Podcast 1
The following is the complete transcription from Podcast 1.
Recording: Welcome to Against the Grain podcast with Dr. Chad Edwardss where he challenges the status quo when it comes to medicine. We get into hot topics in the medical field with real stories from real patients to help you on your way to a healthy lifestyle. Get ready because we’re about to go, go, go, go Against the Grain.
Bryan Wilks: Bryan Wilks here. Dr. Chad Edwards, how are you doing?
Dr. Chad Edwards: I am doing very well, very excited for today. Yeah.
Bryan Wilks: I guess we have to give a warning stamp on this this whole podcast thing. I’m a businessman and you’re a doctor. What are we doing?
Dr. Chad Edwards: What are you thinking?
Bryan Wilks: What are you thinking? We have all this script here and all this stuff we’re supposed to say. I don’t think there’s even a chance that we get it halfway right.
Dr. Chad Edwards: You never know.
Bryan Wilks: You never know.
Dr. Chad Edwards: We’ll just do this and see what happens.
Bryan Wilks: Yeah. Not scripted, not a lot of script here, right? Just kind of an organic thing. Not professionals, right, at all?
Dr. Chad Edwards: By a definition.
Bryan Wilks: Yeah, by definition.
Dr. Chad Edwards: I did sleep at a Holiday Express.
Bryan Wilks: Let me ask you a question. We’re kind of imposters here, right? Like, we’re not real podcast people, but answer me truthfully. Are you a real doctor?
Dr. Chad Edwards: Yes, I am.
Bryan Wilks: Okay. You got to throw out some credentials. I went to college with you, right, so I have a hard time believing that. Did you really go to medical school?
Dr. Chad Edwards: Yeah.
Bryan Wilks: Okay.
Dr. Chad Edwards: I think it’s important for everybody to understand who I am and kind of how we got to this point. Who are we talking to and what are we trying to say.
Bryan Wilks: Sure.
Dr. Chad Edwards: I am a real physician.
Bryan Wilks: Wow.
Dr. Chad Edwards: I did go to real medical school.
Bryan Wilks: Very cool.
Dr. Chad Edwards: A medical school in the United States.
Bryan Wilks: Online?
Dr. Chad Edwards: No.
Bryan Wilks: Okay.
Dr. Chad Edwards: I actually went to class.
Bryan Wilks: Okay, right.
Dr. Chad Edwards: I went to Oklahoma State University College of Osteopathic Medicine, so I’m a D.O., osteopathic physician, fully licensed to practice medicine. Board certified in Family Medicine by the American Board of Family Medicine. I did my residency at Womack Army Medical Center, so I was a military physician for several years. Prior to medical school I had some experience. I did a lot of medicine with the military, worked with a lot of medics. I was an athletic trainer in college. We worked with athletes. Those kinds of things. It’s been a lot of my passion. Always very active in martial arts and working out, different things like that. A little bit of my background. I had a very, very traditional training. In other words, went to traditional medical school, and went through regular, normal residency. Yet, my practice of medicine today is very, very different, and that’s a lot of what I want to talk about in this podcast.
Bryan Wilks: We sent to college together, right? You’ve always been, in my opinion, a guy who’s serious about medicine, serious about health. Quite an impressive background. I’m in your network here and I think all of my friends would attest that you’re a guy that knows medicine in and out. One of the things I think you’re most well known for is understanding a lot of the things that we would traditionally believe would help us actually is hurting us, right? Dr.
Chad Edwards: Absolutely.
Bryan Wilks: You were in the system, right. Like you said, you went to medical school. You were a doctor at a reputable hospital here in town and you saw some things first hand that you thought you would want to change, right?
Dr. Chad Edwards: Yeah, without question. That was kind of a process. What happened was … After residency, again very traditional residency. We saw 15-20 minute appointments. Patients would come in and it was almost like cattle call. Very, very, very busy, large clinics. Bring patients in, we’d spend a few minutes with them, We’d say, “Here’s your problem, here’s your pill. Out the door, see you …
Bryan Wilks: Business
Dr. Chad Edwards: … in three months or whatever. I didn’t view it as business because I’m a doctor in the Army. I don’t worry about money. I don’t worry about exchanging hands. I don’t care about the prices the patient has to pay, because they didn’t have to worry about prices and those kinds of things. It was covered in the clinic. I started seeing some problems with systems and those kinds of things. I had these patients that came in and it was this very nagging feeling in my gut. They would come in and complain and say, “I’ve got this issue.” I went to Dr. So-and-So and they said that there was nothing wrong with me. I got my labs and reviewed them and they said, “You know, there’s nothing wrong with you.” I had some people that were close to me, some women in their late 20s were kind of falling apart, and they were on sleeping medicines. They were on antidepressants and there was this whole thing. It was …
Bryan Wilks: Almost like a cycle, right?
