Sadly, it was no mistake. As you notice dozens, if not hundreds of jars containing fermented human remains, you're hurried into an examination room.

[00:48:38] Over the next hour, technicians will take samples of your blood and stool. They'll test your kidney function and collect any other data considered relevant. Once deemed healthy, you no longer have a name. You're then issued a three-digit number and led through a bleak corridor to a small cell.

[00:49:00] Even with bars slammed shut, you remain manacled, quickly realizing that there's no place to rest your now exhausted body, save for the hard wooden floor. Even just steps away from a squat toilet, the stench of sickness looms large throughout the hallway.

[00:49:19] Your only hope for fresh air is a small window, barely wide enough to see out of, pointed directly towards the perimeter wall. The events of the day have left your mind and body in a state of panic. You're mentally ragged.

[00:49:37] Even in an unyielding state of fight or flight, your nerves beg you for sleep. You lie down, your cheek resting against a sheen of filth on the hardwood. Your eyes grow heavy and slumber arrives. And then you hear something strange.

[00:49:57] A squeaking of wheels reverberates from down the hall. They grow closer. Your eyes finally open to the sight of a gurney being rolled past your cell. Raising your head, you notice the patient. There's hardly a movement, staring coldly towards the ceiling as it moves above him.

[00:50:19] He looks lifeless, yet he's very much alive. As the wheeled stretcher makes the corner, you're once again left in silence. And then, the muffled screams that follow. Well, they last only for a minute or so. But you think back to the fermented bodies.

[00:50:43] Something tells you that this place, wherever you are, is more than just a prison. Something tells you that that patient is already dead. Something tells you that it won't be long before every last captive inside this facility would follow thereafter. And you'd be right.

[00:51:06] All victims of one of the most horrific events of human experimentation in history. And one of the most egregious cover-ups and miscarriages of justice throughout the 20th century. This is the last place you'll ever call home. This is Unit 731. It began with the 1925 Geneva Protocol, prohibiting biological warfare.

[00:51:36] Japanese authorities, they viewed this ban as verification that these methods of assault were actually effective. Per reports, Japan's biological warfare program then started in the 1930s. The Kwantung Army, which had at the time controlled large sections of China,

[00:51:58] made their headquarters near the Pingfang District in Harbin and displaced approximately eight villages to construct their facilities. Now, a primary reason for selecting this village was the, quote, test subjects that were readily available.

[00:52:16] The building and oversight of Unit 731 was led by General Shiro Ishii, a combat medical officer of considerable reputation. Officially known as the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army,

[00:52:35] Unit 731 started out as a research unit, investigating the effects of disease and injury on the fighting ability of Japanese armed forces. But the slippery slope of war and urgency to stay steps ahead of the growing enemy

[00:52:54] eventually saw the studies of Unit 731 blow far past the bounds of medical ethics and morality by observing injuries and the course of disease on living patients. And they did so by inflicting these injuries and bouts of disease upon thousands,

[00:53:16] rivaling if not exceeding the horrors of any human experimentation perpetrated by Nazi scientists in Germany. Now at first, the patients were volunteers from the ranks of the army. But as the experiments reached the limits of what could non-invasively be observed,

[00:53:36] and as the supply of volunteers dried up, the unit turned to the study of Chinese POWs and civilian captives. Now to ease the conscience of those involved, the prisoners were referred to not as people or patients, but as maruta, or wooden logs.

[00:53:58] It began with the testing of various weapons to determine their effectiveness. Captives were held together on a firing range and executed using several different means such as pistols, bolt-action rifles, machine guns, and grenades.

[00:54:15] Wound patterns and penetration depths were then studied on the bodies of the dead and dying inmates. Knives, swords, bayonets, and flamethrowers were also observed in this manner. Additionally, gas chambers were constructed to investigate exposure to nerve gas and blister agents,

[00:54:36] and pressure chambers were used to examine just how much a person could withstand, usually resulting in their eyes exploding first. Heavy objects were dropped onto bound prisoners to examine crush injuries. Captives were also deprived of food and water to discern just how long humans could survive without them.

[00:55:00] Ones that could drink, but they were allowed only seawater. Others were given injections of mismatched human or animal blood to study transfusions and the clotting process. This was only the beginning. Prolonged X-ray exposure sterilized and killed thousands of subjects.

[00:55:22] Their bodies burned via miscalibrated plates held too close to their nipples, genitals, and faces. Studying the impact of G-forces on pilots and paratroopers, inmates of Unit 731 were routinely strapped into large centrifuges and spun at high speeds until they lost consciousness or died.

[00:55:46] Whenever prisoners died from these experiments, a clerk of the 1st Division simply struck their numbers off an index card, and the deceased's manacles were then given to new arrivals.

[00:55:59] Now, it's worth noting that academics of today, well, they actually insist that the research done was not entirely contrived by mad scientists, but intelligently designed and executed. Strangely enough, it's also been suggested that the medical discoveries of Unit 731 saved many Japanese lives.

[00:56:21] For example, it was proven that the best treatment for frostbite was not the traditional method of rubbing the limb, but rather immersing it in water between 100 and 122 degrees.

[00:56:36] Now this knowledge was acquired by leaving exposed prisoners in freezing weather and periodically drenching them with water until frostbite set in. Now they would determine the condition by striking the prisoners' frozen limbs. If it sounded like hitting a piece of wood, they were frostbitten.

[00:56:57] A pamphlet published in Japan at the time detailed having administered this same experiment on a three-day-old baby, measuring their temperature with a needle stuck inside the infant's middle finger. Usually a hand of a three-day-old infant is clenched into a fist, the booklet says,

[00:57:20] but by sticking the needle in, the middle finger could be kept straight to make the experiment easier. When a unit doctor spoke on the justification for experimenting on babies, he insisted on its acceptability as they were all likely children of spies.

[00:57:36] Researchers also published some of their results in peer-reviewed journals, writing as though the experiments had been conducted on non-human primates called Manchurian monkeys. Additionally, as sexually transmitted diseases were the bane of any army at the time, Unit 731 ardently studied the effects and transmission of syphilis.

[00:58:02] Inmates were exposed to the disease, and syphilitic male victims were ordered to rape both female and male captives, who would then be monitored. If this exposure failed to establish an infection, you were raped again until it succeeded. These rapes often resulted in forced pregnancies.

[00:58:24] This allowed the Japanese to study the impact of various traumas on both mother and child. After being infected with several diseases, exposed to chemical weapons, or suffering traumatic injuries, subjects were then opened up and the effects on the fetuses were analyzed.

[00:58:44] That said, some of the experiments had nothing to do with advancing germ warfare or medicine at all. Many studies surrounding beheadings or the reattachment of extremities to incorrect locations on the body seemed to center mostly on morbid curiosity.

[00:59:03] Inmates were often subjected to unneeded procedures so that young Japanese surgeons could practice their craft. If they managed to survive, they would simply be executed on the surgical table. Unsurprisingly, not all those involved were without compunction. One member of the unit is quoted as saying,

[00:59:25] Spiritually, we were all lost in front of the Marutas, who had no freedom and no weapons. At that time, we understood in our hearts that justice was not on our side. Nonetheless, the totality of Unit 731's research was always in support of their larger mission,

[00:59:47] which by 1939 was to develop biological weapons of mass destruction for use against the Chinese, American, and Soviet populations. To cultivate the most lethal strains of disease, doctors monitored infected patients for the rapid onset of symptoms and progression.

[01:00:08] Those symptoms who survived were shot. Those who worsened most quickly were then bled to death on a mortuary table. Subsequently, their blood was used to infect the next round of captives, repeating this process numerous times over. According to a technician of Unit 731,

[01:00:28] a line would be inserted into the carotid artery of the sickest inmates when most of their blood had been siphoned and the heart was too weak to pump. A medical officer in leather boots, quote,

[01:00:42] climbed onto the table and jumped on the victim's chest with enough force to crush the rib cage. This was to ensure that every lash drop was harvested. Doctors would examine the effects of these infections by performing vivisections without anesthesia.

[01:00:58] In layman's terms, they would cut a live patient from chest to abdomen, and they would examine their internal organs. As one doctor explained, if we'd used anesthesia, that might have affected the body organs and blood vessels that we were examining, so we couldn't have used anesthetic.

[01:01:17] When the cultivated plagues were finally bred to a sufficient lethality, the last generation of infected inmates were exposed to a large number of fleas. Infected and now carriers of the disease, the fleas were then packed into dust and sealed into clay bomb casings.

[01:01:37] These flea bombs would then be attached to balloons and dropped on neighboring Chinese villages. Nearly 10,000 civilians would die this way. Americans were to come next. The Japanese planned a biological attack known as Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night for September 22, 1945, intending to buttfuck all of San Diego.

[01:02:03] Fortuitously, their formalized surrender would come on September 2. Regardless, the death count of Unit 731 is estimated to have reached upwards of 300,000 souls, including nearly 1,000 prisoners and laborers who survived to the end of the war, yet were executed in order to suppress evidence. The building itself would be demolished.

[01:02:30] And somehow, all of this information was lost to us for 40 years. Until in 1984, a Japanese historian translated and published over 4,000 pages of US documents on Japanese biological warfare. A massive cover-up had been revealed. Despite Allied nations prosecuting Nazi officers and doctors during the Nuremberg Trials,

[01:02:58] the United States took a much different approach regarding the Japanese. A special committee feared that putting Ishii and his men on trial would reveal the results of their biological warfare experiments to the Soviets and other competing nations. In exchange for immunity for all those involved in Unit 731,

[01:03:20] the United States was gifted detailed reports on the experimental program, including a listing of 8,000 pathological slides and hundreds of color drawings. One US official is quoted as holy shit saying, Such information could not be obtained in our own laboratories because of scruples attached to human experimentation.

[01:03:46] It is hoped that the individuals who voluntarily contributed this information will be spared embarrassment because of it and that every effort will be taken to prevent this information from falling into other hands. Eat shit. This decision kept all information about the human biological warfare experiments within intelligence channels,

[01:04:12] labeled top secret, whereas war crime prosecutions would have required public disclosure. And partly because the Americans helped cover up this program in exchange for its data, General Shiro Ishii, the head of Unit 731, was allowed to live peacefully until his death from throat cancer in 1959.

[01:04:36] Hopefully from getting fucked in the face. Those around him in Unit 731 saw their careers flourish in the post-war period, rising to positions that included governor of Tokyo, president of the Japan Medical Association, and head of the Japan Olympic Committee.

[01:04:57] Japan reluctantly acknowledged the unit's existence in the late 1990s, but has since refused to discuss its activities. Instead, accounts of the unit's activities have been reconstructed via testimony from former members, photographs, and documentary evidence. One surviving doctor is recorded as casually saying,

[01:05:20] there's a possibility this could happen again because in a war you have to win. In August 2002, the Tokyo District Court ruled for the first time that Japan had actually engaged in biological warfare. Presiding Judge Koji Iwata ruled that Unit 731, on the orders of the Imperial Japanese Army,

[01:05:45] used bacteriological weapons on Chinese civilians between 1940 and 1942, spreading diseases and killing thousands. However, he rejected victims' compensation claims on the grounds that they had already been settled by international peace treaties. But in April 2018, the National Archives of Japan finally released the names of 3,607 members and murderers of Unit 731.

[01:06:21] Welcome back. So, first thoughts, responses, feelings, unfeelings? If you ever write about a needle being stuck into the finger of a three-day-old baby again, I will. Is that the end of the show?

[01:06:50] I mean, I don't know that we're done, but like, I'm going to have Gary do something really fucked up to you. We know he's good for it. I was eating too, like, because typically I'll do meal prep or chores while I listen to stories.

[01:07:07] But yeah, I was sitting down to a snack as I listened to this and that was a really poor choice. It was frightening. This is horrifying. And it's very important, I think, in both of these stories.

[01:07:21] I am both pleased and bummed that we both went towards prisoner experiments. But they are really... In terms of Unit 731, some you could say were prisoners because they were POWs, but many of them were just civilians. They were just taken.

[01:07:41] But I think it's really important to note because we both talked about prison experiments that... So in this last couple of years, we've seen a lot of stuff with anti-science, medical distrust, people saying,

[01:07:56] you know, I'm not getting a new vaccine. I'm not taking a new medicine. I'm not doing this. I don't trust these people. And those people, and they frequently get called those people or anti-vaxxers.

[01:08:08] Some people who feel that way are completely justified in feeling that way because they are the descendants of these people that we talked about. And it was largely poor people, marginalized people, people of color, people who already had less agency, who had...

