Latest / Radically Genuine / 121. History & Untold Harms of Hormonal Birth Control w/ Mike Gaskins

Transcript

121. History & Untold Harms of Hormonal Birth Control w/ Mike Gaskins · Radically Genuine

• Welcome to the Radically Genuine Podcast. I am Dr. Roger McFillin. Showing something like six decades ago, research was underway on the use of synthetic hormones as a contraceptive. At the time, natural female hormones were barely understood. The health implications were barely comprehended. Only the fact that pregnancy would be averted was acknowledged and harrowed. heralded as an advancement for women's liberation, feminism, and freedom. Fast forward to today. Though we know so much more about the problems associated with disrupting natural hormones and rhythms, it's all brushed under the rug, and the anti-fertility impacts are applauded, but at what cost to women's health? If you went to the toxicology site at the US National Institutes of Health, you would find the ingredients of birth control pills listed as endocrine disruptors. You can easily access the environmental medicine research to see the impact of these birth control chemicals on wildlife and our environment. In these articles, these chemicals are always labeled as endocrine disruptors. not hormones. The fact that they are marketed widely around the world as contraceptives and are called hormones by most who don't understand them is a problem in the mass communication and understanding of what the birth control pill is. They are synthetic chemicals made in a factory and chemicals have consequences. It's painful to have to reject what has come to be seen as the ticket to female freedom and independence from unwanted pregnancies. The problem is that most women, almost all men, and most doctors are unaware of the history of hormonal contraception, the known harms, and the unfortunate results of a human experiment that has now spanned 60 plus years. Sean (02:17.644) This conversation today is about learning more. How many women experience known mood dysregulation from hormonal birth control and are then placed on mind and mood altering psychiatric drugs as they're labeled with a mental illness? What are the known risks to these endocrine disruptors? What do women need to know? To answer these questions and more, I invited Mike Gaskins onto the podcast. Mike is an author and media producer who began his journey as a women's health advocate after a world renowned physician lied to him about birth control side effects. This chance encounter triggered a passion for research that led Mike to discover many shocking levels of deceit and misinformation surrounding these potent drugs. He frequently writes, for a number of websites and his book, In the Name of the Pill, explores the dubious nature of both the history and science of hormonal birth control. The book is well-researched with established scientific and historical facts. I learned a lot reading this book. It's a compelling argument to immediately look into the widespread emotional and health-related consequences. associated with hormonal contraceptives. Mike, I want to welcome you to the Radically Genuine Podcast. Mike Gaskins (03:46.015) Thank you so much for having me on. I've been looking forward to this. Sean (03:49.592) Yeah, it's great to have you. As I mentioned earlier, I'm a big fan of the book. It was just easy to read. The stories were compelling. And it's just historically and scientifically accurate. But Mike, I'll tell you what, it's not common for a man to be speaking out on this issue and on women's health in general, if you're not an established health care expert or professional. So what is your story that got you here? Mike Gaskins (04:12.758) Well, it's funny that exact fact I let get in my way for a long time. I held onto this information and kept researching. And for a long time, I thought I wanted to do a documentary ultimately because video is my background. But I kept thinking I need a female producer to work with me because a guy can't tell this story, right? And then I kind of wanted to start writing articles, but I felt like I'm not a woman, I'm not a PhD, I'm not an MD. What right do I have to even have a voice in this? So I kind of put up those obstacles on myself for a long time. And it was another woman who was writing for one of the websites I write for now. She had written an article on the Nelson-Peel hearings, which I'm pretty obsessed with. And so I reached out to her and started chatting. And she was like, wow, you know, you've dug so much into this. Would you be interested in writing articles? So it was like, okay, that kind of gave me the, okay, she's approving of me writing about it. So I'll give it a go. And I've actually been surprised how, how few times I've been challenged on, you know, what right do you have to talk about this? Uh, it's pretty surprising really how many women are excited to have a man who does care and wants to talk about these things. Sean (05:26.2) Yeah, this is kind of like fight club. You know, you just don't talk about it. Especially. I mean, we have three men in the room right now having a conversation about something that from a, a women's liberation standpoint has been, you know, something that has allowed them to progress in their careers and have more control over things that historically they may not have had control over. So I understand the hesitancy, especially for you on your end. Mike Gaskins (05:46.679) Right. Mike Gaskins (05:50.166) Well, and it's in retrospect, it's shocking how much we buy into that narrative, right? The don't talk about it. You know, one of the things I share in the book talking about sterility, I remember when we got pregnant with our daughter, I was telling a friend of ours that we were pregnant and he was like, don't mention it in front of my wife yet because they were going through some fertility issues and trying to figure it out. And he wondered aloud, you know, could it be all the years on birth control? And we started to have that conversation about how weird would it be if birth control can contribute to... Sean (05:56.244) Mm-hmm. Mike Gaskins (06:20.062) all this IVF and everything we have in the world now, and we never hear about it. But then we just kind of shrugged it off and moved on. We don't dig deeper into these conversations. We just kind of, wouldn't it be weird if birth control contributed to this? And we just move on. Another side of that is my wife, when she was first prescribed birth control long before I had any interest in it, I happened to be there when she was opening a package and the patient information pamphlet fell to the floor. And I started unwinding the whole thing and opening it up and, and was asking her, you know, has, did the doctor talk to you about all these side effects? Because some of them were really concerning because of her family history. And he hadn't, he hadn't mentioned anything. And so we had that discussion and it was a really great discussion for us about, and I told her is like, at the end of our lives, if this means we have one less day together, it's not worth it. I don't want you taking it. I'm not going to tell you what to do. But it's weird that as her husband, I felt kind of like, hey, it's your body. I have no role in telling you my opinion. And I feel really bad about that now that I felt like I wasn't allowed even to discuss it with her. And then beyond that, it never crossed my mind to discuss it with my sisters, my nieces, anyone else who could be being injured by these because I was a man and it's their thing. I'm not allowed to have an opinion on it. But I was, you know, I totally bought into that narrative for most of my life. Sean (07:49.364) It's shocking as a clinical psychologist trained to treat emotional and behavioral disorders, it is absolutely shocking how this really important information is just left out of our curriculums. You know, obviously I'm trained to understand kind of medical conditions that they've been diagnosed with and any drugs that they may be on, but many people don't even consider being on birth control a drug, so they're not even going to report it. Mike Gaskins (08:15.37) Right, right. Sean (08:17.228) And then the use of birth control along with other pharmaceutical interventions they may be on. Yeah. Like the combination of those is where things get really complicated. Yeah. And that's where the, I want this story to kind of be told today and just kind of figure out how did we get here to get to the point where it's absolutely so normalized number one, and that we just actually don't understand or talk about the risks and harms that are associated with it. So Mike, this started with a chance encounter with. really renowned physician in an area of autoimmune conditions. Can you tell us that story? Mike Gaskins (08:51.502) Yeah, so I do a lot of live events and I was doing an event in Vegas on autoimmune disease. The entire conference was on autoimmunity for all these different specialties. And it was for continuing medical education. And so the first night, their keynote speaker was Dr. Noel Rose from Johns Hopkins University and he's called the father of autoimmune disease. He was studying Hashimoto's thyroiditis and rabbits in the late 50s. And he came up with this notion of the body's immune system attacking itself. Um, and he gave it the name autoimmune disease. And so he's given kind of a broad brushstrokes presentation to all these doctors and he starts out by