Dr. Chad Edwards: Absolutely.
Bryan Wilks: Like this absolutely mad cycle that people go through.
Dr. Chad Edwards: It was almost like everybody was doing that.
Bryan Wilks: Right.
Dr. Chad Edwards: I was just shocked.
Bryan Wilks: Right.
Dr. Chad Edwards: They would go to their doctor and they would say, “Hey, here’s this problem with me and so we would get our routine set of labs and we’d say, “Well, your labs are normal. There’s nothing wrong with you,” or, “It’s all in your head,” or a common one is, “Well, you know you’re just another year older.” It’s just this load of crap that we don’t really know what it is and so we just say there’s nothing wrong with you. I wasn’t helping those patients. That was very, very frustrating. When they were really, really, really sick … You know, we have this spectrum. On one end you have optimal health; on the other hand you’re on the fast track to death. There’s this whole spectrum. These people, if they’re way on the far end, like they’re like sick and dying kind of thing, you’ve got like massive blood pressure, massive heart problems, you have cancers, you have different things like that. That’s where we as physicians work. We function under what’s called the International Classification Of Diseases. That’s how we code things. Recently a few months ago we lodged ICD10 International Classification Of Diseases. If you have high blood pressure it’s an I10, I-1-0. That’s your code for that diagnosis. That’s a disease. So that’s where we function, we function in disease. The problem is that I had these patients that were otherwise relatively healthy but felt bad, and they would get their labs and there’s no disease, so there’s nothing that we can code. We have to say, “Well, there’s nothing wrong with you.” When your paradigm is that you focus on disease, and there is no disease, then there’s no problem. Go tell that to all these patients that feel bad. They feel awful. They have all these issues, but there labs are normal. That put me on a path to trying to optimize health and figure out some of these things. Then I got into … Listened to Robb Wolf’s podcast and he talked about the Paleo solution and the Paleo diet. That guy’s just brilliant, knows a lot about biochemistry and nutrition and it’s effect on the body, and it really caused me to start shifting. There were some other things. There is a procedure I do called Prolotherapy that was just ground-breaking that changed people in a way that nothing else that I did in medicine could do. It really caused me to think, “I’ve been wrong about some things. “If I’m wrong about this then what else have I been wrong about?” It’s kind of like opening Pandora’s box. You go to open that box and there’s no closing it. Then you start discovering, thyroid, maybe it’s not abnormal but it’s not optimal. Then, do you want to be optimal, or do you want to be normal.
Bryan Wilks: You know, one of the things, this from an outsider’s perspective. I’m a regular guy. Own a business. I’ve got kids. I’m not wrapped up into the medical field. I’m not even getting paid to do this, which I’d like to file an official complaint later. I might even do Worker’s Comp. Stuff, or whatever, however I need to get paid.
Dr. Chad Edwards: You’ll have to get in line.
Bryan Wilks: Right. Like you, I have a passion for improving things. I’ll tell you, I think, for a guy like me that might be listening to this podcast, we get lost in the details, people do. We hear doctors talk about how to do things, but for us, for the person that’s in the exam room, this is how bad it is for us. My mom had pancreatic cancer. You know this. You treat my father who has Parkinson’s, which you’ve been absolutely great to him. For us we’re sitting in an exam room with my mother. We were told she was cancer free from pancreatic cancer, after a year of battling it. We come back to the doctor. We’re sitting in the exam room and he says, “Your cancer has come back. It’s all over. It’s metastasized. It’s all over your body.” He goes through this whole thing. The only thing we really hear is that cancer is back. I have no idea what he said in between, okay. He really doctored it up.
Dr. Chad Edwards: Right.