[01:08:29] I mean, Tuskegee being a really good example. There were some other major prison experiments that took place during the 1900s in Ohio, in Philadelphia. There were some in Texas. So there have been many other examples of why we've gotten to a point of like, I don't trust this.

[01:08:50] I don't trust what... We fucked this up. And these stories, especially yours, are a really good example of why we have people... Like when a person says, I don't trust that. And you go, oh, you're stupid anti-vaxxer, you're ignorant.

[01:09:05] You're doing a disservice to that person as well because some people's medical trauma is deeply rooted in real personal family history and family trauma.

[01:09:15] And this is attached to that. If you are talking to somebody who is claiming that Robert Kennedy Jr. or JFK Jr. is still alive and being kept somewhere...

[01:09:25] All right, now we're like outside of the realm. But that group of anti-vaxxers that are like, you know, they're going to come... The Kennedys are still alive and they're going to come back and save us from the new world order. Like, all right, fine, let that go.

[01:09:38] It's a big conversation because for some people it's not medical trauma. For some people it's a distrust of big government. And people that are just essentially holding a grudge against government institutions regardless of what may have happened to them in the past.

[01:09:53] Because of all the various ways that they feel as though that they've been let down and kind of locked out of the American dream.

[01:10:03] And watching what they think belongs to them go to other people. So, yeah, it's easy to get pissy with the government these days no matter who's in office. Yeah, it really doesn't matter.

[01:10:13] You know, sometimes like we had a one star review like two years ago. Somebody saying that we got political on this show. And even though we talk about politics, like we're not... This is not a political show.

[01:10:28] You know, the assumption that we're part of the liberal movement or we have a... No, not at all. The amount that Joe Biden pisses me off in a given week. It's plentiful. It is plentiful.

[01:10:39] It doesn't mean that I'm not going to say this thing that Donald Trump did was absolute buffoonery. But it's not restricted to one or the other. Right, right.

[01:10:52] We just look at life, people, and we try to ride the line as best as we can so we can understand both sides. And so it is very easy even from the quote unquote middle to get pissed off at the government on a daily basis. Yeah.

[01:11:07] So much to the point where, yeah, now you're telling me I can't go places. I need to have a vaccine card to get into this concert. Eat shit. I don't want to do it.

[01:11:19] You know, like, yeah, I've got that instinct as well because I'm a fucking toddler at heart. But either way, like it doesn't always mean that we're all descendants of people that have been harmed in this various way. And I'm not trying to invalidate what you're saying.

[01:11:34] I'm simply saying it's actually easier than you think, you know, for people to kind of end up in that position where they just start pushing back and pushing back and pushing back. Well, sure. Yeah. You get taxed really hard over here when you don't make much money.

[01:11:47] And then you get your insurance claim denied over here when you're playing you when you're paying your deductible and you do everything right and you're still getting fucked.

[01:11:53] Eventually, you hit a wall where you're just like, I am now oppositionally defiant no matter how reasonable the thing being asked of me is.

[01:11:59] But the hard work as a human is being like, I'm not going to be oppositionally defiant about things that are going to protect my community. Like, it's really not that hard to do that.

[01:12:09] And as the government, you know, we're pushing back at the government or what we believe the government wants us to. There's at least another subsect of people, even those people themselves, that are still kind of buying into the idea that maybe it's not the government.

[01:12:21] Or while I'm angry at the government, I'm also going to be angry at this group of people here that I see as inferior. And that's how a lot of Unit 731 took place. That's how it came to fruition. It wasn't just, you know, people looking the other way.

[01:12:36] It was them becoming dehumanized.

[01:12:38] It was the as far as what history tells us, so as far as what accounts of this story tell us, the Japanese, they weren't carrying on these studies like, you know, some of what was happening in Germany and what was happening with the Holocaust.

[01:12:52] There wasn't an effort to purify a master race. They just saw the Chinese as inferior. That's it. They were just like, fuck these guys. Right. It wasn't like, oh, we have to weed you out of existence.

[01:13:05] But they got to a point where they were able to slaughter hundreds of thousands of them, not in a wartime scenario, right, where they're out on a battlefield shooting each other or shooting from a tank cannon or an airdrop or whatever.

[01:13:18] Like this is something that just far went beyond the Geneva Conventions and what was permissible, that they were able to do this because they just they didn't see these people as people. Well, that's that's that unfortunate tribalism thing about humans.

[01:13:33] Like, you know, we're able to roughly see about 20 to 30 people as our intimate, close tribe. We're able to hold the concept really well in our heads that about 100 people are extended tribe. And then outside of that, we're able to dehumanize anybody who we don't see.

[01:13:51] Unless you're really actively working at empathy and compassion and understanding it's a human race and doing all of this other stuff. But we're not doing a very good job of that right now.

[01:13:59] Sometimes sometimes, you know, people when I talk to them, it feels as though I'm invalidating their experience if I caution them.

[01:14:06] I caution them from, you know, referring to someone as a libtard or a tranny or a groomer or an incel or, you know, a redneck or a hillbilly or this, that or the other.

[01:14:20] You know, any kind of subsection or that we kind of relegate or reduce someone to once we put them in that box, that box is dangerous. The part of your story that was so disturbing was them misrepresenting in their research papers that it was done on apes.

[01:14:36] Yeah, because they still had an awareness that this was unacceptable. It was an admission of we know this is wrong. Like, we know this is wrong. And we're covering up like, but yeah, this your story made me nauseous. Good. It made me angry. That's the idea.

[01:14:55] It made me sad. It made me embarrassed to be a human. Like you participate. It made me think so much more than I ever needed to about what a crush injury is and how excruciating that must have been.

[01:15:10] When you imagined something being dropped, like what did you picture? Anvil. Oh, an anvil. Yeah. This goes to show you how cartoons still play an integral role in our estimations of life as we grow older. Yeah, I saw an anvil.

[01:15:25] And then I was like, oh, they probably wouldn't have had an anvil. It was probably like a concrete block or something. Or maybe it's like a heavy, you know, like an artillery box or something. But yes, my first answer was I was like anvil, wild coyote.

[01:15:36] Before we get to our guest judges who have wonderful insight, I guess my last question for you about this story is if you wandered out your house one day on a fine spring morning, eating a popsicle,

[01:15:50] you sometimes do, wearing your little earth sandals so you can get in touch with the charging energy of the ground and all that other stuff. Ionizing. And you look up at the sky and you see a giant weather balloon floating overhead.

[01:16:06] And then all of a sudden, the little package that it's carrying explodes into a red mist and descending upon you. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of plague ridden fleas. Do you just let them take you or do you run for cover? Or do you have some other response?

[01:16:27] I can tell you that I am traumatized enough and hyper vigilant enough that if I see a balloon burst and a red fog, I'm hightailing it for the fucking house. Like I'm not standing around like. OK. Yeah.

[01:16:42] OK. No, but you can't even set off like a firecracker around me without like my nervous system. I don't I don't handle surprise super well like that anymore.

[01:16:53] I think I would run. Yeah. The only unless we were close to a park, in which case I would be like, oh, a fucking idiot is doing a gender reveal that's gone sideways.

[01:17:02] Ha ha ha. But yeah, you would actually be in the minority in this case because the only American deaths during World War Two on American soil came from a Japanese balloon bomb. I did. I remember reading about it wasn't it wasn't fleas.

[01:17:20] They were this this experiment, I guess, was kind of trying it out to see if this would work before they sent over plague. They were planning with Operation Cherry Blossoms at night. They floated a balloon across the ocean and it had a bomb attached to it.

[01:17:38] And there were some Americans that were out having a picnic and they became so fascinated by the balloon that they they actually moved closer to it. And they all died. All seven of them died in a horrendous explosion. Yeah. No. OK. OK. Solid gold.

[01:17:54] Well, you ready for our judges? I sure am. Hey, Gary, could you put this suppository to I know they are delicious. No, no, no. OK, great. Well, hello, guys. Welcome to human fuckery. Welcome. How are you this morning? Good. Good. Wonderful. Excited.

[01:18:16] Pretty pretty muted for two people who have just been tortured for 12 hours. But oh, yeah. I mean, the torture, the torture. Then Gary the ghoul. He he's a rascal. He has his way with folks. So would how would you like us to call you?

[01:18:37] Dr. Nicholson, Dr. Dr. Elizabeth. Elizabeth is whatever. Whatever works for you. Fantastic. I'm not fancy. Fancy Dr. Elizabeth, will you please let people at home know what you do for a living? I am a board certified emergency physician with a master's in public health.

[01:18:55] I trained at a county facility during my training and then now work in a tertiary care center with lots of specialties and lots of doctors. And so you've had like a very relaxing last three years.

[01:19:10] Just like a really. Yeah, the pandemic, you know, Gary the ghoul was like a welcome addition to his efforts were far less painful than going to a spa. Public health trained doctor during the global pandemic where nobody listens to a fucking word you say.

[01:19:30] Just loving life. And Dr. Lucas Trautman. Why don't you tell the folks at home what you do with your professional time? Sure. Thank you, Kimberly. I'm a board certified psychiatrist and an additional master's of public health like Elizabeth from Tulane.

[01:19:46] I'm the medical director of Oxford Treatment Center, a residential treatment center for substance use and also professional care services, which is a Medicaid network of outpatient clinics in rural West Tennessee.

[01:20:01] Medical director for them, too. And then on Mondays, briefly, four hours a day, I see patients that will miss and still have some clinical action there.

[01:20:11] So mostly what I do is supervise doctors and nurse practitioners and medical staff and nurses and make sure everything's running ethically and smoothly in those roles as medical director.

[01:20:24] So in listening to today's stories, would you say that you had a visceral biological reaction to anything that you heard? Raised blood pressure, elevated heart rate, yelling out loud. Oh, yes, absolutely. Mostly because I kept thinking, how is this still happening today?

[01:20:42] Yeah, these are the same. We're the same DNA. We're the same human evolution. Evolutionarily, we're the same as the people, you know, less than 100 years ago. So how are these things still happening? Perhaps more subtly and in which ways are they happening and how can we recognize them?

[01:21:00] I love that. Elizabeth, was this a relaxing listen for you or did you have some visceral biological responses?

[01:21:08] No, no, it's not. Honestly, especially looking at it through a social justice type lens and also looking at how vulnerable the patients in these stories were and how I can easily see parity with patients that I see on a daily basis.

[01:21:33] Yeah, we're going to get into some of the things in Edward's story that were, you know, like really like, oh, hey, we we still need to talk about this now because it's super relevant.

[01:21:44] And Lucas, it's a really good point. Like it when we picked this episode, it was just like, oh, you know, it'll be kind of like it'll be a big bang, you know, like medical fuckery.

[01:21:54] And, you know, we'll talk about saw, you know, old saw bones and, you know, medicating people with cocaine for everything. And instead, we both ended up in this like deep hole of ethical fuckery.

[01:22:06] And yeah, it turns out this is much heavier than just like, oh, we used to give laudanum to women whose uteruses were flying around when they got on trains. Like, no, it didn't turn into that kind of episode.

[01:22:17] It undermines trust, you know, because we have our systems in place in our society that, you know, we want to be able to believe kind of provide that blanket of safety for us. Our government, our police force, our medical system, our school system.

[01:22:34] And every time we hear these stories where that's kind of disentangled and you see that these are just people who are equally fucked up as everybody else, it puts you on high alert. It makes you feel like there's no place is safe. You're not taken care of.

[01:22:53] You're on your own, triggering everybody. Sorry. Edward, note, just as a side note for me personally, I live in Memphis, Tennessee, and we're enveloped in the grief of the death of a young black man at the hands of five police.

[01:23:09] And so when we talk about dehumanization of systems and how are these still happening today? I still am living with the visceral reaction of seeing that video 36 hours ago. And I'm asking some of the same questions that we're probably going to be asking here today.

[01:23:23] Yeah, I only read that story and I couldn't get through it. Like, it's just mind blowing. Yeah. And we are absolutely going to get into some of the overlap of things that seem archaic when you listen to these stories, but how they're still very much happening.

[01:23:40] Now, both of you are selected as guests for the show, not just because of your just fantastic. I know both of you personally and you're both very ethical and you both take your integrity seriously, which gets my nips hard.

[01:23:54] So thank you. That's very exciting. But you both have encountered some fuckery individually. Elizabeth, could you talk to us a little bit more about what it is like to be the fuckery from the front lines?

[01:24:07] What is it like to be a person with a public health and emergency care background during a global pandemic when no one will fucking listen? Oh, God. It's you know, on my better days, on my better days, I'm able to find the energy to be empathetic.