saying, we've known from the beginning, estrogen plays a key role in autoimmunity because of the role it plays in a woman's immune system, especially in her reproductive years, he starts talking about T cells and how there's soldiers of the immune system and how our natural estrogen attaches to those soldiers. And that's what. arms them and gives them their marching orders. But when chemicals get in our system that mimic natural estrogen, suddenly the soldier's armed, but it doesn't know what to attack, right? So as he's talking, and I didn't know anything about endocrine disruptors, you know, or anything like that. And so as he's talking, I thought, well, what could mimic natural estrogen? And the only thing I could think of was birth control, you know, because it's the only thing actually designed to mimic natural estrogen. And so I Google rise of autoimmune disease. And I see since 1970, all of these diseases have started to skyrocket. And I think, well, this has to be what he's talking about. And so I told my audio guy, I was like, I want to take the mic off him. I'm really fascinated by this. And so I go up, approach him afterwards, take the mic off. And I said, so exactly what role does birth control play in all this? And he said, Oh, none at all. And I was baffled, but I believed him because he's the world renowned authority, right? I wasn't questioning him and I said, well, that's counterintuitive. It makes no sense based on everything you just said. And he kind of doubled down. He said, no, there's no evidence linking birth control to any of these diseases. That was, wow, okay. It still didn't make sense, but I believed him. I got back to my hotel room that night and I was still thinking about it. And then just out of air, I pulled lupus and I Googled lupus plus oral contraceptives. Mike Gaskins (11:05.354) And I found this new study that showed that women who take birth control are 50% more likely to be diagnosed with lupus. And so I thought, wow, maybe Dr. Rose hasn't heard about this. I'll find him tomorrow at the conference and share it with him and see what his thoughts are. But I keep reading the article and I, yeah, Dr. Google is their favorite source, right? So I get about halfway down the article, keep reading, and there's a quote from him, from Dr. Rose, saying this study doesn't mean that women should stop taking birth control. And so then I felt... Sean (11:18.66) Doctors love that, by the way. Mike Gaskins (11:34.87) gas lit, right? I think in a lot of ways, I felt like a lot of women do when they're questioning birth control and their doctor tells them something and they ultimately find out it's a lie. It's like, why would he tell me that? Why would he lie to me? And so it just kind of threw me into that rabbit hole that, you know, it kind of made me angry. It made me want to find out more, made me want to keep digging. And I've just kind of never stopped from that moment. Sean (12:00.464) Let's go back to when the birth control was originally evaluated and approved. How was this drug studied? So what do you know about the clinical trials that brought this to the FDA? How did the FDA approve it? Mike Gaskins (12:18.442) Well, I know that I don't know the full story still, as long as I've been digging. Because even after the book came out, Abby Epstein and Ricky Lake were producing a documentary and Abby was the director and she started, I helped them some on some of the historical elements that they were pulling together and they were archiving all these documents that they were finding. And she sent me an article that they found talking about birth control trials in Kentucky, which is where I'm from originally, and I had never heard anything about it. Everybody knows about the Puerto Rican trials, but there were also trials in Kentucky, in the slums of LA, and apparently some trials in Haiti I haven't been able to find any information on. But the trials in Puerto Rico, what we do know is pretty bad. Morton Mince in the Washington Post called it a scientific scandal. They looked at 132 women for 12 consecutive months. And that was kind of their basis for presenting to the FDA. And Morton Mintz said, that's fewer women that will die this year alone. And this was in 1970 before they had kind of reached full scale, but that's more women that are gonna die than this year alone. And it's for only 12 months. And we're talking about giving this chronically to healthy patients to take for 15, 20, 25 years, who knows how long. So it wasn't enough of a trial size or duration to really make those. claims. Sean (13:46.04) pharmaceutical industry has a kind of a dubious history of experimenting on impoverished women, children, and men to try to determine the efficacy of a certain drug. Now, is it safe to say that we really don't know whether these drugs are safe at all, based on any sound clinical trial or evidence that was that was conducted? Is that safe to say? Mike Gaskins (14:14.118) I think it's still safe to say that today. Even Morton Mintz in the foreword of his book wrote that he and his wife were members of Planned Parenthood and he wanted nothing more than to be able to say these drugs had been proven safe, but it just wasn't there. I think the Nelson Pill Hearings, that's one of the things I love about the Nelson Pill Hearings is it's one of the only times in history where you kind of have this snapshot where the drug industry had no control over the message. They couldn't put their controls on it. And then I think you have this added benefit of Senator Nelson, Gaylord Nelson, who was running the hearings, was also an environmentalist who was concerned about population growth and had stated that. And in 1970, the same year as the hearings was the first year that he started Earth Day. So I think a lot of these people who were testifying kind of felt like he was on the same team and they felt safe to kind of have these wink and nod discussions with him. And so it became really clear as the hearings went on. from authority after authority that they changed the benefit to risk paradigm for this drug. You know, you think of benefit to risk and you assume they're looking at the benefit to risk to that patient. But in this case, they determined that population growth was such a threat to humanity that they were willing to look at the threat to the woman taking it versus the benefit to society. So complete change of the benefit to risk paradigm just to get this pushed through. Sean (15:39.608) And how does it get pushed through? Like how does the FDA approve this drug given what we know? And this is, I think, often with the challenges for having conversations with physicians and the general public is there is this widespread belief that the FDA protects us, that they only approve drugs that have clear efficacy, have been studied, established, and they are not dangerous on the human population. So how does this happen? Mike Gaskins (16:11.318) So it's murky, all right? So there was an issue with the way the FDA was approving things. And so the Kefauver Harris Amendment, I think, in 1962, kind of changed the way the FDA ran. They wanted them to look more at efficacy of trials that were coming in. And still, they were relying a lot on what the drug companies were telling them, right? The drug companies were providing the information. But they wanted to shift to the focus on, let's not just look at safety, let's look at if the drug is even doing what it's supposed to do. And so that's kind of the way they got it approved. Dr. Lewis Hellman was the chair of the FDA committee for OB-GYN who was looking at the safety of these things. And he said, the way he stated it was, it came out as it was safe within the intent of the legislation. So his whole... If you read several of his quotes, you see his whole notion, his whole idea was to find a way to work the word safe into his decision, right? So safe within the intent of the legislation refers to K. Favre Harris. But actually in the hearings, Senator Nelson brought out a statement and he said, I doubt there are one in a thousand doctors who realize that Dr. Hellman had said this. He said, Now in discussing the chairman's report, the right statement has to be made. We cannot just hide behind rhetoric. We are going to have to say something and we have to have an opinion, but we have the opinion that these are not safe. Okay. We have the opinion that these are not safe. He said this. Okay. And the FDA commissioner might have to take them off the market if he believes this. So we cannot say that these are safe within, within our scientific data because we do not really. our scientific data do not really permit that kind of statement. So that's him wrestling through, we can't say they're safe because our data doesn't back that up. So what are we going to say? And doctor after doctor who testified, they were asked about how they felt about this statement and it ended up with a bunch of double speak, trying to justify the statement versus what they were saying. Things like... Mike Gaskins (18:30.774) Dr. Hellman had said, if a woman's concerned about cancer, she shouldn't take these drugs, to which Senator Nelson said, what woman isn't concerned about cancer, right? You're ruling out the entire database of women. But you see that doublespeak throughout the entirety of the hearings. Sean (18:51.492) So isn't it more of a conversation about like risk tolerance? Is that what they were trying to avoid that you can't say anything is