Bryan Wilks: I just asked one basic question. This seems odd? I mean that’s an earth-breaking question, right. That seems odd because last week she didn’t have any cancer, seems rapid. He looks at the screen again. He goes, “Oh, my bad. I have the wrong person up on the screen.” Flips the screen. It was a male, by-the-way. How do you miss that? You know what I mean, come on. Flips my mom’s chart over and, of course, she’s cancer free. For the average person, what I hear, and you, and I think why it matters to you is, what I just heard you say is, “We’re in a system that doesn’t even allow doctors to think anymore.” We don’t have to get deep about it, right? You didn’t even have the ability when you were in the system, before you created your own clinic and really spend time with patients, and you spent a lot of time with my dad, to even think about the basic things, right? I mean, that’s where you start.
Dr. Chad Edwards: That’s exactly right. It’s not that physicians don’t care. It’s not that they don’t want to do different. It’s that it’s really an upstream, it’s an uphill battle, it’s going Against the Grain …
Bryan Wilks: Right.
Dr. Chad Edwards: … to try and do something different, because you’re reimbursed by insurance companies. The insurance company dictates how much you get paid, and it’s not what kind of car the physician is driving. It’s not how much money they’re making. It’s being able to keep the lights on. From a primary care perspective, it’s about keeping the lights on.
Bryan Wilks: Right.
Dr. Chad Edwards: You’re barely making the bill payments. You know that Medicare is going to cut reimbursement by 5%, or 10%, or whatever it is that’s next on the agenda. This comes 100% out of any potential profit. It’s why physicians are moving more toward a hospital-based, being employed, because hospitals are paid better than clinics.
Bryan Wilks: Right.
Dr. Chad Edwards: Just the whole paradigm of the thing. Physicians are forced into this model where the only option is to go faster, is to see more patients per day. You either spend more time at the clinic and spend less time with your family, or you see more patients in …
Bryan Wilks: You go get all this education, clearly have an impressive background, right? Really the reason why you’re doing this podcast, you’ve done all these amazing things outside of the box, is because, as a physician, you don’t even have time to think in that box, right? You don’t even have to think. I’m a patient, I have cancer, even basic stuff, you don’t even have time to think about, right?
Dr. Chad Edwards: That’s right. When you got a patient that has multiple problems … With functional medicine we don’t look at you only have one problem. You are an entire organism that has multiple systems, an endocrine system and cardiovascular system, and all these are very interconnected, and they all work together. You can’t separate them out and say, “Well, we’re going to focus on this and it doesn’t have an effect on those.” The human body does not work that way. It is very intertwined and interconnected. You have to spend time reviewing the whole picture. You can’t do that in 10 minutes, it’s impossible. You can have someone come in. Their blood pressure is up. You can give them a pill and they can go out. When all you have is 10 minutes what other option do you expect? We get frustrated that our physicians don’t spend enough time with us. We as physicians get frustrated that our patients don’t listen to us, but when you don’t have any time what do you expect? How do you do different?
Bryan Wilks: People that are going to come to your clinic, or people that are going to look elsewhere in a doctor, or in a clinic that they can, family medicine or whatever it might be, specialist, what are the action steps that a person looks for for the basic things, when they’re looking to find a doctor? How can they find a place? What are a symptoms of a place that actually spends time with their patient? How do you find these people? I’m listening to this podcast. That’s great, but how do I find people that care?
Dr. Chad Edwards: Yeah. There’s a couple of things that you brought up. The first one is, as far as this podcast and the intent of this podcast, I spend 30 minutes with my patient. We sometimes book out more. We don’t file through insurance so we have the flexibility of spending more time with our patients. Depending on their issues, we may need to spend a lot of time. Who needs more time? Who needs a deeper look? This podcast … Having 30 minutes often is not enough time and we’ll see a lot of the same things, a lot of similarities. One of my goals is to educate people on, “You have this condition. Here’s the problem. The problem is bigger than we think.” There’s a lot of medical evidence that we’ll review. There are a lot of medical studies that we’re going to introduce, and we’re going to look at both sides, and we’re going to go Against the Grain on some of these things. I think we’ve lost our, to quote Billy Madison, The Puppy That’s Lost It’s Way.
Bryan Wilks: That’s powerful, Chad, ripping stuff. Chad, you go to the deep quotes, that’s great.