[01:24:26] You sound so tired, Elizabeth. I'm so tired. To figure out where people are coming from and why they might be mistrustful as we're talking about all these stories.

[01:24:40] Like, I completely get especially certain subsets of the population being very, very wary of medical information, new information and doctors telling them information.

[01:24:50] And I get that. And those are the folks that I have the utmost time and energy for to discuss emerging information, what we know, what we don't know, why we're recommending what we recommend.

[01:25:03] And then there's a subset of the population that does shit because, you know, Joe Rogan told them to. And I don't really have a lot of time for that anymore. I'm out of energy for that.

[01:25:14] It's sad to me because those people also could benefit from, you know, from, you know, that kind of approach and that kind of discussion of what we know and what we don't know. But I, yeah, I'm exhausted. Compassion fatigue is real.

[01:25:30] So, no, and it's OK. And for people listening, just know that burnout and compassion fatigue are like, you know, while they're difficult to listen to people talk about sometimes, like they are very, very normal responses to like day in and day out.

[01:25:45] Having your empathy well drained, but then also being verbally abused by people and being called an idiot and being called a charlatan. And, you know, there's there's only so much there's a lot of ways to drain a cup.

[01:25:57] And some of it is just through the sheer activity of being an adult with a job. And some of it is through, you know, the degradation and abuse of people in your field. So, yeah, there's a lot to unpack there.

[01:26:12] Lucas, you have a connection to a very public medical fuckery case. Would you talk to us a little bit about that? Sure. So when I was in college and med school and residency, I attended all three of those institutions with a former doctor named Christopher Dunsch.

[01:26:31] There is a podcast on him named called Dr. Death and also a TV series starring Joshua Jackson as Christopher Dunsch. From Mighty Ducks to Dr. Death, Joshua Jackson. So tell us a little bit about what he did and how you ended up knowing him.

[01:26:53] So I was I was it was 1994, fall of 94. I was in my first semester of my sophomore year in college and my grades weren't great. Like my chemistry lab wasn't great. I was discouraged.

[01:27:04] So I went to the recruitment luncheon where the UT College of Medicine admissions dean came around and I went there and I just was looking for a little motivation. How do I get in med school? You know, it's very selective.

[01:27:20] And Chris Dunsch was there just recently back from University of Colorado football. And he was just this real big figure. He had just aced MCAT. He had gotten acceptance to med school. He was gregarious and motivating and clearly the biggest personality in the room.

[01:27:35] And so he just sort of mentored me. He was like, man, this is what you got to do, because I just got done college wrestling. And he and he was like, you got to approach it like wrestling. You got to attack it. It's a sport. 24 hours a day.

[01:27:47] You can do it, Lucas. This is not something like to think about, you know, your grades from high school truly attack this and make nothing less than an A. And he like kind of got me in good graces with the admissions dean.

[01:27:59] So it's very motivating. I'd see him occasionally from time to time. And it was that constant motivation, maximum effort. And I literally like probably didn't get a B after that. It was like, I can do this.

[01:28:10] Yeah. And so he had gone to med school before me because he was older than me. But when I got to med school, he was doing like this MD MPH thing or MD PhD thing. And so he was in my class.

[01:28:19] So I'd see Chris Dunge again. He was like, you know, one of the cool guys because he's doing like neurosurgery and PhD, you know, and he did PhD, I guess, because he's just like, I don't know. He was the high achiever. Yeah.

[01:28:34] High achiever. So, yeah, I just knew him in med school and then would see him in residency. I went away to LSU Peds. And then when I came back for U.T. psychiatry, he was neurosurgery resident and I would see him there.

[01:28:47] And, you know, just I wasn't like super good friends with him. But again, it was I was sort of a mentee of this guy. And then my wife broke her back in 2004, right before we got married into the hospital here.

[01:29:02] I mean, it was a skiing accident and it was non-surgical, but they were managing it. She had a lot of nausea from the opioids. Sure. And so they kept pushing those at night. And I was like, what the hell? It's making her vomit.

[01:29:13] She got a broken lumbar, you know, God fracture. And so I realized that Chris Dunn was the neurosurgeon on call that night. So I called him and he came to the floor and he was like, stop the opioids. Stop it, Lucas. You need anything. Here's my cell.

[01:29:29] So then like years later, obviously, there was a priest in town who contacted me and my wife and he said, hey, I got to talk to you. I thought he wanted us to start some kind of youth program.

[01:29:40] Finally, we met him at a Rafferty's and he pulls out the paper. It's like Chris Dunn is butchering all these people. I want you to go mentor this guy. He had a cervical injury during surgery named Jerry and all this.

[01:29:53] And I'm just in my mind, I could not believe this high achiever. Like I haven't listened to any of the podcasts or anything, but how did that trajectory happen is a good question. Yeah. Yes. I'm not in touch with Chris Dunn for like 20 years.

[01:30:06] I don't know him anymore, but he was a high achiever, man. I don't know how that happened. I don't know how he botched anything.

[01:30:12] Yeah. For people who haven't heard Dr. Death or aren't familiar, Christopher Dunn performed 38 spinal surgeries and botched 35 of the 38 in ways that maimed, crippled or destroyed the lives of people who did have consequences.

[01:30:30] So and the reason his story became infamous is because a whole bunch of people in the community, the medical community were like, this is a really irrational number of medical complications. The Texas Medical Board should do something about this.

[01:30:44] And they just kept kicking it down the line until three dozen people had been maimed. And it wasn't until the very, very end of that that he has since been prosecuted. And I believe he's in jail right now. He is. And he almost got out on appeal.

[01:30:58] The appeal was like three to two.

[01:31:00] So what's interesting is that when he was killed, when people were dying, when he was killing them via these botched surgeries, the UT department here of neurosurgery, when he'd go to a new hospital in a new city in Texas and they would send the department here a form that says, hey, did he graduate from there?

[01:31:17] The department here was aware that he killed people, but they just stamped the form. Yeah, literally. They asked me if I if he graduated. He did. And there's a big ethical question is why didn't you also pick up the phone? Sure. Sure. Right.

[01:31:29] Don't just stamp it. Pick up the phone and be like, right. So I answered your question. I did what you wanted. But by the way, he killed some people. Yeah. Right. Because the director is still the director here. Right. Dr. Foley is still here.

[01:31:42] And so Dr. Foley, I hear, is very defensive about this and saying that he just answered the question asked. I feel very strongly that. I was just following orders. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds a lot like Unit 731. Yes. Yeah. I was just doing what I was told.

[01:31:57] Dr. Elizabeth, I would imagine that a woman with your education and also just in the world may have encountered a few fuckwits in her profession over the years. You may not have encountered a, you know, infamous oops, I maimed 38 people.

[01:32:15] But do you have any stories of medical fuckery from your own career experience? I mean, I don't I don't even know like where to start.

[01:32:25] I will say that I value the education that I got during residency and the approach to medical ethics, especially since the population that we were caring for was already systemically marginalized and underserved.

[01:32:45] And so there was a lot about how we really needed to make sure that that that we understood that it was an honor and a gift, that we were being able to learn medicine in that context and that we we owed the population our best possible selves and our best possible medical care.

[01:33:03] And because of that, I think I came out of that program with a really sort of entrenched belief that people are trusting me and I have to be worthy of that trust from a personal standpoint.

[01:33:19] And when you encounter people who maybe didn't come out of that kind of an environment. Yeah, I mean, there are times where you have to remind people like, hey, these people are trusting you. And I get it again, like we talked about fatigue. We talked about burnout.

[01:33:36] We talked about the medical system and sort of the morally bankrupt business of medicine that exists right now. We have to, you know, we have to remind each other at times how to do our best for our patients. Are there doctors who are better than other doctors? Yeah.

[01:33:54] Just like there are electricians who are better than other electricians or any number of different things. It's I think it is challenging, like like Lucas, like you're talking about somebody just rubber stamping a form.

[01:34:07] You know, where's the line? I think in that sense, that particular case, the line was definitely below the law. There's like there's there are differences in the way people practice. There are differences and what people think are appropriate guidelines.

[01:34:23] And those can vary and still be within the range of normal. It's when they're not right. Yeah. And I have I had to make reports. Yes. Have I had to like personally talk to physicians and be like, hey, this doesn't sound like the standard of care.

[01:34:37] What's going on there? You know, and it's it's hard because you will just like in your case, you will get a lot of defensiveness because people want to believe they're doing the right thing.

[01:34:48] And I mean, all of us, not just people, me, we all want to believe we're doing the right thing. Right. Yeah. Elizabeth, is is there out of all the cases that you've reported or you felt compelled to report?

[01:35:00] Is there one example while preserving everyone's privacy that still keeps you up at night? Yeah. I mean, the hardest ones are like child abuse cases. Sure. Honestly, like when when you go to a medical provider and say, hey, I have concerns and they don't share your concerns.

[01:35:22] Yeah. And that's really challenging. I also, you know, seeing people get suboptimal medical care because of system issues at a county hospital, knowing, you know, with the right kind of interventional radiology treatment and a vascular surgeon, someone's leg could be preserved.

[01:35:42] But in county medicine, they get an amputation. God. Yeah. Yeah. Well, have either of you good doctors have been victim to medical medical fuckery of any kind like personal experiences, like in your own life, in your own health as a patient?

[01:36:00] Well, I would say that when we were when I was training in medical school in 1998, that's when I started and went on from there. It was the days of just suck it up. It was pre work week. It was Q3, Q4 call.

[01:36:15] So every third night we were also up in the hospital doing hard work. Yeah. And there's a lot of alcoholism in residency. I had a saint of a residency director and, you know, even her, you know, I went to her and I was like, I'm exhausted.

[01:36:30] I really need like a month off after my intern year. And it was I was a joke. I was like, you're a joke. Yeah. I laughed after my intern year because it was like such a such a culture of complete and total just barbarism.

[01:36:44] It was tough for me in a pediatric hospital. There's real high volume there in New Orleans is really hard. All night I was working hard and then I was around until 6 p.m. The next day, really mess with me mentally.

[01:36:55] Probably had some depression and lots of other stuff. So that was really definitely definitely the medical system. Like I have this friend named Chris Del Riego in New Orleans back in the day. He was a family medicine dude from Argentina. He was so awesome, lived on for it.

[01:37:10] But he said, Lucas, medical education knocks some people off their rocker. And I felt that line coming, you know, and and so there's a doctor. There's an oncologist now named Dr.

[01:37:22] Laura Votter, who's on Instagram, and she's really promoting in a really public way resident and med student mental health. So I look back at those days and I just think, man, that wasn't a thing back then.

[01:37:35] And I'm so glad mental health is a thing now because the way we treat our med students and doctors knocks them off their rocker and dangerous bad outcomes.

[01:37:46] You know, right? Yeah. And PTSD, honestly, like the amount of like, yes, the amount of I carry a graveyard of patients with me everywhere I go over the lifetime of my career. There are people I will never forget. Yes. And that's the secret.

[01:38:02] There was nothing that we talked about during, you know, yeah, wellness. Sure. But that wellness was usually, you know, drinking beer on the rooftop of the hospital with your co-residents after call, you know, like that.

[01:38:15] Which again, like it's like you have on memory therapy, but also not productive like group therapy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, honestly, that's when you want to talk about medical mismanagement. I completely agree with you, Lucas. Like that is the that's the thing.

[01:38:34] That's that's all of it. How did we not have our own therapists? Oh, my God. That's bad. Thank you.

[01:38:41] How how is it that so many people I know are ineligible for disability insurance or life insurance because they actually admitted that they were having a hard time during your. Right. So, yeah, the system is stacked against even your physicians to get adequate medical care.

[01:38:59] And we're for the most part, we're like even if we didn't come from higher socioeconomic status or privilege, like we end up there through the course of our training. And if we can't access it, how the fuck are our patients accessing it?

[01:39:15] Right. It's a really, really good point. One thing that you said that really resonates with me is the deaths of patients and how those impact us.

[01:39:23] And, you know, being in addiction psychiatry, there's a lot of opioid deaths and they're unexpected and they're sudden and they're people that I knew and their doctors that I treated.

[01:39:33] And I just we just get a phone call where we learn from a colleague that so-and-so died tragically and we don't get to go to the funeral, you know, because it's all confidential.

[01:39:42] And something that I've really carried with me, especially through the pandemic in these past several years, is all those just amazing patients who really got to know, you know, in these sessions sitting with them who died.

[01:39:55] And that was it for me and them. And there was just really no ceremonialization of their death. And there's just so many deaths, especially with synthetic opioids, that they haunt me.

[01:40:07] Not for a responsibility standpoint, because we have I mean, I know, Elizabeth, I can tell we have our absolute adherence to standard of care.