safe because there's always going to be some risk regardless of whatever medication it is you're taking and it's down to the individual to determine what risk tolerance they have when taking anything. So it's just a matter of being informed about all the potential risks. Is that what the language that they were trying to to avoid coming out and saying something safe versus not safe? Mike Gaskins (19:24.55) It's hard to get into their minds, but we also need to remember at that time, drugs didn't come with the patient information pamphlet. So you were totally relying on your doctor to give you information. Yeah, so the Nelson Pill Hearings, the birth control pill was the first drug required to have a patient information pamphlet, and that kind of came out of the Nelson Pill Hearings. So you're relying on the doctor to share all of this information with you. Sean (19:34.229) Oh, I wasn't aware of that. Mike Gaskins (19:50.706) And to this day, I mean, even with the pamphlet, doctors downplay all of these things that are well-established side effects and consequences of taking the pill. And women today still go in, I hear this all the time from women, I had this side effect, I went into my doctor and he told me it's impossible that the pill could have caused this. I say, well, it's listed in the patient information pamphlet, so it's not impossible. Sean (20:11.234) Yeah. Sean (20:15.436) Yeah. Mike, this whole story is so familiar to me with the psychiatric drug industry. You see it's the same exact playbook. And this was like reading a history book on, you know, the development of this playbook and what they did for kind of mass propaganda. And there's a zeitgeist of this time, this time period, because the kind of the women's liberation movement was really growing and feminism. And it was a cause. This was a cause for feminists to believe that this created freedom and created parity, equality with men and women. So I imagine the pharmaceutical company that was producing the original drug really used that to their benefit to try to promote their drug to the American public. Mike Gaskins (21:08.418) What's really interesting, I mentioned Abby shared a bunch of archived documents and articles that they found from the late sixties. And one of them was from a feminist magazine called Off Our Backs. And that was exactly their concern in this article. I forget the title of the article, but they were saying they were worried about this population growth movement kind of co-opting their feminist movement and making it all about birth control. And they kind of saw the writing on the wall and it's pretty interesting to look back at the fears they had and how that played out because today, I mean, you think of women's right movements and birth control is attached at the hip, if not at the forefront. Sean (21:53.792) Yeah, this population control movement, I've been just exploring it recently with the World Economic Forum and some of their agendas. And I'm just starting to become aware of how much hysteria has existed throughout the 20th century on population control. What can you tell us about kind of the zeitgeist of that period of time and those in positions of power and leadership and how they thought about the growing population? Mike Gaskins (22:03.702) Right. Mike Gaskins (22:21.366) Well, it was really shocking to go back. I pulled a lot of old news clips from, you know, Walter Cronkite and Harry Smith and, you know, a lot of the old newsmen when you have three networks basically to get your evening news from. It was amazing the number of stories that led off with, you know, 23 children are being born every 10 seconds. And it's clear that population growth is still out of control. And it was, it was always presented as very third world, you know, of course, we're not the problem. The third world is a problem because they're just reproducing like rabbits. But it was a constant thing that was on with the Vietnam War and segregation and population control. And it was something that was really pounded into the minds of people that population growth was out of control. And of course, Paul Ehrlich's book was a huge bestseller, The Population Explosion. And he was warning that 10 million people were going to starve to death every year, starting in the 70s. And it was too late to do anything about that. But. the tides needed to turn so we could protect our future. And so yeah, that kind of hysteria creation I think really became a part of the zeitgeist at exactly that time and became a really good launching point to push a drug such as this. Sean (23:36.4) I want to get into some of the harms and problems associated with these hormonal contraceptives. So I'm just going to start with this, Mike. One of the things that concerns me are that the oral contraceptives deplete the body of important vitamins and minerals. B vitamins, which are necessary cofactors in neurotransmitter production. and the essential trace elements selenium, magnesium, phosphorus and zinc can plummet with continuous use of the hormonal birth control. Meanwhile, candium, calcium, iron, copper levels may lead to a multitude of ailments, including fatigue, depression, PMS, insomnia, headaches, hypertension. All those are like real legitimate problems and things that I see in clinical practice way too often that end up getting attributed to condition like anxiety or depression, right? When you medicalize and you create a disease called major depressive disorder or generalized anxiety disorder, no longer are they symptoms of something else, they're a disease in itself that people begin to attribute their own struggles, their emotional struggles to that disease when in turn they don't even ever think that it could be tied to the fact that they were placed on oral contraceptives. Mike Gaskins (25:00.618) Yeah, and especially when you have doctors, again, saying it's impossible, you know, this is not affecting you, even though you can see that clearly right after you started taking it, your whole personality changed, right? There's a Danish study that came out, one came out in 2016 and then the follow-up came out in 2017. And one of the things I love about them is they have a national registry. So they're looking at over a million women, you know, when they come up with this data. And they found that women who took birth control were 70% more likely to suffer from depression. The follow-up study found that women who took birth control were three times more likely to commit suicide. So it kind of follows up again, if you go back to the Nossam Pill Hearings, there was a Dr. Gile Boyle, I believe, who testified he was seeing major depression in women who were taking the pill. And not only were more women who... took the pill experiencing depression, but the level of depression that they were experiencing was much higher. There were many more suicide attempts. And so that was late 60s to today. It's the same trend. The data hasn't changed. There's really nobody who's disputing it. So at what point does it become criminal to just keep sweeping under the rug and denying that there's a problem? And whenever studies like this come out... You always see in these articles that say the Danish study found this, you always see a doctor who's willing to say, well, the benefits still outweigh the risk. In my mind always goes back to their benefit-risk paradigm. It's like benefit to who, risk to whom. I hate seeing that, but in my mind it's like, okay, that must still be their mentality. The benefit to society is still great enough to be willing to accept these. Sean (26:38.894) Yeah. Mike Gaskins (26:50.602) And I always want to say, okay, so what's the benchmark? How many women are we willing to sacrifice before we say, okay, maybe the benefits don't outweigh the risks? Sean (27:00.632) Yeah, and I go back to that risk. It has to come down to the individual, the individual decides how much risk they're willing to tolerate. And I was I don't know if it was the same Danish study. But when it came to depression, there was just one little, you know, blurb in there about you know, especially among adolescents. And when we think about women going on birth control, I'm thinking about like when I was in high school, it was like, girls would turn 15 or 16 and immediately go on birth control. They're not even sexually active. They were just taking birth control because it was like that the next thing that somebody does the moment they start having a menstrual cycle. Because I think it was pushed by their doc. Yeah, over acne. Yep. Yeah. I mean, this, I think this is really pushed by their doctor. So some of the things that have been, you know, told to my own daughters is that this is a kind of a treatment for PMS, you know, so having the symptoms pre menstrual, to regulate your period. Mike Gaskins (27:38.038) or to help their acne. Sean (27:56.244) if you're having like heavy periods or a number of other things. Really strong abdominal cramping is what I recall a lot of girls going on it. They're talking about regulating mood. Like this is some, this is some advancement as a health intervention, women's health intervention that improves a number of areas, including acne, as Mike, as Mike mentioned. So these girls are being placed on aural contraceptive not to prevent pregnancy. They're being placed to treat other conditions that again have not, it has not been approved for, it is not adequately studied and the harms and risks are not communicated to the