Dr. Chad Edwards: I try. I was up late last night looking that one up. That’s right. Looking for … How can we enhance patient care without booking out an hour and going over the same kinds of things over and over. Let’s talk about these topics and get them out there. Let’s educate people on what’s going on. How do you find a physician? First of all, you’ve got the interpersonal. You want those kinds of things. I would argue that an insurance-driven system works against quality patient care. Now, we’re going to identify disease. We’re going to treat disease, but we’re not enhancing one patient’s optimal health, because you don’t have time for it.
Bryan Wilks: I would venture to say that again an average listener here probably doesn’t fully understand what you mean by an insurance-driven system. Of course, someone who pays for your medical care via insurance, right?
Dr. Chad Edwards: Correct.
Bryan Wilks: You submit the bill to insurance, right?
Dr. Chad Edwards: Right.
Bryan Wilks: I think the average person, “What other kind of doctor is there?” How does that work?
Dr. Chad Edwards: In our clinic we are pure cash. When someone comes to see us they write us a check, put it on their credit card, pay us cash, whatever. What that does is it gets the insurance company out of the seat in the exam room. Our focus is on the patient. I don’t answer to an insurance company, I answer to the patient.
Bryan Wilks: Okay.
Dr. Chad Edwards: Now, we have to do things within guidelines, of course, but my relationship is the doctor/patient relationship, period. I don’t have a relationship …
Bryan Wilks: They’re paying you.
Dr. Chad Edwards: That’s correct.
Bryan Wilks: In other words, I think anybody can understand this, the insurance/doctor/patient relationship, the doctor’s customer isn’t the patient, it’s the insurance provider?
Dr. Chad Edwards: That’s absolutely right, and it’s driven by contracts and you’re bound by this, and if you spend too much time with all of your patients you open yourself up to an audit. You’re over-coding. You’re spending too much time. These are things that I’ve seen in the past. An insurance-driven system, we think it saves us money, but the reality is that we’re being deceived by a lot of things. This is kind of one of those Against the Grain-type topics, is that we are being deceived. We’re told that insurance saves you money and it simply does not.
Bryan Wilks: Oh, Chad, oh, Chad, when you said that I thought of the non-HIPAA violation story time. Hold on, we’ve got a button for it.
RecordingHIPAA: HIPAA, Health Insurance Portability And Accountability Act.
Bryan Wilks: That is so baller. Seriously, am I the best host ever, possibly? First time I get that button right.
Dr. Chad Edwards: The jury’s out right now.
Bryan Wilks: Transition. Okay, so give me an example, a real-time, there’s supposed to be a real story here of someone who was on a traditional insurance model. For me again, I want to hear how I didn’t pay a lot more money through you.
Dr. Chad Edwards: That’s actually pretty easy. I had a patient. We’ll call her Sally. She came to see my nurse practitioner. At the time, my nurse practitioner was working at another clinic that was in network with insurance. She came to see my nurse practitioner twice. Came to see her twice. The first time she saw her she did the codes for a new patient visit. Spent about 30 minutes with her. Ordered a series of lab tests. Got an EKG and then had her do a follow up. On follow up she spent about 28 minutes with her, so she got a total of about 58 minutes, and reviewed the EKG and the lab work. Now, this patient has insurance, but it’s a high-deductible insurance plan, or her deductible had not been met. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got $1000, or if you’ve got $10,000, if your deductible isn’t met, it’s all coming out of your pocket.
Bryan Wilks: You’ve got to get there before you can get the insurance to pay for it.
Dr. Chad Edwards: That’s right. That’s right. This in-network clinic billed her … Because of the contracts you have to bill what’s the agreed-upon charge.
Bryan Wilks: The rate.
Dr. Chad Edwards: That’s correct.
Bryan Wilks: You pre-establish rates. Most people don’t know that. You pre-establish rates with insurance providers.
Dr. Chad Edwards: The insurance provider establishes the rate.
Bryan Wilks: Okay.
Dr. Chad Edwards: Not the doctor’s office. The doctor’s office is going to charge as much as they can. The insurance company says we’re gonna cover this, because of the contract. That’s what you agreed to.
Bryan Wilks: You know you’ll never have a real job again? You’re letting people know stuff that they’ll kill you for, right?
Dr. Chad Edwards: Yeah. I got it.
Bryan Wilks: Keep going, though, I like it. Just realize that.