[01:40:17] But, you know, sometimes sometimes people die because of a lot of reasons, you know, like they didn't realize that there was fentanyl in that substance that they took when they relapsed and people are allowed to relapse.

[01:40:28] Like that's part of the disease. And and these deaths, man, these deaths are so heavy. And I imagine a lot of physicians feel this and don't talk about it.

[01:40:37] But these deaths in the absence of these people and the finality of those deaths, those are really hard for me. Yeah. And it's my mom was a critical care nurse for 30 some odd years.

[01:40:52] She still is a CCRN. She'll almost certainly die on the job because she'll never quit. But shout out to Sue. Shout out to Sue. Mom, I know you're listening. But PTSD, you know, like we didn't understand it growing up.

[01:41:05] But like, you know, having your mom mom, no offense. I know you're listening, but having your mom come home and be like, you know, she was riding trauma with an ambulance unit for a very long time after the hospital politics kind of got to her.

[01:41:19] And you'd be like, Ma, how is work today? And she'd be like, oh, we had a crispy critter. And you're like, what's a crispy critter? And she's like somebody burnt to a crisp so that their body fuses to the car that they were in.

[01:41:29] And you're like and just like the casualness, which she would be like, oh, yeah, you know, we had a crispy critter. And then we had like a cardiac arrest and then something else like you hear and see somebody put a callus on themselves emotionally.

[01:41:41] So just to survive. But then there is a consequence to that. And like you are now the child of somebody who has obvious PTSD and this callus that is there so that they can continue to function.

[01:41:53] But like, you know, like you said, you're carrying a graveyard of patients with you. And I think it's important to stress it's not just the doctors.

[01:42:00] It's it's occupational therapists and physical therapists and emotional counselors and R.D.'s and nurses that are also like this entire body of people have to carry around a tremendous amount of trauma. Which is why being trauma informed as a community is not a terrible idea.

[01:42:18] And I would argue that all of those other people, all of the people who are all part of our health care team, like we're we're at the top of the health care team. We're we have means often to be able to access care, even if we don't.

[01:42:34] Right. But we have the means to. But when your tech who gets paid, you know, maybe 14 bucks an hour is doing CPR while you're running the code, that person does not have the same means and access.

[01:42:48] Sure. Sure. With therapy running anywhere between like 80 and one hundred and eighty dollars per session, all of a sudden things are quite different. Yeah. Edward, have you ever experienced medical mismanagement or medical fuckery? You got to me first. I was going to ask you the same question.

[01:43:07] You can ask me back because we both have microphones. You've had such an illustrious career that's been kind of not like LiveJournal, like mid 2000s style, but like publicly documented. I was very public about documenting. Journey about all the different shit that you've gone through.

[01:43:23] Yeah. Well, let's get to you first. Oh, gosh. Mismanagement. The only thing that jumps out really comes to mind is probably when I had mono as innocuous as that sounds, because like, you know, teenagers get mono and it's just like, oh, you were kissing somebody and that's it.

[01:43:39] You got the kissing disease. A few weeks later, you're fine. Well, I had a horrible case of mono and my doctor was just like, yep, nothing you can do for it.

[01:43:48] That's just the way it is. You just ride this whole thing out. And I'm like, OK, that's so be it. And so I went home and just suffered for weeks and weeks and weeks in my throat had completely closed shut to where I could not get food down.

[01:44:05] I was living off of Gatorade and I had withered. Now, for reference, I am now 215 pounds. I was one hundred and thirty five pounds. Good God. And I really felt like I was about to die. And my mom basically, like, drug me back to a different doctor.

[01:44:23] And he was just like, what the fuck? He's like, here's a steroid shot. And immediately my tonsils went down and I was eating that evening. So I suffered for like an entire month, just malnourished. I ended up getting hepatitis A.

[01:44:38] I mean, like my spleen was poking out of the side of my body. Like it was it was fuckery. But, you know, I survived. It was what it was. Sadly, I can't give blood anymore. But yeah, I'm still here.

[01:44:53] That's my story. Kimberly, you've got a much more illustrious career with medical fuckery. Give us a like, I don't know, top of the greatest hits for you.

[01:45:02] Oh, boy. So for me, the two that really stand out and have kind of shaped the way I want to be honest, I'm the only non-doctor on this call. I feel like a big time underachiever.

[01:45:14] But I do work with patients now, largely as a patient advocate and coach, which sounds like a lot of bullshit. There are a lot of terrible coaches out there who are not ethical and are just grifting and trying to sell Joe Rogan supplements and all this other stuff.

[01:45:29] I am not one of those people. The two that really jumped out at me was the first is people who listen to this show regularly know I was born with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. It is a complex, multi-system genetic collagen disorder that affects the neurological system, your gut,

[01:45:50] the tissues that connect pretty much everything in your body is made out of collagen in some way. It affects your mast cells, which are these little histamine releasing cells in the body. So it's a very complicated condition, hard to diagnose.

[01:46:08] And when I started trying to get diagnosed, I was told I had bipolar disorder, put on 900 milligrams of lithium, which is not a baby dose of lithium, given a bilify and then also given an ungodly amount of Valium on top of it.

[01:46:28] So I was basically medicated by a psychopharmacologist into a crisis because if you give a person who isn't bipolar,

[01:46:36] a bunch of lithium, a whole lot of a bilify and a bunch of sedatives, they're going to start to act in ways that are perhaps like not the way they should act. So sort of like thing number one was, oh, you hysterical little female with these many symptoms.

[01:46:51] These must be emotional and you must not have a bilify. Your uterus is making you crazy when you get on trains, it flies around inside your body because women can't travel at over 45 miles an hour without their uteruses traveling through their body.

[01:47:04] That's a joke about 1800s medicine for people who aren't into medical anthropology. So that was kind of the first one of like, oh, my trust in the system is broken. It took six years to have.

[01:47:18] There was a wonderful man named Dr. Christopher Sola at Cleveland Clinic while I was inpatient there who came and did my psych assessment while I was inpatient and said, you categorically are not bipolar. Like, I don't understand what's happening here.

[01:47:35] We have to get you off of these meds. Yeah, that's not what's happening here. Like there is you're not in organ failure because you're bipolar. You're in organ failure because something else is going on. We got to get this handled.

[01:47:46] But the big one helpful were all those medications with your organ failure. Really helpful in going into organ failure for sure. Really helpful in speeding up the process of organ dysfunction. Not helpful in organizing anything else in my body.

[01:48:02] But the other one that really jumped out is there was a doctor here, a urogynecologist. His name is Ahmed Bedestani. And I don't mind talking about this publicly because I've already lodged a complaint against him with the Louisiana Medical Board. His bedside manner was terrible.

[01:48:21] At the time that I went into organ failure, I couldn't pee like I couldn't get my bladder to open up. And so I had to constantly be catheterized or have Foley's put in. And I kept getting infections and it was like a whole thing.

[01:48:35] We could not get my pelvic floor to coordinate to open so I could urinate. It was really horrifying. And Bedestani was like the solution to this is bladder installations, which is where they stick a catheter up your urethra.

[01:48:48] And then dump a installation of like baking soda and proprietary substances into your bladder. So you go to the doctor's office, they charge you, they put this solution in your bladder and it's supposed to heal some of the issues with your bladder.

[01:49:07] And I did this with excruciating pain six different times, was charged with it when it didn't work. And I sort of said like, hey, I feel like you're not listening to me. I feel like you're not listening that this is excruciating. I feel that you're not listening.

[01:49:22] This is actually making things worse. I was fired unceremoniously as a client. Like it was just like, oh, you don't like how I treat you. You're fired. And he like did this over the phone with no referral to another physician, which is actually in the state of Louisiana.

[01:49:35] You're not allowed to like fire a client and then just interrupt their care by abandoning them. So when I got to Cleveland Clinic and said, hey, I've been getting these installations done. Do I need to still get them done?

[01:49:48] The doctor there, who was a woman, said, I'm sorry, what have they been doing to you? And I explained it and she said, you have pelvic floor dysfunction. You should never, ever stick a tube into the pelvic floor of a woman who's experiencing pelvic floor dysfunction.

[01:50:07] It causes something called a levator spasm, which makes it worse. And the thing that he's been doing to you has been medically out of date for 20 years. It was disproven as an effective therapy over a decade ago.

[01:50:20] And he has been charging you for something that we have known for two decades will not help you and will in fact only make your condition worse. And that was kind of like when I was like, well, that's it.

[01:50:29] My faith in this system is thoroughly and completely fucked for the rest of my life. Those two combinations was just kind of like I will never trust another male doctor ever. And that doesn't mean that there aren't good ones like Lucas, I would trust you.

[01:50:47] You know, Edward, if you were practicing, I would trust you, although that would be a dual relationship and we don't do that. But, you know, how do you guys feel about any of these things that we're saying about our care here in Louisiana?

[01:51:01] I mean, I can't say that I'm surprised, unfortunately. You know, I I do think that there's also a lot of misunderstanding.

[01:51:14] So those particular cases like, you know, aside, there's a lot of misunderstanding about sort of what becomes a standard of care and what the time course of that looks like.

[01:51:25] Yes. Which is why when I have friends who send me like, well, what do you think about this article that was just published?

[01:51:32] I say, oh, that's very interesting. I'm going to need to see a validating study and wait about five years before it's something I would be willing to adopt into my practice. You don't want to be an early adopter and you don't want to be a late adopter.

[01:51:42] And I think that the turnaround, barring any sort of like solid, unrefutable evidence, like for instance, when we took care of strokes when I was in residency, we were massively managing blood pressure because that's what the data to the time had said.

[01:52:00] The research going forward said, whoa, you're probably hurting people's brain tissue by lowering your blood pressure too fast. Here's a meta analysis. Here's a like a good study. It was a single a single study, but a good study that says we should not be doing this.

[01:52:16] We changed our practice immediately. Right. Same thing with therapeutic hypothermia, where you cool people after cardiac arrest to try and help save and preserve tissues. We were making them too cold. There was a single good quality study that said we're making people too cold. Protocols changed immediately.

[01:52:33] Those are the two times in my practice over the course of 20 plus years now that I have changed my practice immediately based on a study. Everything else is sort of like you got to see the evidence emerge. You have to see the good quality studies emerge.

[01:52:48] So somebody being 10 years behind is actually not really. Yeah, especially in Louisiana. Right. But that being said, if it's refuted with a good quality study, then practice should change immediately.

[01:53:01] Yeah. And also I feel like if your patients are consistently saying this isn't working and I'm in excruciating pain, that should be informative.

[01:53:07] Yes. And you should at least say like, huh, this thing that I was taught doesn't really seem to be helping my patients in the way that I was taught it should.

[01:53:16] We need to go back and see what my professional organization or the research at large or my colleagues think about this. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's like it's a failure of humility, I think, when you don't do that. I agree.

[01:53:33] I'm sure, you know, Lucas, in the practice of addiction medicine. I mean, the things that we learned probably when we were in residency are woefully outdated. Oh, yeah. You know, specifically suboxone, buprenorphine. That was that was so shameful in the 12 step community.

[01:53:51] And still you can't have a sober living house and take suboxone because it is like not real, not in quotes, not really sober. Yeah. And so we were like five, 10 years ago. You'd want to get somebody off of that real quick because you're scared of the DEA audit.

[01:54:07] You would scared of being a cash under the door doctor because a lot of the people who had people on suboxone forever or with these shady like former anesthesiologists.

[01:54:17] And so then we had tons of studies started coming out over the past five years that showed that it cut the death rate in half. We just need to be flooding the zone with suboxone.

[01:54:26] Who cares what anything else if they're not dying, you know, and they certainly are not overdosing of it. We don't care kind of what the juju says about it in the community. We know that it keeps people from dying. So physicians, we screech the tires on that one.

[01:54:41] Yeah. You know, and people started getting medication assisted treatment and we stopped saying it's not real recovery. You just like it's not real diabetes treatment. If you've got to take metformin, we don't say that.

[01:54:52] Sure. Albuterol. You went around a cat or a dog and you got bronchospasm, so you have to take albuterol. You're not truly treating your asthma. Well, sure you are. Yeah. You have to use bronchodilators.

[01:55:06] Yeah. I mean, it's even gotten to the point, you know, like I have an MAT waiver for instituting suboxone treatment from the emergency department.

[01:55:12] It's an eight hour course that we worked really hard to make sure that all of our doctors like gave like a reward for completing the treatment.

[01:55:22] So people that as an opportunity, all our pharmacists are now trained to say, hey, do you think this person would be appropriate for this treatment?