patient and the family. Mike Gaskins (28:36.938) Yeah, and so I'll turn it to kind of the tragedy of this. You know, you may say, you know, what risk is the woman willing to accept? But, you know, exactly that makes me think of this woman, the woman who reached out to me when I started writing articles and was sharing with me the story of her daughter. Her daughter was getting ready to turn 16, and she was having trouble with her acne. And she talked her mom into letting her go on birth control to try to get her face cleared up. before her 16th birthday. And so she went with her daughter. The doctor prescribed what he promised was the lowest, safest dose possible. The mother agreed, and so she started taking it. And a few weeks later, before her 16th birthday, she died from blood clots before her 16th birthday. And the mother shared that story with me. And she was doing, you know, she was writing articles. She was... advocating, she was doing anything she could to try to make other women aware of just how dangerous these drugs were. And a couple of years later, I got an email from another mother who lost a daughter telling me that Laura had committed suicide on Thanksgiving morning. And so, there's no way of measuring kind of the layers of tragedy to these drugs. You lost the daughter and then you lost the mother from the grief. And she's the second mother I know that committed suicide from kind of the guilt of having allowed her daughter. So there's really no way to measure the damage these drugs are doing. It's just, it's impossible. And really, you know, and that's, you know, ultimately one of the things I say is I'm just trying to push informed consent because everything's supposed to be based on informed consent and without that, it's all just smoke and mirrors, right? And I would love for birth control to get to a point where, you know, where like tobacco smoke is, you know, if somebody's still smoking today, we can feel pretty comfortable that they've been warned and they know the risks that they're really jumping into. I'm not sure women are anywhere near knowing the kind of risks they're jumping into when they agree to take birth control. Sean (30:48.952) You know, I was, um, looking into the, the stroke and hypertension, and I thought the percentage was really going to be low. Um, I was actually surprised when it said four to 5% of healthy women. Uh, well, you know, exacerbate hypertension, but if you have like a preexisting condition, like with hypertension, um, which was probably could be, you know, like diet related. If you're a little bit overweight, that goes up to like nine to 16%. Um, putting you at risk. And I. That's significant enough that should be coming into the conversation very early on Before you decide to go on it the other factor with adolescents I don't have any data behind this but I would imagine there's a large percentage of girls that are going on birth control their parents aren't even aware because you could just go to a planned parenthood and And you could you could go on the oral contraceptive I just recall, you know girlfriends in high school and college just going to Planned Parenthood and getting the pill Mike Gaskins (31:47.466) Yeah, that happens a lot. And I mean, not to jump into too many stories, but there's another story that I do share in the book, a gentleman who found one of my articles and he realized it had been written on the same day his daughter died. He found it a couple of weeks later and contacted me and asked if he could talk. And for me, that was the first time I really, you know, I had met a lot of parents and talked to them who had told me the stories of their daughters. But by the time I met them, those stories were kind of already their past tense. And they still hurt and they're terrible stories, obviously. But I never gone through it with a family member who was still raw with pain. And so this father reached out to me and asked if he could talk. And he said he liked talking to me because he was avoiding all of his close friends and family because he was afraid if they said something wrong, it might damage their relationship forever. So it was nice to have a stranger to kind of go through it with. But he was telling me about his daughter was 20. And she had gone to Planned Parenthood. They didn't even know she was on birth control until she was dead. But she had started, you know, and I see this all the time. She had gone in with back pain. The doctors give her a muscle relaxer. They thought she must have pulled it at work. And then she started having trouble with her lungs, trouble breathing. They give her an antibiotic, told her she probably had, you know, just a, you know, some sort of viral infection or whatever. And then she was at home one morning. A repairman was coming. She went outside and collapsed on the driveway and died. Then they discovered she was on birth control. And the father was, he was experiencing guilt. You know, it was like I should have had conversations with her. I should have warned her. And then he was like, but, you know, Googling it, he said, I realized I was at a disadvantage because when you Google it, all you see are all these great stories about how wonderful it is for this or that. And there are enough, you know, it's really, unless you know specifically what you're looking for, it's hard to find the negative things about birth control. So we're all at a disadvantage on getting this information properly. And then, you know, you just, it's one of the things that continues to drive me. I have this image of him telling me about sitting in the hospital at Duke University and his wife is telling him about sitting on the driveway, holding their daughter's hand, waiting for the ambulance to come that morning. And all he could picture was his daughter's learning to ride bicycles on that same driveway. And just that image. Mike Gaskins (34:08.638) shattered my heart and still, you know, it's one of those things that keeps driving me to, okay, these things, we need to get the word out about these. We need to do whatever we can to make sure women know, you know, how many, you know, one of the, one of the drug inserts, one of the patient inserts or pamphlets says one in 12,000 women will die from, I think it's in Seasonique, one in 12,000 women will die from blood clots from using this drug. Well, if you consider 15 million women taking it in the United States, that's three women a day dying from... blood clots. That's not insignificant. Sean (34:42.988) Yeah, that is significant. And so let's just be clear about what is actually happening. The hormones or the synthetic hormones in birth control pills do suppress a woman's body's production of estrogen, their natural production of estrogen and progesterone through this negative feedback loop mechanism. And as we've talked with other professionals regarding the impact of like an SSRI or another psychiatric drug, what happens when you chemically induce a change in the body. It affects the entire body. Birth control pills flood bodies with high doses of artificial estrogen and progesterone causing the natural hormones to turn off, preventing ovulation, thinning the uterine lining. And this leads to hormonal imbalances such as like estrogen dominance. And so then what are the consequences of having this disrupted hormone balance, something that is just natural. that has evolved over centuries of human evolution. And I come to the conclusion that what we've been doing the last 60 years is just a mass experimentation on human beings. Mike Gaskins (36:03.662) Yeah, I think it absolutely is. Even one of the doctors at the Nelson Pill hearing said that. He said exactly that. He said, this is a mass experiment and women who are going on this need to be warned as such. Sean (36:16.068) There's a TED talk, Mike, I don't know if you're familiar with it. I think her name is Sarah Hill. That was looking at women's brains on birth control. Yeah, she's an author of a book. I read the book. Oh, you did. Okay. So she was looking at how when a woman goes on birth control, I guess the natural cycle is during certain periods of the month, maybe it's when estrogen is increasing. So the first, first half of the month, women are more drawn and attracted to men with testosterone, like higher testosterone. So she was looking at a study of people's faces that had more masculine and feminine features. And it was affecting the way that women were attracted to a partner sexually, which I thought was really interesting to show how it affects the brain. Yeah, not only that, she has a lot of research that supports that once a woman would get off the pill, it would affect their marriages, because it changes who you're attracted to. So the birth control pill can decrease sexual desire by suppressing testosterone. Mike Gaskins (37:07.209) Mm-hmm. Sean (37:16.096) It has been proven that women who are on oral contraceptives are more likely to be attractive to more feminine men. But once you stop the drug, it changes how you feel about your own partner that you might've chosen. It's fascinating, fascinating research. You are changing the personality. You're changing the person. You know, we are a collection of like all our hormones and our chemicals and our personality, our experiences. I mean, it's just so complex. We don't even scratch the surface and understanding the human condition, right. But synthetically changing the human body has real significant consequences that we're