Dr. Chad Edwards: Because her deductible was not met, they were contractually obligated to bill the patient for the full amount. They also got labs and they got an EKG. Because of those two visits, the labs, and the EKG, her bill was over $800, because of the way that network thing goes.
Bryan Wilks: It’s all out of pocket until she meets that deductible?
Dr. Chad Edwards: That’s correct. In our clinic, the way our current system runs, she would have been seen twice. She would have gotten an EKG, she would have gotten lab work, and her bill would have been $300. We are out of network. We don’t file insurance. We give the patient the paperwork. If they so desire they can file on their own. They’ll often get reimbursed. Now for her, her deductible wasn’t met anyway so it wouldn’t have mattered. It could go to her deductible. We could have saved her over $500 by going out of network. There’s also no pressure on, “You’ve got to go faster, because at the end of the day you’ve got to keep the lights on. If you don’t go fast enough, you don’t see enough patients to generate enough revenue that you can keep your lights on over time, and you will have to close your doors, because it will be a money-losing venture.
Bryan Wilks: Again, let’s go back to this girl’s story. Basically she’s paid $800 out of her pocket, would have paid $800 out of her pocket, or did pay $800.
Dr. Chad Edwards: She did.
Bryan Wilks: She did. Got less care. Would have been cheaper and better care?
Dr. Chad Edwards: Well, the care. We’re talking about it was the same nurse practitioner in either scenario, same level of care, but at almost a third of the cost.
Bryan Wilks: Wow. I just don’t believe … I think the majority of people out there, probably big businesses promoting this. You realize, and I do too, as a business owner, dealing with insurance myself, that the hospitals, the insurance people, they’re all big business, they’re all connected, and they do not want people to know that a cash-based, like your clinic is cash, they don’t want people to know that it’s cheaper and better. They do not want to know that. They have a vested interest in promoting the opposite, right.
Dr. Chad Edwards: I don’t look at that kind of whole thing. I stay down in the trenches …
Bryan Wilks: Right, with the people.
Dr. Chad Edwards: Right.
Bryan Wilks: I know that. I’m a businessman. I’m telling you, I’ve dealt with them.
Dr. Chad Edwards: Actually there are a lot of businesses that are looking for cheaper ways and a direct-care model, which is the patient comes in, pays us, actually can save them a lot of money. The reason for that is because when you … For example, I have considered multiple times having an in-network arm in my clinic. In order for me to bill insurance, I can either do it by myself, which means I either have to pay someone to do it because I don’t have time, so I either have to pay them, put them on my payroll, or these companies will bill for me and they will take care of that, and they collect 7% off the top. Now, if I charge $100 and I’m paying someone else I now make $90, no, 7%, $93 …
Bryan Wilks: Right.
Dr. Chad Edwards: … instead of the $100. I’ve lost $7 right off the bat. Now, my electric bill is the same. My internet bill is the same. My EMR bill is the same. All my medical supplies are the same. I still pay my front office person the same. My office manager, my nurses, all of them get paid the same amount of money. Where does the $7 comes from? It comes from my pocket. That means if I want to be able to pay all of my bills I have to see an extra patient, which means I now have either less time with my family or less time with each patient. It’s just the numbers. Dave Ramsey did an excellent job of talking about The Affordable Care Act and it’s impact and it’s just a numbers game. It doesn’t matter which side of the aisle you … I’m not interested in discussing politics, but it doesn’t matter which side of the aisle you fall on, it’s a number’s game.
Bryan Wilks: It’s just smart. It’s using your brain, right, to figure it out?
Dr. Chad Edwards: Right. With insurance your costs go up. There’s more hands in the pot. You need a billing company. You have to have a coder, you have to have this. I don’t mess with any of that. I want for that patient when they come in 100% of their money goes toward their medical care.
Bryan Wilks: Yeah, and the medical provider, again, to end on this topic, is incentivized directly with the consumer. That’s their consumer. The patient is their consumer.
Dr. Chad Edwards: Right.
Bryan Wilks: I don’t perform for you. I don’t make you better. I don’t increase my skills to make you healthier. One, if you’re no longer here I don’t get anymore money, right? I’m not in a system that is that way. It incentivizes to keep their patients around longer. It’s not a turn and burn thing. The other thing is if I’m the patient and I’m not happy you don’t get the money directly anymore, right?
