The Cross Examiner Podcast S02E02 – Sweet Deception: The Sugar-Coated Lies of Homeopathy

Speaker A: Hm. Did you hear about the homeopathic addict? Yeah. Unfortunately, he underdosed.

Speaker B: Welcome to the Cross examiner podcast, the Internet’s courtroom in the case of rationality versus religion. Here our host uses his experience as both an attorney and an atheist to put religion on trial. We solemnly swear that it is the most informative, educational, and entertaining jury duty you will ever do. And now it’s time for the cross examiner.

Welcome to the Cross examiner podcast. This season, I’m starting off with common ground
Speaker A: Welcome, welcome. Welcome to the Cross examiner podcast. I am the cross examiner. I am an attorney, I am an atheist, and I am alarmed. I’m alarmed by the rise of christian nationalism in our country, United States. But more importantly, I’m alarmed by the rise of misinformation being spread about that topic, along with pretty much all other topics. I started this podcast to try to entertain, but also to educate, to give you information and ammunition to push back against that information, whether it be with the legal system or religion or science or anywhere where you really run across it. Today I’m going to be following up with part two of my discussion, on homeopathy and more generally, alternative medicine. This is a, continuing thread in my, podcast as I’m discovering what I’m really interested about. And the focus here is common, ground. We started last season with an episode about common ground to say, hey, regardless of your political leanings, your, religious leanings, we can probably all agree, to some basic facts, some basic realities about how the world works. And in the original episode, it was the McDonald’s hot coffee case. And I hope I demonstrated through that, that, yeah, yeah. we can all be misled by massive amounts of marketing misinformation, from politicians and even religious leaders to our detriment, right? Everybody was convinced that tort reform was needed to stop runaway rogue juries, and nothing could have been further from the truth. And, those who supported that shot themselves in the foot and limited, limited, their ability to be made whole when they go to trial, when a big corporation harms them or their family. This season, I’m starting off with common ground to talk about homeopathy and more broadly, alternative medicine. What they call complementary, alternative medicine, or Cam, is the. Is the usual phrasing of it. So I’m doing something a little different today. I am doing a video. I normally just do a podcast so I don’t have to look at a screen. I can sort of think about things and rant and edit. I will be editing this. You’ll see a lot of cuts. I’m new to video editing for, so forgive me if it looks awkward, but, the reason I am doing this on video is because I would like to document my overdose. So today I am going to. I’m announcing right now that I intend to overdose on painkillers. And, this may be my last episode since I’m going to probably take over 400 pills of painkillers in one go during today’s episode. But I figured I’d document it for science to see what actually happens. The painkillers I’m talking about. Let’s see if you can see this on the screen, and I’ll read it. For those of you listening, are nerve pain relief pills. on the box it says nerve, pain relief asterisk. And we’ll get to that asterisk in a minute. Radiating, or shooting pain. This is what these pills are designed to relieve. The, active ingredient is listed as hypericum perforatum, which, sounds real fancy. and it’s hypericum perforatum 30 c, whatever that means. We’ll get into that in a minute. They are, it’s listed as homeopathic medicine, but, it is listed as medicine. And it does have a drug facts panel. On the back, you can see drug facts, your standard drug fact panel that you would have, for example, for tylenol. it is described as on the go, pain relief. Again, there’s an asterisk after that, pain relief. So we’ll have to look into that. And it says there are no known drug interactions, which is good. So you don’t have to worry about, any other prescription medicine you might be on. That’s, that’s very convenient.