just not talking about. It's, it's absolutely shocking to me. And as men, I mean, I was never involved in this conversation, when I have two daughters, and I've kind of taken a vow to not talk about their particular circumstances on the pill today. So I, you know, protect their privacy. But this was a conversation that was between my wife and their OB. Their, yeah, their, their physician and, you know, any of the risks were certainly not discussed. And then once you start learning more, because I believe we are part of an awakening right now, we are starting to become more aware of pharmaceutical, industrial and political corruption. in these drugs and we're starting to understand more about what the consequences are. And healthcare professionals across disciplines have to be aware of this history. They have to be aware of how these drugs have come to market and the way it's impacting our collective humanity emotionally, physically, but we're not told. You know, so you're actually just considering that this is almost like a vitamin. Like it's shocking how it's communicated from our physicians to patients. Not only do they Mike Gaskins (38:50.318) Okay. Sean (39:09.208) just minimize any potential risks. They're talking about it entirely in benefits. Has it something that's going to enhance your body and wellbeing? And my question to Mike is trying to understand, like how did we get here as a culture? How do our medical professionals who are, you know, some of the brightest people in American society obviously, you know, have just really succeeded throughout their academic history. How do they get to a point where they so blindly just repeat the marketing propaganda? Mike Gaskins (39:44.234) Well, I think you hit the nail on the head. I used to say that they handed out the pill like it was candy, but I think, you know, with candy, we at least have some notion that it's ultimately not good for you. But by treating it like a supplement, I mean, I've actually had women in my Facebook group, they'll say, hey, I just went on a progestin-only pill. Well, I still get all my lady hormones. So they think of it as a supplement, you know? And I think the doctors... I try to give doctors a little bit of leeway. I don't want to think doctors are, you know, I want to think they're well intentioned for the most part, but you know, sometimes they say some things that make me wonder how can you not, you know, they put women on NuvaRing or Marina, you know, because they say the hormones are localized. How can any MD believe in this notion of localized hormones? There's no such thing as a localized hormone. But I think a lot of the, you know, I think a lot of the doctors are probably as much victims of the curriculum. as the patients are. The Bay Doyle Act kind of changed a lot of things back in, I guess it was the early 80s, where it kind of shifted the paradigm where academia was suddenly in bed with the pharmaceutical companies because they could own patents and make royalties off the patents. So now you had the people that should have been the watchdogs kind of looking over industry. They're now in bed with industry making money. So everything becomes very profit driven. And now you have the pharmaceutical companies in the medical schools actually helping control what's being taught in the medical schools. And then, you know, continuing medical education is all sponsored by pharmaceuticals. So you've got pharmaceutical money behind every level of education that doctors are getting. And, you know, the doctors, you want to have faith in your training, right? Because you have to sit in front of the patient and act like you know what's wrong with them. And so you want to have complete faith that what you've been taught is the the best information available. And so I think it just becomes like the self perpetuating thing that completely benefits pharma in the end. Sean (41:50.104) Yeah, that's a very familiar story. I mean, we spoke a lot about antidepressants, but just the conversation of informed consent. Like how just receiving proper informed consent with anything is a challenge. For a doctor to provide and for a patient to, you know, ask questions because Even when you want to do your own independent research, finding the things about adverse reactions is limited because there's not much funding behind doing research to identify adverse reactions. So if you do become aware of some risks that you have concerns about, and you bring it up to your doctor, there's, there's always a little bit of smirk in the corner of their mouth about the validity of those concerns and they'll always say, I don't, there's, there's no clinical study out there that shows it's something to be concerned about. So how does, how does a patient overcome that, that bias that exists right now in the medical system? Mike Gaskins (42:51.986) I wish I knew. It's funny, I was, you know, last year I had a basal cell carcinoma removed from my nose. And when I went back in, the doctor gave me this cream and he said it's basically like a chemotherapy in a tube. And he wanted me to rub it on. And he's like, it's wonderful. It kills all the bad cells and leaves the healthy cells alone. I was like, oh, great. And I didn't even question it. I walk out and to this day, I don't know the validity of it. But I thought, how easy. I accepted that. Wow, wow, it kills all the bad cells and leaves the good ones alone. That's amazing. I just accepted it at face value because my doctor was authoritative and he told me and I wanted to believe it. I think we're all going to be victims of that to some extent. One of the people who testified at Nelson Pill hearings brought up Plato's juxtaposition of the doctor to the slave versus the doctor to the free man. where the doctor to the slave comes in as an authoritarian voice and dictates, here's what we're going to do for you, right? Where the doctor to the free man comes in and enters into discourse and doesn't do anything until he's convinced the patient that this is the best course of action for them. And I think too much our medical system has shifted to that kind of that approach of the doctor to the slave, where we go in, the doctor dictates to us what they're going to do. and we just accept it, which is a really bizarre paradigm when you look at, we're the ones that live with the consequences and they have pretty much no, you know, of course you have malpractice, but they have no skin in the game in the longterm on these drugs that they're giving you. If they give you something that creates a new side effect and then they just give you, they start into polypharmacy where they just give you a new drug to treat the new side effect that creates a new side effect, they're giving you all these drugs and they've, really got nothing to lose in it. It's kind of a no-win situation. I don't know how we fix it. I did have one OBGYN tell me it would be hard to find anybody in her specialty willing to say anything bad about the pill because it represents about a third of their business. And so that was mind-opening to me to always think of it as a business. Sean (45:05.891) Hmm. Sean (45:13.636) Fascinating. My question is, is this, you told a story about your experience with the Johns Hopkins physician who was renowned in expertise in autoimmune conditions. And I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but were autoimmune conditions even a thing prior to the widespread use of oral contraceptives and endo... disruptors that have been so now prevalent in a lot of our products. Mike Gaskins (45:48.078) I don't know the exact timing of it. I know it's certainly become a lot more, it's proliferated a lot more since the introduction of all these new chemicals, forever chemicals and all these endocrine disruptors we have. I know it's certainly skyrocketed since birth control. And one of the things I always like to say is I'm not trying to say birth control causes, everybody who has autoimmune disease, every woman, it was caused by birth control. I'm not saying that, but it's... There are some indications. Like there was, I think the best one is probably multiple sclerosis. I think it was 1940, somewhere around 1940. There were twice as many women who had multiple sclerosis as men. And today it's four out of every five multiple sclerosis patients as women. So you see this major change, you know, it's always been kind of discriminatory toward women, but you see this major shift in the gender ratio that indicates something's changed in a very sex specific manner. Right. And you see that kind of thing where especially the autoimmune diseases that are already more discriminatory toward female, that gender gap is widening. So, I mean, I think there's little doubt that it is having an effect on autoimmune disease. I don't know if it, you know, if it kind of triggered the whole thing. But I suspect one of the things I run into a lot is I'll have a discussion with a woman and they'll see the timing, you know, once I. bring up this connection. They're like, oh, wow, I did start having my first symptoms just weeks after I started taking birth control. And then they'll go to the doctor and the doctor will convince them, no, that's impossible, it's genetic. So this whole notion, it's not mutually exclusive just because it's genetic disease. To some extent, Brandt's cancer is genetic as well, but there's still something that triggers it. And the environmental triggers are really key to setting these diseases into