Dr. Chad Edwards: Sure.
Bryan Wilks: Insurance isn’t the main key.
Dr. Chad Edwards: That kind of brings up another point and that’s how insurance pays. There’s covered services. One of the things that I wanted to discuss in this podcast is, again, how we’re being deceived. Another way we’re being deceived is that how we consider things medical problems and how we consider things beneficial. A lot of that is based on what we call evidence-based medicine. We do these studies to determine … If we want to use drug X and we want to know what’s the outcome, who funds that study? Well, it’s the manufacturer of drug X a vast majority of the time. The results of that study will say drug X does this. Insurance companies look at those studies. These things are “proven” to be beneficial so that’s what we’re going to do. Talking about Prolotherapy, I was talking with one of my colleagues a couple or few years ago and we were discussing Prolotherapy. His statement actually was, “Well, there’s no evidence that it works.” With Prolotherapy, again, there’s nothing that I’ve done in medicine that’s been as consistently effective as Prolotherapy. We’ll talk about Prolotherapy in the future. I know this works. It’s consistently over time in case series reports been shown to be in excess of 85% effective. When I do Prolotherapy on patients for musculoskeletal problems, knee pain, back pain, neck pain, fill in the blanks, they walk out feeling better over 85% of the time. It’s phenomenal, but, yet, the studies, and we’ll talk about this on a future podcast, will say, “It doesn’t work.” I know better than that, and so my colleagues will look at this, it’s called the Cochrane Review, and they’ll look at the Cochrane Review on Prolotherapy because they just don’t have time, because they’re too busy seeing 25 or 30 patients a day because insurance is paying less and they’ve got to get it all in. They don’t have time to dig into the research. That’s one of the things that I want to do in this podcast is dig into the research and present the other side of the story. Kind of a Paul Harvey’s Here’s The Rest Of The Story.
Bryan Wilks: The other side. If you’re over 35 you know who Paul Harvey is.
Dr. Chad Edwards: He didn’t die that long ago, Bryan.
Bryan Wilks: We’ve got a young’un here on the set now.
Dr. Chad Edwards: A young’un?
Bryan Wilks: Yeah, a young’un. Huh, 2009. We actually got a research team. There’s like 20 people here who do like fact checking.
Dr. Chad Edwards: Right.
Bryan Wilks: You don’t know your facts when it comes to Paul Harvey, but you’re a great doctor, I’ll tell you that much.
Speaker 5: Born in Tulsa.
Bryan Wilks: Paul Harvey was born in Tulsa?
Dr. Chad Edwards: Yeah, he was.
Bryan Wilks: Wow. Wow.
Dr. Chad Edwards: Yeah, that’s the rest of the story, Bryan.
Bryan Wilks: That is the rest of the story right there.
Dr. Chad Edwards: Anyway, presenting the other side of that data, because the data can be very misleading.
Bryan Wilks: Right.
Dr. Chad Edwards: We’re going to dig down into some of this stuff.
Bryan Wilks: That’s great. That’s great. I think most [inaudible 00:26:27] is probably, it sounds like an effective treatment, doesn’t even know what Prolotherapy is, right?
Dr. Chad Edwards: That’s correct. When my colleague said that, “There’s no evidence that this works.”
Bryan Wilks: Right.
Dr. Chad Edwards: One of the studies, and this is kind of one of the big points here. We’ll often have these segments where we’re going Against the Grain and we’re saying some of these topics for … What’s that one that’s Why Is This Going Against the Grain? One of the things is, this study that was published in the British Medical Journal is looking at observation data versus randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blinded studies, things that are “proven to be beneficial.” The gold standard in medicine is this randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blinded study. You’re testing and intervention. You’ve got two groups of people. One of them is going to get this; one of them is not, and you’re going to see what’s the difference. That’s kind of the gold standard.
Bryan Wilks: Right, right.
Dr. Chad Edwards: This observation data is where we do something and then we observe the effect, and so often we will dismiss observational data. We’ll say, “we don’t have the other kind of study so we’ll dismiss it altogether. We’re basically throwing the baby out with the bathwater. When my colleague says, “Well, there’s no evidence that it works,” it’s dismissing the potential benefit for this. Prolotherapy is something that, in the right hands, has very little, if any, risk. In fact, C. Everett Koop, former Surgeon General of the United States under President Reagan. I know that’s going back.