[01:55:29] And that's all that's all, you know, guys like Lucas who are like, hey, yo, this is helping our patients and yeah, bring it anywhere we have an opportunity. Yeah, absolutely. What's the what's the prescription for someone who failed, who relapsed on opioids while on suboxone?

[01:55:47] Well, ideally higher level of care, but suboxone is the treatment. Yeah, we're probably underdosing them. I mean, it remarkably reduces cravings. I used to sign my emails like a year ago. I was really fighting this fight and I used to sign them suboxone for all.

[01:56:02] Just because the reasons for withholding suboxone were very paternalistic, judgmental. You were holding the keys. You had to act super pure and you had to be perfect to get your prescription. And I just don't I just don't that that doesn't resonate with me that way.

[01:56:19] Right. Like the methadone clinic philosophy where you have to pee in a cup and you don't get your methadone if you have something else in your urine. Yes. Yeah. And then there's I think there's a lot of people.

[01:56:31] I think it's really hard to make people in and outside of patient care understand that like quality of life and harm reduction. These are two things that always have to be part of a conversation and not just here's what the textbook says.

[01:56:47] Here's the and that's it's hard, right? Like new humans tend to be pretty bad at nuance. That's kind of a thing we talk about on this show a lot is that we're very binary as animals.

[01:56:57] And we're like this good, this bad when the truth is usually somewhere in the middle where it's like, well, you know, what are we trying? Are we trying to save lives and improve quality of life and do it with consistency?

[01:57:08] Or are we trying to test people's moral purity and their ability to endure pain? And like if you endure enough pain, then we'll reward you with less pain. And you're like, what what weird seventeen hundreds Puritan whipping myself with a fucking rope with knots in it.

[01:57:23] Shit is this that's being applied. It's like the equivalent of a heart doctor refusing heart medicine unless you bring a food journal in every week that says you didn't have McDonald's. Right. Like, you know, most people would scoff at that.

[01:57:38] Oh, my God, that's inhumane. But if it's someone who's addicted to drugs, it's like, well, well, through their life away, they get.

[01:57:45] Yeah. I mean, that was my public my my master's in public health project was in trying to decriminalize paraphernalia laws in California so that users could be trained.

[01:57:58] It was the drug overdose prevention education program that was run by one of the leaders in the harm reduction community and a needle exchange and basically empowering users to save their friends lives.

[01:58:09] Because it used you know, it used to be that you would do rescue breathing or you would like try and wake your friend up. And when you heard sirens, you had to bolt because you would get ganged by the cops for paraphernalia and criminalizing paraphernalia.

[01:58:23] Then you empowered people to stay with their friends, keep them from dying.

[01:58:27] Yeah. And so that was like we were like, well, you know, this is where we're going to get the most traction with the community is if we're able to ensure them that they're not going to get arrested for saving their friends life. That's a good thing.

[01:58:40] Yeah. I'm trying to convince people that you were like not encouraging drug use so hard. I had a friend overdose on heroin when I was much, much younger.

[01:58:51] And, you know, reactively, the first instinct of those that were with him is like, well, let's put him in the shower and try to wake him up or or do it. Taking him to the hospital was considered the last resort because no one wanted to get in trouble.

[01:59:05] Right. So he died. It's just, you know, it's unfortunate. So you're fighting the good fight, Elizabeth. Well, I'd love to pull the curtain back just for a second on the system of the practice of medicine.

[01:59:17] Mm hmm. And OK, so the doctor that the doctors that you've encountered that were full of fuckery, you and I lament and we can identify how fucked they were. Right. And this is very obvious and it gives us amazing conversations.

[01:59:36] And unfortunately, it's given you trauma, I would imagine. Yes, I have very bad medical PTSD. While identifying that, let's look at some other fuckery participants in the system, for example.

[01:59:48] So during COVID, the first two years of COVID, I was a chief medical officer of an acute psych stabilization hospital, you know, the psych hospital. And what happens is, is they expect the corporate that runs the hospital expects 12 to 14 day lengths of stay on each admission.

[02:00:05] So if you go to the psych hospital and you qualify for admission because you have depression, well, you know, you could just get some of those causative factors in place and you could resolve that depression very quickly and really qualify to go home in 72 hours, perhaps.

[02:00:21] I mean, it's it's it should be patient dependent when you resolve and go home. But they make you know, we get preauthorized for a 14 day stay. They want to use all that money. They being corporate. So if you're a physician, you're really incentivized to use all the days.

[02:00:37] Most of these patients are low income people and Medicaid patients, chronically mentally ill, schizophrenic, you know, so they really can't advocate for themselves. Sure. Memphis, they're mostly poor black.

[02:00:48] Let's be honest. So you admit one to the hospital and they get better and they're lucidly telling you they're better and that they knew it was my spouse. I want to go home. Like I'm in college, you know, like or whatever.

[02:01:02] And you discharge them early because we can do that as physicians. We do have that autonomy early being with some days still left on the table. You get a call from the you are person. You'll get even a call from the CEO. Doctor, have you considered this?

[02:01:15] Are you sure? Because I looked in the note and I saw that blah, blah, blah. And so they start getting debated by, you know, bachelor level people in the practice of medicine. And that is if you do that too much, you just don't work at that hospital anymore.

[02:01:31] You're a contact, a contract employee and they'll find somebody else. And so you're incentivized to keep people against their will institutionalized. And it really feels like jail.

[02:01:40] And when you've got a poor black population, marginalized populations, schizophrenic population in there and you just keeping them and you may not, you know, some doctors won't even really see him that day because they don't want the confrontation of explaining why they're staying in the hospital yet another day.

[02:01:57] Like to me that, you know, doctors are under this pressure of like work within our cash system or lose your job. Yes. And that's frightening. And it's I'm really happy that you made that point.

[02:02:08] I have a friend here who recently left the major research hospital in the New Orleans area in internal medicine because due to mandates from the very, very top of the corporate section of the hospital and rules set by the Louisiana insurance companies.

[02:02:30] This individual was only allowed to spend 11 minutes with their patient. And if they did not consistently log 11 minutes or left with their patients, they were docked. They were put on probation. They were written up.

[02:02:45] They were consistently punished for spending adequate time speaking with their patients trying to get to the bottom of what was happening.

[02:02:51] And so she was saying, I may have given inadequate care to people that could have negatively affected their trust in the system and their ability to trust anybody going forward because I was not allowed without being punished by someone who doesn't have a medical degree at all.

[02:03:08] To do my job the way I was trained to practice it, which is to be thorough, ask questions, do compassionate inquiry, do all of the assessment that you guys learned to do when you were in school. Yeah. Yeah.

[02:03:19] And interestingly, doctors were never trained in medical education to kind of roguely push back against corporate. Sure. Adhere to standard of care. Like we don't know. I'm like, shit, the CEO. I'm going to say this to the CEO. Right. What do you do? It's a hard conflict.

[02:03:38] So all that to say doctors are under a lot of bullshit. That's just one of the, you know, one of the ways we are, you know, but there was another time during COVID where.

[02:03:45] So we had like a 16 bed geriatric wing to our hospital and three of the patients got COVID. So I got everybody, all the other geriatric patients who are negative out of there. We had family members we could send them to. This is at the start of COVID.

[02:03:58] And so the corporate, I mean, we had 16 beds and 13 of them were empty. We do not have the negative pressure rooms. We didn't really have precautions in place at a psych hospital. Right. This shit's going to spread right. Like the air conditioner is all connected.

[02:04:12] We had three patients, census of three on a 16 bed unit. Corporate does not care. Corporate wants that full.

[02:04:20] So they told me as chief medical officer, I had to admit geriatric patients, people's grandmas during COVID to a unit where the only three patients on there had COVID and the staff was going to be cross caring for everyone. So I didn't do it.

[02:04:33] I mean, I just told him, no, I was like, I'm the doctor. God damn it. I have them the motherfucker. And sorry, I just have a lot of passion. Sure. Put your dick on the table. That's not something we ever say.

[02:04:45] Like my generation, Elizabeth's generation are not the people that say I'm the doctor, you know? Right. We're like a part of a medical multidisciplinary treatment team. You know, we work together. That's how we were trained post, you know, 1990 or whatever.

[02:04:58] But in this case it was kind of like, no, no, like this is someone's grandmom and we don't know a lot about COVID yet. We have three COVID patients there. We know it spreads like wildfire. We're going to fill that unit for your profit.

[02:05:09] And if shit goes awry and we learn that that's malpractice, of course you're not going to catch my back. Right. We kept that unit, three patients for two weeks.

[02:05:20] I was always a stained medical leader after that point because I said no to corporate and drove down our revenue. Well, staying on this topic, I mean, this is an excellent, excellent point. Excellent. You know, just subject in general.

[02:05:35] What made me initially think of it is when you brought up the police brutality in Memphis and kind of the discussions that we have around the systemic issues with police brutality.

[02:05:45] As far as doctors are concerned, do you guys feel a pressure from within to look the other way when other doctors are just absolutely fucking it up? A pressure? Yeah. I think the pressure is then in the consequences.

[02:06:06] You're taking upon yourself to make a huge, huge set of consequences. You want to be really sure. I think that it's really interesting that we take that really to heart, whereas nobody thinks twice about jailing somebody with very little evidence. Right.

[02:06:26] And I'm not saying that we should be less diligent. I'm saying that maybe everybody should be as diligent in doing that. Yeah. You will definitely also feel some institutional pressure, like Lucas is saying.

[02:06:44] Like if a hospital system has allowed a physician to practice without the standard of care or doing bad shit, they're most likely going to try and just sort of kind of push that person out very quietly because if they're aware of it, then the hospital system or the insurance company, whoever, incurs liability.

[02:07:05] Right. Legal liability. And so they don't want that legal liability. They will always try and kick it down the line to the doctor or the nurse or the whoever that outcome came from.

[02:07:17] That it's very difficult to hold big corporate systems accountable for their complacency in any of these bad outcomes. Wow. And in Tennessee, I can only speak for that. Where you practice, no doubt, is more progressive. But in Tennessee, it's definitely a good old boy system.

[02:07:36] If you get sued, definitely you're not going to find a Tennessee doctor to go on the stand against you. A hundred percent you won't.

[02:07:45] But even as a medical leader, there's a physician, there have been several physicians in a nursing director that I've wanted to fire for such egregious, like we had a physician who was only seeing patients once every 14 days. In a psych hospital, you got to see them every day.

[02:07:59] Oh, yeah, that's not good. Once every 14. I shit you not. That's not enough. That had to stop. That physician needed to go, but corporate said we'd be inhibiting the opportunity for that physician to practice medicine and that lawsuit would be fierce. And that physician still works there.

[02:08:16] And I'm not there anymore, but that physician still works there. In North Mississippi where I work, it's different. No one will believe me, but it's centered around Oxford, a blue dot in a red state. And the doctor pool is so small.

[02:08:29] I have been so pleasantly surprised with how efficient the medical system, psychiatric addiction medicine system, I should say, works down there.

[02:08:37] Or when I call up the ER or whatever, like we're all bros and sisses, you know, like for some reason when we all know each other, everything works well and we call each other out.

[02:08:47] But I think in the South in general, more in the rural South, it's a good old boy system and doctors don't cross each other. Oh, definitely. Yeah, there's.

[02:08:55] Well, this is a good way to segue into the stories and let me do so with a let's start to segue into the stories with a very highbrow question for our guests. I'll start with you, Elizabeth.

[02:09:10] If you were, say, assisting a physician and he was like, all right, so what's on the docket today is we're going to be sticking this goat nut inside the testicle of this guy here. And it's it's going to make his dick hard again.

[02:09:27] Let's go. Would you be like, I have some questions about this or would you just be like, let's get to work? So many questions. I yeah. Like is this being done under a research protocol? Has there been a B approval? What's the health of the goat?

[02:09:49] Are we sure we're not like this guy was zoonotic disease? What's the risk to the patient? Like, you know. Yeah. And so what the fuck? We have medicine for this. Why are you putting goat nuts places? He was a non surgeon practicing surgery with no supervision or oversight.

[02:10:10] Yeah, in a vulnerable population.

[02:10:16] Now, Lucas, my my other ethical question leading us into the doctor Stanley story is in your mind, how ethical is it to give people free plastic surgery and frame it as like I'm improving their lives if you haven't disclosed to them that you haven't actually studied plastic surgery?

[02:10:33] So that's the key. I mean, you mentioned it in your story. The key is consent. Yeah. So informed consent. I mean, we do stuff all the time, like not we as psychiatrists anymore, but psychiatry or plastic surgeons. I think it still goes on.