motion. Sean (47:43.756) Yeah, and that's, that's off of so much flawed research. That's a podcast for another day, how the industries have used that idea of something being genetic as if it's not under your control. And they've misrepresented science to try to push their disease mongering. But that's a whole another podcast. I can't wait to get to that. We got to say something. I was gonna ask a question about the cancer. Is there any data that showing that cancer is increasing in women? Cause I like the idea of you comparing men and female because that takes out some of the environmental things, right? Cause you can say like maybe it's from plastics and the, you know, food consumption, whatever, but comparing men and women in the rising cancer, are we seeing something in that area as well? Mike Gaskins (48:22.686) Yeah, and it amazes me people still try to twist, you know, there are spin doctors who will try to twist it and say there's no evidence, but it's for me, it's pretty clear. So even doctors in the early, recognizing that cancer is latent, right? You know, it's going to take some time for you to actually see the full impact of it. But doctors at the Nelson Pill hearings were already saying they were very concerned about what might happen to breast cancer. It was still too early to see actual data. but they were concerned because they were seeing changes in breast tissue of women who were taking birth control. So they were warning the drug companies, but the drug companies looked at it and turned it into a marketing ploy. So they started saying, it makes your breasts fuller. So instead of being concerned about what these changes to the breast tissue might mean long-term, they used it as a promotional tool. So Dr. Max Cutler testified at the Nelson Pill Hearings and he said that one out of every 20 women, this was in 1970, One out of every 20 women would be diagnosed with breast cancer in her life. They were diagnosing about 75 to 80,000 women a year. And they were concerned that if they even saw a 10% increase, that would be a tragic rise in breast cancer. Well, today, I mean, most of us know the statistics. It's one out of every eight women. So we went from one out of every 20 women to one out of every eight women is diagnosed with breast cancer today. National Cancer Society says, they'll probably diagnose around 310,000 women with breast cancer this year. So that's what over 380% rise, right? So from 75 to 80,000 in 1970 to 310,000 today. Sean (50:03.088) Yeah, it's significant. Yeah. There's no doubt that these, I mean, it's just, they're associated with a number of negative health effects. And Sean, call me out here because I'm going to call it as I see it. Right. I feel like what has happened over the past 40 years is a couple of things. We have, we have pushed women into the, into, into the workforce. Yeah. Now, if that's something that they want to do, that's different, right? If they feel like that they have this calling. or pull for a career and they see that as something as part of their life mission, that's different, but we're pulling women out of the home. Many who would prefer to be in situations where they can be active and involved with the raising of their own children, but they have to do it for economic reasons. Because right now, I mean, it's pretty hard to survive on one single income. You know, families, if you just look at economically for families being the middle class, they require both parents to have some form of income. So we push this idea of this women's liberation movement and we give them some synthetic hormones and we remove them from the act of raising of their kids during a work week. We push them through American capitalism into industry. And then when they start struggling with their health or their mental health, we tell them that they have a disorder. and we give them more chemical compounds. It seems to me like it's a giant Psyop scam that certain industries are benefiting from and us as our families, our mothers, our sisters, our daughters, our wives are suffering. Is there something outrageous about that statement? Yeah, I guess where you and I always differ is I don't believe there was this plan up front that was intent, as something rolls out, then industry sees the benefit of secondary markets. Let me ask, let me ask you side effects to treat adverse reaction. Let me ask you a question. Does, does American industries benefit when you have more women in the workforce, and they're not on leave? Oh, of course. Yeah. Okay. So there could be an intention that like, certainly they benefit financially economically. And also you also benefit from a diverse workforce. Sean (52:32.628) of having, you know, different thoughts in the way of I mean, there's a lot of like research about women serving on boards for corporations, and having a diverse board, you know, you get a better representation of ideas, perspectives, and ultimately drives a company forward. Does the pharmaceutical industry do better financially if there's more people utilizing their products? Of course. Yeah. So the more and actually the more people that are using their products, the more other products you can sell them because of the adverse reactions. So the sicker we are, the richer they are. Does the food industry benefit from developing products that will increase the consumption of their product by creating it to be like addictive and to hijack the reward centers of the brain? Yeah. So and even you know, we had a conversation. Hold on. I'm not done yet. I've got more questions about intent. Does the multi trillion dollar healthcare industry do better when they can see more patients in a particular day and sell more healthcare related products? Sure. Okay. So that's my answer to anything around intention. I don't I'm not necessarily thinking that you know, five people got in a room and put their fingers together. So we're going to get the women into the workforce. We're going to pull them away from the American family. And we're you know, I don't know if it's that dubious. It's just natural kind of capitalism. And now you get to the point where you think about where we are economically, where, you know, you have these rising costs, you know, you get taxation, inflation, and you do require multiple family, multiple parents in a home. You have to, they have to work, right? Everything's just more expensive and the top 1% gets richer and richer. And the middle class starts to shrink. And we rely on public schools where there's more mass indoctrination. So it is a system that certainly does work together to support, you know, ideas in industry. Yeah. So if you choose to enter into that system, they're of course, then you're part of that system. It goes back to choice and it always goes back to informed. But there's not choice. It's the illusion of choice. And that's, right. That's what you're getting at. If you want to go, if you want to go see your doctor. Sean (54:54.072) which I don't know why you'd be part of that sick care system. I try to find someone independent, but I know it's impossible. And with the financial challenges and the fact that we have to use our health insurance, that the only way we can get affordable healthcare is to enter into the sick care system. But before they even see you, you have to sign a document. That document is the informed consent. That's the legal informed consent that you are basically accepting, you know, that you've been informed and you know the risks and you're put, and this is before the doctor has even seen you. So is there really choice? That's not really informed consent though, because if you're going in for specific- You have no, you can't see the doctor unless you sign that. You don't know what you're being treated for yet. If you don't sign that, if you don't sign that, you can't be seen, right? Shouldn't- Is that, is that really choice? No. Aren't there multiple informed consent? There's no choice. It's a bunch of bullshit. There is absolutely no choice. This is healthcare in the United States. I want- You take this pill and this works for you. I'm the doctor. Fucking listen to me. Mike, Roger's getting angry. Mike Gaskins (55:51.398) Well, can I jump in on this? So, you know, I listened to you, you know, your discussions on just world, right? The, we want to believe that the world is just and everything. So why can we look at, why can we look at Purdue Pharmaceutical? Why can we look at the Sackler family and realize they're a waste of humanity, right? They're, they're horrible people. They're the unit, the company is criminal. Sean (55:53.044) Yes, please. Mike Gaskins (56:13.61) Why can we look at that? You know, they funded these patient advocacy groups that were supposed to be nonprofits, so that, you know, to kind of, you know, flow out their continuing message. They did all these same things that all the other drug companies do for different drugs. Why do we separate them out and say, well, they're a rogue example? Why can't we look at Pfizer and GD Serol or whoever, and say, they're all criminal. They've all been brought in on charges for misrepresenting... products that they have were misconstruing the facts about what their drugs do. They're all horrible companies. Why is it so easy for us to segment it and just, we'll toss the Sackler family off and good they got their just dessert, but we forget about the companies. J&J is still held up to a, as a whole, we look at them as a paradigm of the community. Why