Bryan Wilks: Yeah, I don’t know who that guy is.
Dr. Chad Edwards: He was the …
Bryan Wilks: When did he die? Fact check.
Dr. Chad Edwards: Recently.
Bryan Wilks: What year? Not recently. Ronald Reagan didn’t die recently.
Dr. Chad Edwards: I’m not talking about Reagan. I’m talking about Koop.
Bryan Wilks: Oh, Koop, okay. I definitely do not know who he is.
Dr. Chad Edwards: Anyway. He said, “The nice thing about Prolotherapy, if properly done, is that it cannot do any harm.” That was a lead physician in the country in the 1980s. We’re talking about something that’s very safe and is potentially very effective, but yet the Cochrane Review shows that it doesn’t work. Observational data shows that it absolutely works. This paper from the British Medical Journal, published in 2003, excellent, excellent point, and it’s kind of an in-the-face statement about dismissing observation data. I want to read this to you real quick. This was there conclusion at the end of this study. The name of the study, I don’t remember the full name, but it will be in the show notes somewhere. It was about the use of parachutes to prevent death during airborne operations. So, should you use a parachute? Let’s see what the studies say. There are no randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blinded studies on the use of parachutes, so their conclusion was that it didn’t work. This is their statement. “As with many interventions intended to prevent ill health, the effectiveness of parachutes has not been subjected to rigorous evaluation by using randomized controlled trials. Advocates of evidence-based medicine have criticized the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence-based medicine organized and participated in a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled crossover trial of the parachute” Basically what they’re telling them is jump out of an airplane without a parachute and tell us how it works out for you.
Bryan Wilks: Yeah. Seems like a great idea.
Dr. Chad Edwards: I read that study and it was hilarious because we’re dismissing so many potentially effective therapies because there’s no randomized, controlled trial on this thing. It’s, in my opinion, not appropriate.
Bryan Wilks: I think that’s a great example, because, again, to go back to the average Joe that goes to the doctor, I think that’s how most people walk out of their doctor’s office feeling, is the doctor has said, “Heck if I know if you need a parachute, just jump.” Why? “Well, we gave this to the last 20 patients so we’re just assuming that it will work on you.” The problem is, that’s my mom, that’s my dad, that’s my life, and it’s pretty important, right? As we wind this down, as we wind this podcast down, it’s interesting to me that you gave that example, because I think all this started, the reason you are personally paying for this podcast, right, and investing in these things, and taking a leap of faith into these things is because you’ve seen for too long, probably, patients being asked to jump out of an airplane and they don’t know if they have a parachute or not, right?
Dr. Chad Edwards: That’s correct.
Bryan Wilks: That’s kind of the passion behind it, right?
Dr. Chad Edwards: Right.
Bryan Wilks: That’s the whole point of the deal.
Dr. Chad Edwards: That’s right. There are so many studies that will say one thing and we misinterpret it and extrapolate it across patients that were never intended to deal with this, and we’ll dig into that. There’s a lot of stuff out there that we can dig into. We want to hit topics that are pertinent to people, and the questions that people have. Why did my doctor say this?
Bryan Wilks: Right.
Dr. Chad Edwards: Why won’t they listen? Why do I feel bad? We’re going to address all of those things.
Bryan Wilks: For me personally, Chad, I don’t know that there are a lot of resources for that right now, where I can go get that kind of information.
Dr. Chad Edwards: Right. Chris Kresser is an acupuncturist out of California. He’s got a great podcast, but he’s not a physician, so I’m not aware of any physicians doing this kind of thing, so I’m pretty excited about it.
Bryan Wilks: Me too. I have no idea why you asked me to come on the show, but I’m fairly sure I can do your accounting and your finance side of it and only charge you let’s say 80% of the proceeds.
Dr. Chad Edwards: That’s awesome.
Bryan Wilks: Does that sound good?
Dr. Chad Edwards: Sure.
Bryan Wilks: Okay, we have it on record. That’s great. Good way to end the show. I appreciate you, Chad for making that deal.
Dr. Chad Edwards: I appreciate you, Bryan.
Bryan Wilks: I appreciate you.
Recording: Thanks for listening to this week’s podcast with Dr. Chad Edwards. Tune in next week where we’ll be going Against the Grain.
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