[02:10:51] I mean, people get informed consent and do all kinds of stuff. We see it in the media. Oh, yeah. And so I still I still think that medical ethics get even pushed a little bit with informed consent. But in this case, these people were not consenting.

[02:11:04] They weren't notified. They didn't know he was a non surgeon with zero surgical training. And so I think they're even if even if they like it in layman's terms, Lucas, can you explain to the audience what informed consent is? So you'd like me to do this. I OK.

[02:11:22] Let me tell you all the ways it could go wrong. Let me let me understand that you understand what I'm saying. Tell it back to me. OK, cool. You got it. Are you psychiatrically unwell? Are you are you awake? Alert.

[02:11:39] Do you have the capacity to to understand what I'm saying? And then did I thoroughly say all the things that could go wrong? So, you know what you're getting right? You could die. Yeah, you can die. Are you cool with that? I still want to do it.

[02:11:56] You would. Elizabeth, do you agree that this is the correct definition of informed consent? Do you have a different definition or an addition? This risks benefits and the person has the capacity to make the decision.

[02:12:10] I mean, those are, you know, from an ER standpoint, obviously, generally we do have like occasional implied consent.

[02:12:17] Like if somebody is not able to give me an answer and I have an intervention that is proven to help, then you do an implied consent with another health care provider in order to do a procedure on someone who can't consent or doesn't have an agent to consent.

[02:12:33] Right. Right. And those are like life saving stuff. Right. Car crash comes in person dying. Person is not conscious. But on the other side of that is Elizabeth having to be yelled at and potentially litigated against if she saved someone's life.

[02:12:48] They didn't want it like Lieutenant Dan and Forrest Gump. Forrest pulled him out of the firefight. But remember, Lieutenant Dan woke up and he was pissed. He wanted to die there like his relatives.

[02:12:59] There's legal risk to Elizabeth heroically saving a life because that may not have been what wanted to be saved. Right. Right. But in my own, my own like ethical and moral obligation, I would rather give somebody the option to be pissed at me for being alive.

[02:13:19] And so it's like, again, there are but there are ethical quandaries that come up even in the context of informed consent. It gets really complicated at times as well. Right. Yes.

[02:13:31] Someone doesn't have the capacity to make a decision and their medical decision maker is making decisions for them. And you have doubts about that person's motivations or their ethics. If you think a child really is in need of an intervention and the parents decline the intervention.

[02:13:47] We see this a lot in psychiatric emergencies in the emergency department. We're like, shit, this is not a safe situation for this kid to go home to make the call. Right. Right. Very, very sticky and very, very complicated. So it's not always very cut and dry.

[02:14:03] Sure. Right. There are a lot of different things. I think in these stories cases, it's like, how did they get here? Because it's pretty cut and dry. Yeah. Yeah.

[02:14:15] Well, so, you know, since we're on the subject, Elizabeth, as you listened to the San Quentin experiment story, what were your impressions? What were your reactions? Were there any point where you audibly yelled to yourself or inside? How did you feel about that story?

[02:14:31] Just from the start, you have a prisoner population who is right. Who's disempowered to make decisions. And because they're in that situation, they may consent to something thinking that it's going to get them a benefit.

[02:14:48] They are not in a position to be able to consent to things in the same way. Correct. Yeah.

[02:14:56] I know folks who work in jail med, you know, and they talk to people about this all the time because they have to have, you know, the they have to have a conversation with their their patients who happen to be inmates about consent.

[02:15:13] You know, because sometimes guards or police will ask them to do something and the person says, I don't want that. And then the doctor is put into a position of saying, who has the agency to make this decision? Right. Right. Yeah.

[02:15:27] I don't think any of those people, one, they weren't given informed consent, as Lucas mentioned. Like, I don't think that they understood that the person was not a plastic surgeon, was not a surgeon at all, and was doing something that was medically invalid. So that's that aside.

[02:15:44] But I think, you know, even when you are doing things that are medically valid and the standard of care and you have a population who is not in a position to have the power to give informed consent or is giving consent under duress, it gets very sticky.

[02:16:03] OK, even though this happened roughly 100 years ago. Well, it started in 1913 or sorry, it started around 1915. The the ball stuff. But it went on for for, you know, well over a decade before that family, before Clarence Kelly's family said, no, no, you've handed me a desecrated corpse.

[02:16:26] But then he still kept doing, you know, little things here and there that were, you know, he was he was the prison doctor for almost 40 years. He had a very long career there. And we know that this is still happening now.

[02:16:36] OK, that was my question. What are your suspicions? Still happening. Women are being coerced into getting sterilized in exchange for decreased sentences. Yes. OK. It's all right. It's still. It's still happening. It still happens now.

[02:16:52] It happened on it, like not even in secret, like in Puerto Rico in the 70s and 80s. OK, this is not ancient history. Yeah, this is this is medical racism, medical that has happened and it's still happening.

[02:17:06] Yes. That's the key. That's why this story is relevant, not as a historical piece, but to apply it. What are the ways that it can sneak in right now?

[02:17:15] Yeah. One of those ways is what I think was the most pivotal point that Kimberly made in the story, which is these figures are complex. And I will not present a stereotype, even though it'd be funnier and it would help Edward's ass.

[02:17:31] I'm going to present the complexity of this situation, which is that villains don't often present as villains and heroes don't often present as heroes. And so this villain who was doing these villainous things was also making people a lot really happy.

[02:17:48] He probably had a lot of political capital at the prison among the prisoners. He, in fact, was briefly at a point when the warden had to take a break.

[02:17:58] I think he got sick or something happened. But Leo stepped up and was briefly both the prison doctor and the warden. So and he had helped this, you know, this manservant that he had get a release.

[02:18:10] Like everyone in the prison knew that this was a man who had the clout to get you released, which, you know, would perhaps make people want to make him happy.

[02:18:19] Which then could skew any potential test or a test, I say in great big bracketed quotes, because there was no proper testing happening. There was no, oh, you know, we have a sample size and we're doing a controlled experiment.

[02:18:33] There was just let's stick some nuts in these other nuts and see what happens.

[02:18:37] But yeah, Lucas, the point with Leo that I hoped got across was like he did have a clout, not just because he, you know, did a lot of interesting stuff and gave people some better food.

[02:18:51] But like it's a big fucking deal to say we're going to standardize medical care and we're going to catch people with infectious diseases before they enter the building so that we're not spreading horrendous, deadly respiratory illnesses to the rest of the uninfected population.

[02:19:06] Like that is prison reform. That is improving the quality of life for people. It's just also he was sticking bull nuts in people's, you know, right.

[02:19:16] Well, he's got to be right because Dr. Stanley did all these great things and he's a doctor and he gets food free or whatever. You know, he's able to do all these great things. So he must be right.

[02:19:28] So it must be OK that he's doing these things just as Joe Rogan, Dr. Philip McCullough. He's the most published cardiologist. Right. He must be right. Yeah.

[02:19:38] So during the Delta variant that I will forever be traumatized by masses of people didn't get the vaccine because during the Delta variant, Joe Rogan had one after the other, after the other, after the other anti-vaxxer who presents. Well, I'm Dr. Malone. I created the mRNA vaccine.

[02:19:56] Yes, I am the creator of this. So these people that did I mean, if you talk the population out of getting a protective vaccine during the Delta variant, when our ICU was 61 people at the time, all 61 unvaccinated, average age 39. If you talk, that's not informed consent.

[02:20:16] Right. They don't know that they're gambling there. And now maybe it's different. But during the Delta variant, it wasn't different. And we had Dr. Phil McCullough, the wolf in sheep's clothing, the villain, in my opinion, who was there to sell two thousand dollar treatments, right?

[02:20:33] Telling people not to get the vaccine to the Delta variant and people were dying of that. I kind of think that's a modern day example of this, you know, of someone who must be right. So I'll listen to them. But man, that was unethical and caused harm.

[02:20:48] I'm having palpitations right now. I have this in my chest just listening to you talk about this because I was like, you know, working in the ER during that time.

[02:20:58] And trying to like explain to somebody that I really wanted them to get vaccinated because I cared about their well-being.

[02:21:09] I'm trying to explain to them that I don't want to have to hold my own cell phone up to their ears so they can say their last words to their family over the phone because their family.

[02:21:18] You did that. You did that, Elizabeth. Tell me, tell me that. Tell me that. Because no one knows that. Tell me that. I mean, it's like, yeah, I don't know. You feel totally helpless. You have the information.

[02:21:32] You have the education and you have the power to make a change. And you're not allowed to because somebody has listened to a person who they think is an expert. Yes. And it's been excruciating for people who can't see Dr. Elizabeth's face right now.

[02:21:52] There's tears in her eyes, like this person who's been genuinely affected by the consequences of misrepresenting information.

[02:22:00] But the number of people that I have had to sit down, people who are clients of mine who didn't want to get vaccinated and who are like you, Kim, you're very, you know, you're very woke.

[02:22:10] You know, like in quotes about like the medical system and medical gaslighting and abuse and, you know, the consequences of, you know, I'm a medical outlier.

[02:22:19] So I'm always like, hey, some people are outliers. And like, I know that this is the standard of care, but it's not great for outliers.

[02:22:24] And you have to assess whether someone could be an outlier. Robert Malone was the one that made my job most difficult having to sit down. I found myself in session having to be like, OK, I know he was billed as this.

[02:22:39] I know he's been presented as this. Here are the 40 other people who worked on this MRNA vaccine that he claims is his invention over many, many years. Like can't trying to break apart the brainwashing and make people go, you know, hey, I have been sold.

[02:22:58] I've been grifted and it sounded really good. And it sounded there was a doctor. There was a very authoritative sounding interview or this person's got doctor in front of their name.

[02:23:07] They've got these letters here on their resume. They must be correct. And you're like, no, we're all fucking fallible. Right. Like any of us can be wrong on any given day.

[02:23:15] And any of us, especially people who are really motivated by money, can get your it's like your ethical gyroscope goes wonky and you can't find true north anymore.

[02:23:27] The medical reality of covid is all happened in secret. Like you walk down the street, people don't know that Elizabeth Nicholson held the phone like that so many times.

[02:23:36] Didn't know that she probably helped a little boy and a little girl put their gown on and say goodbye to mommy for the last time.

[02:23:42] And they're too young to know it was goodbye. And, you know, in the emotion that happens when you hear like someone on the phone, like crying and crying and you're you're engaging in this last interaction.

[02:23:54] And like you get on your shift and you take your scrubs off, you know, you do your thing and then you open up Facebook just to be mindless. You've got these real extensive reasons why the covid vaccine is killing people.

[02:24:05] Yeah. Yeah. You still got like dried salt on your eye from the tears from the person who actually died of covid. And it was all bullshit. It was all a grift.

[02:24:15] And I just think that is so relevant to say that in the mass casualties that Philip McCullough said, like from the vaccine, like that didn't happen. That was all bullshit. And the fact that he said you can't get covid twice.

[02:24:28] No, we got covid like three times. You know, and the other thing was myocarditis. Joe Rogan did this big thing on myocarditis. Sure. Did vaccines given you myocarditis? Guess what? Also gives you myocarditis. Yeah. Like covid. Yeah.

[02:24:42] Covid gives it at a way higher rate in Omicron's here and you're all getting covid and you're going to get more likelihood of myocarditis if you were unvaccinated. But it's like these things didn't happen. The Facebook algorithm won for some of these people.

[02:24:57] Yes, absolutely. Sure. It's still one. They still don't realize they were they were sold. I also think it's really hard. I mean, you could probably speak more to this. Look at us being a psychiatrist or Edward as a psychologist.

[02:25:09] But the people we have built a society, especially in the US, other places, too, but especially in the US, we're admitting that you're wrong is considered weakness or gay.

[02:25:25] So I think that that hits the point that nobody wants to admit that they were grifted because they would have to admit that they are fallible.

[02:25:37] Yeah. And if we could just make space in society for us to be fallible, for parents to admit when they've failed their kids, for doctors to admit when they failed their patients,

[02:25:51] for people to admit when they listen to like information that was invalid and say, geez, I can do better next time.

[02:25:59] Yeah. All of the stuff that we're talking about in in this story, in police brutality, in in medical mismanagement and all of that, we could be we could then move forward. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's the that's the key. And that's especially the key for men.

[02:26:19] That's the that's what we lack in the male culture when we talk about toxic masculinity. It's the championing of never saying you're sorry. Everything Kimberly post some of these these memes where apologizing, saying you're wrong is like a sign of weakness.

[02:26:36] Whereas on the road to my jujitsu black belt or college wrestling, saying you're wrong, like that's how you get better. Right. You just get your ass completely handed to you every day.