are we so easy? Why do we separate that so easily? Sean (57:13.244) You're right, because it's easier for us to accept that the whole world isn't out to get us, right? So when the Sackler family gets, you know, found guilty of all this stuff, people will look at that and say, well, look, yeah, they got busted. If everybody was guilty, wouldn't they all be getting busted? Like, that would just be the normal response to thing. But I think when I'm just speaking, like, Roger gives me these smirks because sometimes I say things, it doesn't mean I necessarily believe it. I'm just saying it because that would be the argument against it. However, But when people do become more aware and they are understanding that there's, whenever you make a decision of going on to a drug or taking some type of like procedure, that there's going to be risks and asking the right questions or just not trusting the person in front of you telling there's nothing to worry about, that's when people actually have a choice to choose to or choose not to. That's where upfront, I'd like that, that it's not a what did you say it's the illusion of choice? Yes. I do believe people still have a choice. They really don't. You're just using economics as an as a reason. Well, I really don't believe they have they have a choice because that you if you're going to if you're sick or there's something wrong with you, the only way you can get health care is the use of your health care insurance. Yeah. And the health care insurance has bought you into a large scale hospital networks, not independent doctors. Mike Gaskins (58:23.916) Well. Sean (58:41.016) We've already spoken about how biased the healthcare information is, the conflicts of interest that are now decades that occur. The best available evidence that doctors are following is corrupted, biased information. And so that is the nature of the sick care system. You don't really have choice. Now, is it possible that somebody who is very wealthy and has access to doctors outside of the system, that you can pay hundreds of dollars for a consult and you can be provided information to try to restore your health that's outside of this sick care system that they might have access and they can choice but I don't think that's most people and we have to recognize that. That's why these podcasts are so important. Yeah, you know, five, 10. That's what we're trying to do here is five, 10 conversations five, 10 years ago, I would have never even thought that the birth control pill was really this problematic. Yeah. You know, and this is part of the benefit of the COVID awakening. You know, just recently this past week, it was released how certain healthcare, uh, actual insurance companies were reimbursing doctors for the percentage of people who would get the COVID vaccine, right? So now your doctor is getting a kickback basically, if they can get their patients to take an experimental mRNA technology. Mike Gaskins (59:37.933) same. Sean (01:00:06.092) which we now know has significant problems. And again, no one can sit here and really tell you what is the long-term harms of this. We can only start looking at the data. Turbo cancer's a number of things. It's the same damn playbook. It's the same playbook that's been going on for 60 plus years. You know, and they'll say things, well, we can't really, you know, I can't really speak for somebody else and their intent. Or, you know, we can do other things around, you know, real extreme naivety and say, well, correlation doesn't equal causation. Yes, everybody's getting sicker. Everyone is getting really, really sick after this intervention, but we can't say it's because of the intervention. God forbid, because they, I mean, they have such powerful attorneys, right? People are afraid to make certain claims because they can wrap you up in court, right? And these industries are so, they're so powerful. They are paying out. There's been legal actions against like Bayer, for example, maybe you can speak to that around the birth control, but it makes so much money that it's a drop in the bucket what they pay out in these lawsuits. Mike Gaskins (01:01:16.414) Yeah, exactly. They have actuarials, you know, calculating and figuring, okay, it's still worth it because sure. Yeah, you mentioned it. So Yaz and Yasmin are the most popular brands right now. So in 2016, they paid out just over $2 billion to settle over 10,000 blood clot related lawsuits, $2 billion. On top of that, they also had 57 million that they settled for heart and stroke victims and another 21 and a half million they paid out for gallbladder issues. Yeah, but it's still worth it to them. Imagine how much money they're making if they're looking at that and saying it's still worth it. And you one of the things I think problematically on our end as the population as the civilization. We tend to also segment not just like the Sackler family, but I was surprised you talk about the COVID awakening. One of my COVID awakenings was when all of this first started with the lockdowns. I looked at, you know, I've been around it enough to know that medical dogma rarely changes and when it does, it doesn't change overnight. So for me, that was the first big red flag. It's like, okay, we've redefined what a pandemic is. And now all of these countries seem to be on board with we're just going to lock down. It's never been tested before. This is a totally new paradigm. And yet all these countries seem to be reading from the same playbook and saying, this is how we're going to do it. Something's not right. You know, I posted a couple of things about it on social media, questioning what's going on here. And with the shifting perspectives on masks and how effective they were. Posted a couple of things on social media. Well, I had a couple of liberal friends who I had made in the, in the birth control fight, reach out to me and say, you know, you sound like a wacko. Watch what you're saying. You know, this is all over the world. It's not just the United States. And, and, and one of them actually a mother who I love dearly, who lost a daughter. reached out to me and she was like, why don't you just, you know, stick to birth control and stop being political? It's like, I didn't realize I was being political. I'm just questioning what's going on. Why are they doing these things? So this was particularly here, this woman that I've had several conversations with about how evil the drug companies are, she loses sight of that once it moves away from birth control and she completely trusts them again. Sean (01:03:37.392) This is exactly what I hear in my space. Stick to your psychiatric drugs. It's the psychiatric- I say it to you because I know how much work you've put into supporting your position on this. But then when it goes into other areas, I'm always like, well, hold on, do the same level of research that you did for antidepressants and then make your own decision. So I get it. Mike, I completely understand why somebody would say that because they don't feel like it's, I'll go back to. It's easier to live in a world in your mind that is not corrupt everywhere, that it's just within this small pocket of things that you have control over right now, because, you know, when it comes to antidepressants, you say, I know that they're not really going to benefit you. There's a lot of harms in there. It's just not worth it. Don't do it. Do this instead. That is an area where you can say with such confidence, um, that you totally understand what's happening there. But when you go beyond. then it just opens up a whole world of like, do you put your arms up in the air and say like this whole thing is corrupt, this is all crap. And that just becomes really overwhelming for a lot of people to accept. Mike Gaskins (01:04:47.274) Yeah, it is overwhelming. But it's you know, my question is and obviously I wasn't as Studied on the lockdowns as maybe I am on birth control, but I think it's still there's no problem in questioning it You know bar the problem is we have to look at the drug companies are organized. They're well funded They they know their strategy. They know what tactics they're going to take to get their message out Those of us who are questioning it are discombobulated, right? We're all over, we have all these different, and one of the things I'm starting to become more aware of is in early development on a new series, but looking at, so there are a lot of parents whose children have been hurt by Miralax, being given off-label as a pediatric use, which it wasn't approved for by the FDA, and so you've got all this consensus kind of, here's how we're gonna treat it. You're not supposed to take it longer than two weeks, according to the FDA, but you have all these pediatricians giving it indefinitely to children and children are being harmed. So you have all these parents whose children have been injured by Miralax. You have this other subgroup of people who have been injured by Accutane, you know, an acne medicine who thought, you know, they wouldn't give me an acne medicine if it wasn't safe, right? You have people injured by SSRIs. You have all these subgroups of people in their little pockets recognizing the drug companies for what they are. In that one instance, we need to figure out a way to connect all those dots so that we all become mobilized and have a better strategy to say, no, we're not going to put up with it anymore. Sean (01:06:19.964) And in fact, I do believe it's our right and our