Ron Miller: I respect the company for putting lot numbers on packages
So I’m gonna. This is, this is unscripted. Normally, I have at least an outline. Since it’s on video. I’m gonna sort of wing it. So I’m going to bounce around a little bit, but I’m going to try to organize my thoughts here and talk about what we’re going to do. I think first I will just start eating these, but in order to do that, I have to get them out of their packaging. So first I’m going to open. I have two packages of this. Each. Each packet comes with 240, tablets. I am going to open the box and show you what’s in here. So you saw on the back there’s a drug fact panel. There is, in fact, on the side. See if we can show that a lot number and an expiration date. And that’s actually a good thing. I respect the company for doing that because, as we discussed previously, adverse health, events are reportable to the FDA. So if somebody did take this and they did overdose or had some adverse reaction using this lot number, they could track down not only the company that did this, because the labeling tells the company, it’s, boyerin, by the way. Boy, Ron, I believe. B o I r o n. They are one of the biggest manufacturers of homeopathic drugs in the world. I believe they’re a french company. but the fact that they’ve got an actual dot matrix printed lot number and let’s just check. Did I get two from the same lot? oh, I did. so same lot. So if the lot’s bad, I’m in big trouble. but the reason that’s good is it shows the manufacturer is somewhat serious about being able to track down problems should something happen in the marketplace once their drug is in the hands of consumers. As we talked about last episode, with the sulfonylamide disaster, that was a real problem back in 1906, I believe it was, 1938. Excuse me. 1906 was the date of the original, FDA regulatory law that, was mostly toothless. But the 1930 719 38 sulfonylamide disaster was when, a pharmaceutical company took sulfamilanide, which had been prescribed for many, many decades, as a legitimate drug, and had a new formulation that involved suspending it in a, liquid. the market had started saying, hey, we want a liquid formulas for easier use. So the chief chemist mixed, it with a, ethylene glycol, I think it is, one of the key ingredients in antifreeze. and it became a deadly poison, it shipped out. And that’s where the trouble started, is once the, people working on the problem figured out this is the cause of all these people dying, 100 and something people died due to this. They had to track this stuff down, and they had to go back to the manufacturer and say, who did you ship it to? And back then, without worldwide telephones and other things like that, people physically from the government and from the American Medical association physically got on planes and flew out to all the places they had shipped the stuff and had to do the hard work of finding out, going through the records and say, find every pharmacy that you sent this to and visit every single pharmacy to stop this from happening. These days with these lot numbers, with the Internet, when. When you report a possible adverse reaction, it goes into a big database, and there can be automated triggers to say, hey, we’ve received over a short period of time, an unusually high number of potential adverse reactions alerts can go out and you can immediately, like transmit to all the pharmacies. Pull this stuff from your shelves immediately and give us a list of every lot you have. Give us a list of everybody you’ve sold it to. And that can happen in the matter of hours instead of weeks. So good for them for putting the allot number there. I’m going to open the box here and, you can see, it fell out here. So where did it go? Have I been scammed? Did I drop the, I opened the box and now I can’t find my tube. I’m going to pause and go see if I can find it. Ladies and gentlemen, I think I’ve been scammed. That box was actually empty. One weighed a lot more than the other. I think we have a manufacturing problem. Now I’m actually nervous. Are there manufacturing controls? really that poor? so anyway, this is what it should look like when you take it out of the box. It’s three tubes that look like about the size of a large lipstick or chapstick. one tube is, each tube, I should say, is sealed with a label that you have to peel off so you can see if it’s been tampered with. So I guess I’m going to still overdose, but only on 240 pellets. I’m looking at my cluttered desk. I don’t see that this tray fell out anywhere. and I don’t recall ever previously opening that box. I did do this before as a test, not, to give away the ending, but I did do this before as a test, before doing this recording, live. So I’ll do 240 tablets. I’m very disappointed. okay, so on the tube it says, hypericum perforatum 30 c, relieves nerve pain. Asterisk again, everywhere asterisk. Homeopathic medicine made in France has the lot number on it, and it is the same lot number that’s printed on the box. So that’s good. Unless they print the same exact lot number on everything every year, which would be disturbing. you can, it says you can peel this label back like you can on like a Tylenol bottle for drug facts. So I am peeling, it’s hard to see here, it’s peeling the label back. And sure enough, there is a drug fact panel, on, inside the tube. Although this is, now cut off because it cut in the middle, but it seems to be echoing what is said on the back of the box. So let’s read what’s on the back of the box. Active ingredient, hypericum perforatum 30 c. Hp us. Excuse me? Hp us. That’s what we will get to in a minute. Purpose relieves nerve pain. It’s a pain pill pain medicine uses, again with an asterisk. Purpose also has an asterisk. Everything has an asterisk. Temporary relief. Symptoms of nerve pain associated with minor injuries such as radiating or shooting pain. Pain in legs and back. Back pain is pretty serious. and toothaches. Wow. Okay, so this is, this. They’re telling you to take this for toothaches and back pain. Right?

Warning: Use should be avoided if pregnant or breastfeeding
So this is pretty potent stuff. warnings, stop use and ask doctor if symptoms persist for more than three days or worsen if new symptoms occur, or if redness or swelling is present, as these could be signs of a serious condition. If pregnant or breastfeeding, ask a health professional before use. That’s cute. And we’ll see why in a little bit. Keep out of reach of children. In case of accidental overdose, get medical help or contact a poison control center right away. Well, I tell you what, as soon as I overdose on this, we will contact the poison control center and see what they have to say about it.