[02:26:47] It's obvious you're wrong. Right. You know, and so the toughest people I know, like Matias, if Matias is wrong, he's going to he's going to tell you he's wrong. Yes. He's talking about a wonderful black belt here in New Orleans who's Swiss.

[02:26:59] So he's slightly less toxically masculine because the Swiss are just like, I don't know. It's not the same. It's not the same as being an American guy. But we culturally you're right.

[02:27:09] Like I have this. Oh, you're not only are you are you less of a man and maybe gay if you say that you're wrong, but then there will be a pile on of people being like, see, I told you you're fucking idiot.

[02:27:21] I'm smarter than you because I never admit that I'm wrong, which means I'm always right. And it's like this. It's like Dunning Kruger, like just dog pile. Well, there's this flashback, not flashback. I can't remember what it's called.

[02:27:36] There's an entire like when you tell somebody information that contradicts with their particular worldview is rather than looking at it, examining it and seeing if it has validity, they double down on the other thing.

[02:27:49] They double down on the the the inaccurate information or the, you know, on the paradigm that is what they believe before. And it's how how easy it is then for the misinformation or or the grifter to gain a stranglehold on people.

[02:28:12] Like all these guys are trying to be tough guys like the Tim Kennedy kind of like selling all the tough guy stuff. What's so shameful, perhaps about that, about the group that that pursues that mindset is that special operators, their hallmark is admitting they're wrong.

[02:28:29] Their hallmark is sharpening the iron. I'm finding ways to expose my weakness so I can get better. The operators that I know and have trained with are all acknowledging and seeking out desperately the ways that they're wrong so they can get sharper.

[02:28:46] So it's odd that there's a group of bros who's out there trying to follow the operators who are championing and never apologize. I'm always right from the womb mindset. It's very incongruent with the end point they're seeking.

[02:28:59] Yeah. Yeah. Final final question for you guys related to this story. And then we're going to move over to Edwards, deeply traumatizing, never listening to it again. Story. How do you guys feel about eugenics?

[02:29:12] How do I feel about eugenics? Because I mean, Leo just was sort of like, hey, this is this is how we do away with crime. We just we make sure that older white guys who have good breeding and good education can get a girl pregnant at 75.

[02:29:26] And we just sterilize all these brown poor people and then no more crime. Done. So you talk about like the ignoring of covid precautions as eugenics because we can just go there to know we can go in. Both know that I've been preaching from the rooftops about this.

[02:29:52] And and again, let's admit when we're wrong. Right. I am totally a recovered fat phobic ableist. Same. Hard. Same. OK. Like throughout my teen years and my 20s, I like I bought into that. Same. And I was fucking wrong. Also. And it was good for you.

[02:30:12] Right. Oh, my God. She's not magically gay because she admitted she was wrong. You know, but I swear. But that's a totally different ball away. Oh, yeah. Right. OK. Cool. But nevertheless, though, like watching people say, I just can't do this anymore.

[02:30:29] I can't I can't put a mask on to go to the grocery store because it's just too much without thinking about how that affects other people. Sure. Yeah. And so like, yeah, eugenics is wrong. OK, that's how I feel about it. It's wrong. And we're still doing so.

[02:30:48] Yes. Well, to complicate things a little bit further, like if you had to pull a piece out of eugenics and say, I can respect this ideology, what would it be? Oh, my God. You know, it's it's it's shows called human fuckery.

[02:31:06] You know, you're right. You're right. We're light on the thing. I think we could all do it because on the surface, when you say, hey, we're going to improve the well-being of the population. Yeah, this is what we're who's going to say no to that. There you go.

[02:31:18] There you realize that what they're actually asking you to do is devalue certain people's lives and certain people's value. Right. Devalue. Correct. Value their value. Exactly. I'm a doctor. Listen to me.

[02:31:31] Yeah. But yes, I like that. Yeah. It all comes under the guise of, hey, we're making society better. Right. We can create this utopia. Right. Through marginalizing marginalized people even more. Yeah. And you're placing you're placing a hierarchy of value. Mm hmm. And they're often patriarchal white supremacists.

[02:31:53] Yes. You know, anti queer, anti disabled, anti all of these things.

[02:31:59] Yeah. I thought it was really interesting that Leo went specifically for his forced involuntary sterilizations after you're like, oh, yeah, we know that they've been spending centuries for sterilizing people who are on the spectrum or have developmental disorders.

[02:32:14] But he was like the bisexuals. We don't want them passing on their queerness to the next generation. So since they're banging both, we got it. We got to make sure they can't pass this on. And I was just like, thanks, Leo. I really appreciate it.

[02:32:27] I mean, I think that's that's that's where like when we're talking about heroes and villains, sometimes you're the hero and the villain and sometimes in the same story.

[02:32:37] Yeah. And I think that's most people I am. I would love to believe that I am a hero, but I am absolutely the villain in a few people's story because of the way things played out and the way people ended up feeling.

[02:32:51] And that's where my inadequacies in the past. Absolutely. Like the way I failed, my lack of insight and the way that I failed my poor communication, you know, that sort of thing. Like whatever. But yeah, I think that, Edward, you hit it on the head, though.

[02:33:05] Like what's the thing that you could say that you could you know, that you could really buy into with eugenics and it's making the world a better place?

[02:33:12] Yeah, that sounds great. One of the tenets of our show is is we explore concepts, but it doesn't necessarily mean we're advocating for them. Like the effort to better understand them doesn't mean that we are validating them. Right.

[02:33:25] If somebody's got to understand that we can then combat that. Exactly. Somebody's got to try and understand this stuff. If if we just leave it in the dark, you know, we're just bound to commit these same mistakes at an even higher rate than we do already.

[02:33:40] Right. Right. Lucas, eugenics, you a fan? No, no, of course not. When you're saying like what was what are some of the are there any things that we can lift up from eugenics? And I was just really pondering that question, trying to be a really complex thinker.

[02:33:57] You know, that that world is just fraught with so much fuckery. Yeah. Yeah. It gets real dark, real fast.

[02:34:04] And it was fascinating to me. I do hope that some people, if they're super nerds, will look up Leo's books and read them because, you know, some of his writing is like that, you know, like conservatives missing the point or conservatives almost getting the point.

[02:34:22] Like his writing is so frequently like, God, these people, you know, they had poor representation. They were discriminated against by police and the judicial system because they weren't white. And now they're here in this prison for crimes they didn't commit.

[02:34:36] And we're going to sterilize them because that's for. And you're like, you were so close. You were doing so well until. Yeah. Well, moving away from San Quentin, let's start with Dr. Lucas. How did you feel about unit seven? Oh, fuck. Because that's seven thirty. Fuck.

[02:34:57] Seven thirty. Fuck my life. Was this a story that you were familiar with? No, I didn't. I didn't know this. I never I didn't. I didn't know this story. I think that the descriptions are.

[02:35:10] Oh, just I just think that the Edwards voice in the background music and the I'm an 80s kid. And it's like, did he get that soundtrack from Nightmare on Elm Street or, you know, just the whole multimedia Trojan horse he did to my amygdala? Like it was bad.

[02:35:30] It was bad, y'all, because, I mean, we've seen blood and guts and we've seen vulnerable people. And so, yeah, just the fear of that villager and, you know, knowing that three hundred thousand people met that fate, the frostbite of the little baby.

[02:35:44] Yeah. The needle in the finger. Just oh my goodness. I hate you so much. This was this was this was a lot. This was like really heavy. And then wrapping it up with General Shiroishi living a comfortable life to nineteen fifty nine.

[02:36:01] And a lot of these people just live in and how I got covered up and never prosecuted, really, and never really admitted, you know, wow. I learned a lot from that. But yeah, that was very viscerally moving.

[02:36:14] Twenty minutes of my life that I may or may not ever listen to again. I don't recommend listening. The only the only nation that prosecuted the Japanese for the war crimes associated with Unit 731 were the Soviets.

[02:36:28] I didn't mention this in the story and that's my fault, but there were a lot of Soviet prisoners in addition to Chinese POWs that met this same fate. And so they carried out trials for war crimes against the Japanese.

[02:36:43] But because of our relationship with the Soviets, that information remained disconnected from the United States. It remained hush hush until, as I said, 1984 when those first documents started to emerge.

[02:36:55] But even then, Japan was playing the Donald Trump game where it's just like, yeah, no, that no, that didn't happen. Yeah. Sorry. No. And then like finally, 10 years later, they're like, well, maybe it kind of happened, sort of.

[02:37:07] And then in the 2000s, it's like, all right, it happened. Yeah. We're not far away from admitting finally that there was a Holocaust in Japan as well. Right. Right. So how is this happening today? Well, Russia, Ukraine, I mean, Russia is targeting civilian targets with big explosives.

[02:37:26] There's sure. So it's not happening necessarily in a controlled research format, but just the whole dehumanization of another nation or another race. How is that happening today? Because that's ultimately what this story is about, is dehumanization. Well, it's happening when you're like border country.

[02:37:44] You can somehow justify with the oligarchs and the religious leaders that we just need to decimate these cities of humans because they're less than human. I think it really reminded me of Russia, Ukraine.

[02:37:56] We're really on the same level of that Manchuria, Japan situation, it feels like to me. And we've talked so much about Covid on this show kind of unexpectedly, but it the salivation that Japan had for developing and engineering bio warfare,

[02:38:14] creating diseases, plagues that they would then unleash on the world, their enemies, thinking that they could somehow contain it to just their enemies. It brings us back to so many theories that people have kind of floated in the last few years.

[02:38:27] Was Covid a weapon? Was it somehow leaked out of a laboratory? Was this something that was manufactured and and now it shows up on our doorstep? And it's intentional because it was the globalists who are trying to break the economy and all this other shit.

[02:38:40] It's as crazy as some of that stuff sounds. You hear a story like this and you're like, well, fuck, maybe. That's why the grift is so effective, though. The grift is any good grift is rooted in nuggets of truth.

[02:38:56] Sure. And that's my job so hard because like all the data says that it was naturally occurring. All of the reviews says it's naturally occurring. They say, but what about what about Union Unit 730? Fuck. Yeah. I'm sure you hear that a lot in the ERs.

[02:39:15] And and anybody who is willing to look at an accusation or an assertion should be willing to take a step back and say, yeah, I hear you. There's some some stuff that happened. There's been people who have been trying to do these things with pathogens.

[02:39:31] It's happened in the past. We should look very critically at this. Yes. You don't just fill your eyes and poo poo it. You look at it critically. Right. And you come up with a theory or an idea or a preponderance of evidence or whatever it is.

[02:39:48] Yeah. I mean, this is like I need to research this just to verify that it's it wasn't like a tick tock created of a homeless man. But have any of you watched a video that apparently came out in the last week as.

[02:40:03] Oh, God, I think he was a director of strategy, something along those lines for Pfizer. He was caught on a hidden camera. Someone was asking him questions about the vaccine.

[02:40:15] And he was floating the idea that Pfizer's further strategy or one of the strategies that they're considering is intentionally mutating the virus in their own laboratory so they could then have vaccines ready in case this occurred naturally.

[02:40:32] And then he says, well, then you also run the risk of it getting out like what happened in Wuhan. And it's just like, holy fuck, like you guys have not learned your lesson. Edward, did you watch the follow up to that video where I did not.

[02:40:45] So the follow up to that video is the head of that, you know, conservatives for truth or whoever made the video. Yeah. And they go to back to that dude and they were like, hey, so let me ask you another question.

[02:40:56] You said this on camera and he was like, whoa. And he gets violent. He starts smashing the tablet and he's like, I was lying just to try to impress someone on a date.

[02:41:07] None of that's true. And so the follow up is crazy and they end up wrestling in the cafe. I have to see this. You have to see it because it's it's being used currently to say, see exactly. Exactly. Oh, my goodness. Oh, boy.

[02:41:24] Well, Elizabeth, we never even got to asking you. So what was your impression of it? Edward's story. Oh, it's horrifying and also unsurprising. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, the same way that Nazi scientists made a lot of discoveries about human physiology

[02:41:48] that then get, you know, used in the modern practice of medicine. And lots of Nazi sympathizers were given pardons and allowed to work in the United States. I am not at all surprised that the same is happening or happened in Japan.

[02:42:08] And I also think it's also not surprising that we don't learn about it. Oh, yeah. It's just the U.S. has ignored an entire subset of the world as being valid history.

[02:42:22] So well, and I think that, Edward, your story is really, really important for modern listeners because there is a lot of complaint and pushback currently in our contemporary discourse about, you know, wokeness. You're controlling my language. You're policing my language. You're trying to control me.