obligation to do so. And that's why I think there is a choice, right? There's a choice to, you know, to listen to a podcast. I mean, how great is it that nowadays you can, if there's something you don't understand, you can spend three hours listening to multiple conversations about a topic that for many people would take weeks, if not months to do research on and have a better understanding to ask additional questions. Like that's the value of these conversations. Sure, I mean, there's information, but we're still on the fringes here with all this. And this is such a part of my life. And I just begin to assume everyone has that knowledge. I'm still shocked every time I say something and people look at me like, are you kidding me? Like I have two heads. Like I do this- I do this to you weekly. I do this parent training. I do this parent training group, you know, and this is- parents of kids who are suicidal, self-injurious, they're in the system. And I just do, last night was session number 13 of 16 total sessions. And we talked about basically food and mood. So we're talking about the American food industry and the impact of seed oils and nutritional deficiencies on, uh, on, uh, on hormonal imbalances and mood dysregulation and things that get labeled as psychiatric conditions. And you know what, I have not talked about birth control. I have to add that to the slides as part of the information I'm providing, but they're shocked. Like they don't even understand industrial seed oils, let alone SSRIs. So yes, maybe there's 5% of the population that listens to podcasts or is in this algorithm on social media, but it's not mainstream. information and most people are getting their information from mainstream news outlets, Google searches, and you know how corrupt that is, how biased that information is, YouTube, other things. Like it is very difficult to find accurate health related information because of the power of these industries, the financial influence of the industries. When the pharmaceutical companies are paying for advertising, they own those media companies. Sean (01:08:37.548) because they cannot survive without those advertising dollars. So they work for them. This is, this is a big problem. And Sean, I don't think it's the choice you believe that people have. Um, because if they're not exposed to it and we have to rely on our professionals and let's face it, like we ultimately do have to trust our medical professionals. Now we've given them way too much power and I think we're starting to realize Right now, there's not many people that are more dangerous than the American pediatrician. And I hate saying that because they are following guidelines. They're not independent scientists like we think they are. They are following these guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics, which is a corrupted organization funded by biotech and pharmaceutical companies. Right? This is just about serving that greater industry. That's why you can put kids on. Muralax, you can prescribe Adderall to a fucking toddler and give SSRIs to 14 year olds going through puberty. It's absolute insanity and it's criminal and we have to wake up. There has to be a return to some degree of common sense sanity in American culture because there's just too many people that are walking around completely brainwashed and that is the influence of this mass conditioning. over 60 years. Yeah. Um, there's always going to be a percentage of people that are just going to do what they're told. And then there's going to be a percentage of people that need to start and are starting to look at things a little more critically. And, and I do think to your point that the call to code awakening, I think that was a first exposure for a lot of people to how the system can, you know, take advantage of them and lie to them. Sean (01:10:31.344) So I think that awakening is really gonna open up the door for more people to critically evaluate their own health. And that's the benefit that I see coming out of the last three years. Yeah, I hope so. And I do see it happening. Just the success of our podcasts and the people that I'm meeting, I do believe it's elevated consciousness and just an awakening to information that was usually held in the shadows. Mike, before we let you go, is there any real final words of caution or something that you really want our listeners to know regarding oral contraceptives? Mike Gaskins (01:11:11.982) Well, we spoke a little earlier about the genetic versus the environmental triggers of autoimmune disease. I think that's one of the things we've really lost. In the early days when these drugs were put on the market, they were still really good about saying if you have a family history of breast cancer, migraines, autoimmune disease, blood clots, that you should... give serious thought before prescribing these drugs. That was the warning and to patients taking these drugs. I think we, at the very least, we need to reawaken that. If you're considering birth control and look at your family history, find out if there is a history of migraines because people who suffer migraines are more susceptible to strokes and blood clots, heart disease. If there is a family history of breast cancer, if there is a family history of autoimmune disease. really think twice because you're probably at a higher risk of the consequences that come from taking these drugs. I guess that would be one thing to really consider. Sean (01:12:18.576) The other thing about this, and this is for the next podcast on this topic, is it's not so easy to get off birth control. It's not just like you stop it and you return to baseline and everything is just fine and you feel okay. Mike, I don't know if you know much about the process of getting off birth control for a woman or a young woman who might have been on it for years. I imagine there's a number of things we have to be aware of medically. Mike Gaskins (01:12:54.91) Yeah, I am not terribly familiar with that, but I do know just anecdotally in my Facebook group, I see it all the time. Women who have tried going off of birth control, who, you know, they just can't deal with the side effects of going off of it, you know, and they're, you know, I hate it. I hate what it's doing to me, but I have to go back on it because I'm dealing with all these different side effects. I know it's very difficult. And I know Holly Griggs Ball in her book, Sweetening the Pill, wrote about how she felt like it was almost an addictive kind of quality. It was like it was something she couldn't walk away from. She felt, she had taken it so long, she felt kind of incomplete and like her body was missing it. So I think it's probably very much like you're saying, it halts your body's natural processes of creating these hormones and it's like anything, right? Somebody who eats sugar all the time is not gonna feel good when they stop eating the sugar. That doesn't mean it's not a good decision. It just means they're going to have to go through some, some rocky roads before they get back to hopefully back to normal. Sean (01:13:57.984) Yeah, clinically I have seen young women become suicidal from stopping the birth control. It has a profound, it can have a profound impact on their mood. A lot of things that they, they find intolerable, including like skin problems, feeling like horribly fatigued, heavier periods, longer periods. There's an adaptation process that has to restore homeostasis takes, takes time. And I think my next step here is to investigate this with some professionals. There are professionals out there who have started their own practices around this issue. Oh, no kidding. Yeah. Restoring women's health from the damages of synthetic chemicals. And it's a, it's, it's a medical specialty, but again, I think what you end up seeing is that they're, they're independent doctors. They're not in the system. They're not taking health insurance. So it's. really, who are they serving? They're serving the well privileged, of course, but I just love to hear their insights. And the horrible thing is you go talk to your typical physician and they're just gonna, they're not even gonna know. They're not even really aware of the risks, they're just following what they've been told for as long as they've been told. Mike Gaskins, you've been great. Your knowledge is really important. I want to... Just make sure everybody is aware that you can get this book on Amazon. It is a great book. The title is in the name of the pill. It's a, it's a quick read too. I mean, it's a, it's an enjoyable read because as, as we heard on the podcast today, Mike, it's the adding in the stories and communicating how, you know, this affects people's lives and then understanding like historical context and using the science to kind of support the argument. Where else can people find you and just get access to your projects, your work that you're going to be doing? Mike Gaskins (01:16:01.602) Well, I'm on Instagram at in the name of the pill and I'm on Facebook at Mike Gaskin's. That's probably the best way to find me. And I'm always happy for people to reach out to me and share their stories. That's, I'm always looking for a new angle to write something about. It seems like no matter how many rocks you turn over, there's always something new to discover with birth control. Sean (01:16:24.792) Yeah, no doubt. Mike Gaskins, we want to thank you for a radically genuine conversation. Mike Gaskins (01:16:31.822) Thank you for having me.