[02:42:41] This is fascism. But when you use language to take away someone's humanity, that has long been a tactic which precedes absolutely appalling human rights violations.

[02:42:54] So when people are saying, hey, when it comes to trans folks or queer folks and they say, please don't call me it, please don't call me that, please don't call me then when we're talking about criminals in quotes, please don't call them thugs.

[02:43:06] Please don't call like stop using language that strips people of their humanity and makes them seen be seen as vermin or animals or inanimate objects.

[02:43:18] This story is a great example because they framed this in such a way to strip the victims of this incredible human torture as they're not human.

[02:43:30] They're just logs. They're just they're not. And it seems, you know, like we should be smart enough to to be able to as a goat. No, that's definitely a person I don't care that we're calling them logs like that's a person we're torturing a baby.

[02:43:42] This this I'm out. But when you systematize abuse and you normalize and normalize and normalize like people's brains, eventually, like Lucas says, your amygdala can only take so much. Your cortex can only take so much before it's just easier to go, OK, that's a log.

[02:43:59] I have to stick a needle in its finger. We're doing this for science. We're doing this for the betterment of the country. And all of that ties back to there is a reason that people are being asked to stop dehumanizing people.

[02:44:12] You know, I saw somebody online the other day, like, you know, calling a female pop star a pig and was just like, hey, girl, like it's 2023. We not trying to make you feel bad, but like we're not doing this anymore.

[02:44:24] Like collective thing is we're not reducing humans to animals or stripping them of their humanities just because they do something that we don't like.

[02:44:32] And I got a lot of pushback for it. But like, that's why, like she was like, why do you care if I think that so and so is, you know, a pig? And I was like, because it's a slippery slope. Right. Like it starts with this.

[02:44:43] But then it turns into, oh, this thug deserves to be executed by five cops on the side of the road without a trial. You know, like it's it's very interesting that they used. Let's see these people as inanimate objects or logs.

[02:44:59] We have to reframe them as inhuman so that the humans that are participating in their torture can torture them. Yeah. Yeah. Gosh, that is so heavy. Mm hmm. Dehumanizing. There's a real big dehumanizing debate in Memphis right now this this weekend.

[02:45:17] And it's that, you know, our systems obviously dehumanize black people. I think we can say that confidently historically, especially with Michelle Alexander's book that the new Jim Crow.

[02:45:29] It just talks. It just really breaks down the data of how, you know, black people committing the same crimes as white people or minor drug offenses, get more drug jail time. And just you just look at it objectively and you can and you can see that.

[02:45:42] And, OK, let's accept that and do something about it. I mean, I think we're to a place where we can hear that. And hopefully people won't get triggered by that and they can understand that our systems can cause harm and they need to be reformed and reimagined.

[02:45:56] I don't think hopefully that's not a controversial thing to say.

[02:45:59] What is a little bit controversial and I'm kind of like you, I think, in that way, Kimberly, is that I'm probably not without fault in dancing around some places that are sensitive and maybe even against type for me.

[02:46:13] But, you know, I coach I coach in jujitsu and wrestling team in the inner city here in Memphis and love my guys, you know, and but the music they listen to and they want to play.

[02:46:25] And I'm not listen, I'm not that dude being like, oh, Elvis, he's doing his hips. But if you if you listen to the music, every single song. Yes. Is people who look like my wrestlers absolutely murdering each other, murdering some gay people or raping some women?

[02:46:44] Yeah. And so I just have to think and I don't say this, you know, but I just think, you know, there's there's dehumanizing language there. And I think both sides have implicit bias. You can't really see that.

[02:46:55] But gosh, that that what they want me to play during wrestling practice. There's so much rape. There is so much beat down. There's so much just bragging and bragging of murder. I don't know, man. That's always made me a little uncomfortable.

[02:47:10] Like when these things are actually happening in these vulnerable communities, it breaks my heart, you know? Sure. And that's why if you train at Lucas's gym now, he only plays Yanni. It's just hours and hours of Yanni.

[02:47:26] We thread the needle because there's like we stick with Nas and then everybody loves Nas. All right. Yeah, that's good. That's good. You know, we go that direction. So I am not promoting those songs that I'm saying. I think that's probably for the best.

[02:47:39] And I also think that that speaks also to the ideas of both intersectionality. Right. Where people can have more than one marginalized identity. Yeah. But also that just because you have a marginalized identity doesn't mean that you're not complicit in the dehumanization of someone else.

[02:48:01] Absolutely. Right. Right. Yeah. And it also becomes challenging and how to approach that, especially as like a privileged white person. Where is it my lane to bring that up? And when is it not? Not my lane. Right. Right. At all. Ever. So another one of our goofy questions.

[02:48:23] Elizabeth, someone walks in the room and says, hey, I need to put these leather boots on and jump up and down on this guy's body so we can get every last drop of his syphilitic blood out. What do you say? She looks thrilled. I broke Elizabeth.

[02:48:41] I mean, you know, so much goes through my head. Right. Because it's obviously horrific. And yes. Yes. And what is that person under the threat of when they're being asked to do this thing? Yeah, absolutely. It's not again explanations, never excuses. Yes. Yes. It's a really good point.

[02:49:07] Yeah. So you don't put the boots on. I don't put the boots on, but I probably would get shot in the firing squad and then, you know.

[02:49:16] There is a unique callous that that ER doctor or ER trauma nurse needs to create in order to do the intensity of that work. For example, I don't have I didn't have that callous in 2004 when I did a one month night rotation at Charity Hospital in the ER.

[02:49:34] My job was to tell the black moms that their young black son was killed that night and we couldn't save them. And I was there, like with them crying helpless. They were hearing the most painful news of their life.

[02:49:48] And then I was wrecked for like a week and it would happen every night. Yet I'd continue on with my shift in the ER. Nurses were like telling gallows humor, doing chest compressions. They were eaten. They were able to go back and have a normal life.

[02:50:02] And I wasn't like that month stuck with me. What is that process called where you work in death and destruction, but you're able to then go home and be like a normal human healthy? You know, is it compartmentalization? Like, what is it?

[02:50:18] Don't ask me because I can't do it. Like it is. That's not true. I do it to a certain extent. But I think one of the things that. Yeah. The dark humor is something that we do a lot. I think that you have to come like temporarily compartmentalize.

[02:50:39] But if you don't deal with those feelings afterwards, then you end up becoming apathetic. And that's very, very dangerous. As a clinician, there are people who are better at compartmentalizing than others. That's not the kind of doctor I am.

[02:50:56] So it's like sometimes it's about just sitting down and taking some deep breaths. But it is really hard when you're giving somebody bad news and then you have to go in and take care of someone who has a tummy ache. Yeah, right. Right.

[02:51:09] Or, you know, my last two weeks on trauma service as a resident, I had to tell a family that their young black son under the age of 21 was dead 14 days in a row.

[02:51:22] And I had to tell the same grandmother twice in the same two weeks because she lost two green sons in the time period of two weeks. Oh, my God. And that's part of why I decided not to practice medicine where I trained. Yeah, right. Right.

[02:51:40] Because it did break me. And it wasn't something that I didn't I thought that I could recover from. Sure.

[02:51:47] Well, if you're really struggling with the trauma, can I recommend mashing up some pig nuts with some saline and sticking them in a syringe and then charging someone like three thousand dollars for rejuvenation shot?

[02:52:02] That sounds like a really great way that you could make some money and and then not have to do that part of the job.

[02:52:09] Yeah, you know, I see and I do see that happening in medicine where people are so, so burned out and so traumatized that they're leaving to become like physician life coaches. Right. Yes. And they basically are buying into the grift. Yes. Yeah. Yes.

[02:52:29] And it's like it's it's heartbreaking and frustrating. Yeah. The wellness guys, the wellness guys that know more than doctors, they found the secret. They worked out. They worked out a bunch.

[02:52:40] They found or doctors that no longer practice clinical medicine but can help you fix your life by by prescribing a meat only diet and then ignoring every antecedent and every other factor in your life. Just meet meat only diet for everybody. Carnivore carnival fix it. Carnivore MD.

[02:52:59] I think that guy and Bush is like that, too. Oh, my God. Yes. He's got this beautiful imagery. He's really peaceful. He's got his Hawaii roots. But, you know, he really for money empowered the death of many people with his super esoteric theories.

[02:53:18] I mean, it's it's wrapped in a lot of beauty. He gets by because I'm an MD and I'm fellowship trained. And and then he has just written books and gone all the way with that. And he's part of a lot of the algorithm of that demographic that's targeted.

[02:53:33] Yes. Intentionally with that with that algorithm. And his hands are all over it. Yeah. He's probably a peace loving, amazing human. But he's made a lot of money as the MD with the fellowship training that here is actually the truth.

[02:53:45] And everybody's like, oh, he's got the fellowship training in the MD. He knows the truth. None of the other doctors do. Right, right. I do.

[02:53:53] For people listening, it is really hard when you see a doctor who's saying, you know, because I was a doctor, because I was a pharmacist or because I was an anesthesiologist, I saw behind the curtain. And now I'm telling you the truth and all the secrets.

[02:54:08] There are people who are ethical whistleblowers who are talking about important issues, about how systemic issues in the medical community are hurting people and causing trauma and causing death.

[02:54:23] However, as a general rule, you can find the grifters in that group of people because they will say, I saw behind the curtain and now I have this supplement to sell you or this happy juice or this thing here. And because I'm a doctor.

[02:54:39] So if someone's trying to sell you a product while warning you about the evils of the world that they used to work in, that's usually a red flag. People who are just ethical and trying to communicate, hey, we have some problems don't tend to attach profit to it.

[02:54:56] They just come out and say. They usually lose their jobs. They usually lose their jobs and they usually lose standing because they're going up against a system. They're not then promoting something else. Right. Especially a powder.

[02:55:09] Or a pill or a pig testicle shot in your abdomen that makes your dick harder. That's yeah. So, well, it's getting to be that time. My friends, you are tasked with choosing a winner this week, which we use winner very, very loosely here.

[02:55:29] So no one wins on human. No one wins on human. Everyone loses on human fuckery. So it's you.

[02:55:34] You can pick whoever and no one will be mad at you is the point since, you know, we let you guys don't have to pick my story because I know you or have told you to eat less dairy.

[02:55:48] Ethical concerns about you two being judges knowing Kimberly more than you know me. Everybody loses. So, so, so Edwards voice, the gristle in Edwards voice in the 1980s soundtrack, the content of his immensely disturbing story were epic. And I hope your listeners hear that and listen to it.

[02:56:18] Number one, it was such a masterful just performance. Both were so great with performance quality and sounds. However, if you use phrases like flesh parcel, like a seam, beige and crepey, you had me at flesh parcel.

[02:56:45] So I love the complex way that Kimberly described the villain as a pseudo hero. I think that's how our modern villains are wreaking havoc. Plus, just this hypomanic, just enthusiastic, engaging way that story was told.

[02:57:13] I'm going to have to say that Kimberly and Dr. Leo won the day from all right. One for Kimberly. One point for Kimberly and the goat nuts. And then poor, heavily traumatized Dr. Elizabeth with like a seam, like a seam. You could see it right.

[02:57:30] You could see that center seam on the nut sack just right down the center. Good. Dr. Elizabeth, you got to pick one. The more horrifying of the stories was definitely Edwards story. Okay. So would you say that you're voting for Edwards story?

[02:57:51] I would say I'm voting for Edwards story. All right. Split again. We're split again. Split again, kids. All right, kids, you know what that means. You're going to go over to the social media. You're going to get into the comment section.

[02:58:02] You're going to vote team Edward or you're going to vote team Kimberly. Although you could put team flesh parcel or corn purse or whatever this time. We'll know what you mean. But I guess this means that we have to have Gary release the guests.

[02:58:15] I think that's definitely what it means. Okay. Thank you guys so much. Thanks, guys. Check, check. Well, spooky nerds, that's all we've got for the month of January 2023. If you love the show and haven't already, please subscribe.

[02:58:35] And if you're feeling uber generous, please leave us a five-star review on whichever podcast platform you happen to use. If you want to follow us for some daily weird fucking stories, etc., go to our Instagram, human fuckery podcast and follow us on Twitter at human fuckery pod.

[02:58:57] And please, if you want to continue to join us throughout the month, subscribe to our Patreon. Even though we were a couple of bitches for the last two months and went on hiatus, we stayed active on our Patreon and have a wonderful guest come on

[02:59:13] to discuss some of those disturbing tales. We will see you next month with even more human fuckery. But in the meantime, please be safe, be kind, and stay weird.