Homeopathic medicine uses claims based on tradition, not accepted medical evidence
Then we get to directions. Everybody’s familiar with this format because of the hard work that FDA did to make this format required on all drugs. So thank you, FDA. Directions. adults and children, at the onset of symptoms, dissolve five pellets under the tongue three times a day until symptoms are relieved or as directed by a doctor. So if a doctor tells you to use more or less of this stuff, follow their directions. Other information, do not use if glued carton end flaps are open or if pellet dispenser seal is broken. That’s actually very good. Inactive ingredients. So the active ingredients was hypericum perforatum, fancy’s fancy name. inactive ingredients, lactose and sucrose. you don’t have to have gotten a college degree to know what those are. Those are sugar, lactose and sucrose. so sugar is the inactive ingredient. questions or comments? They’ve got their web address, an email address, and a 1800 number. And here we get, finally, at the very bottom, right at the bottom, there is, an asterisk. The asterisk reads, and remember, this is associated for all of their claims on their label. That has to do with purpose. Uses the claim that it relieves nerve pain. everywhere you see those discussed, you see this asterisk. And the asterisk points to claims based on traditional homeopathic practice, not accepted medical evidence, not FDA evaluated. So there, they’re telling you this is all based on traditional homeopathic practice. So they’re telling you this is homeopathic medicine. And the claims that this relieves pain, that you can use this for a toothache, that you can use this for a backache, are based on tradition. That’s the word. They use claims based on traditional practice, tradition, comma, not accepted medical evidence. So we are not, we are not basing our claims on evidence. We are basing our claims based on tradition. is that a good way to truth? Is that how we handle important matters in the rest of our lives outside of religion? And woo. When somebody comes to you and says, boy, have I got a deal for you, it’s a ponzi scheme where you’re going to get this, that and the other thing. And, oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say ponzi. It’s a pyramid structure. With this, do you, do you say, well, traditionally says I should go with my gut. Tradition and practice says, he’s a friend and he’s a neighbor, so I should go with that and I should invest my money. No, you’re skeptical. You want evidence, you want documents, you want, listings on certain stock exchanges, you want insurance documents that you can verify with a third party. We don’t do that with the rest of our lives, with our financial investments, with serious problems, like, I have cancer. Although C, for example, my previous discussions about Steve Jobs and somebody we’ll talk about later today, which is Doug Henning. I have cancer. I just had my leg shot. we don’t go with tradition there, but for some reason, when it comes to these smaller things, like, I’ve got a mild sense of pain. I will go with tradition at just the same price, by the way, as regular drug companies. And that’s going to come into play later.

Homeopathic pills are marketed and sold as a drug with a drug fact panel
I’ve obviously got a lot to talk about here, so, I’ve got a lot to read on this. Forgive me for not looking at the camera again. I’m new at that. And this is mostly a podcast anyway, so, let’s take a look at these, this tube, I’m going to open it. And the weird part about these is they go a long way to make this really look like a legit drug. I’m trying to right now peel off this safety sleeve. There’s a, there’s part of the label that is perforated. There we go. And it, overlaps the cap. So you can’t take off the cap without peeling away this adhesive label. And that is actually a very good thing. Props to them for doing that because there are bigger risks than overdosing when you’re dealing with homeopathy. So then you take off the, the top of this thing and in the middle there is a little slot. and you turn the bottom of this. Let me turn the bottom. Let’s see, turn this and over. I don’t know if you saw it. We’ll do another one, maybe. It’s very hard to get out. There we go. So these pills are dropping out as I turn this thing. And I see if you can see this, they’re about the size of a bb, if you’re familiar with bb guns. I was in my youth. so there are, a bunch in here and you could saw I had to turn this and twist this thing a long time. Maybe my mic is picking it up. If I. Okay, if I twist back and forth, they’re coming out faster. So there we go. Twisty, twisty. A bunch are falling out. One just ran away. I’ll put it back in. so what I’m going to do is I’m going to get all of these pills out, 240 of these pills. And, then we’ll continue with the podcast. I’ll be right back. Okay, I’m back. that took, that took a while. My hands are sore. It’s hard turning these little things and you have to shake it every once in a while. I got it all out. I did not count them. That does not look like 240. But I’m not, I mean, humans aren’t great at looking at a group of things and figuring out the number, but that really doesn’t look like 240. I’m m going to shift my camera down, show you I’ve got a bowl here. Let’s see. Okay, so what I’m going to do is I’m going to go ahead and eat all of these and then I’m going to continue with the episode. So I’m just going to scarf these down. I did the math on, how much sugar is in here. So this is not, even though this isn’t really an effective medicine, it is marketed and sold as a drug with a drug fact panel, which means it does not have to print on here any sort of information, you would normally see on a food label like net weight or total number of calories, or, ingredients other than the active ingredient, inactive ingredient on the drug panel. but I did some math. I know how these are made, so we’ll talk about how they’re made. But I weighed them. I weighed the empty bowl. I put these things in, and then I weighed the weighted again. It’s about 14 grams or so. Ah, difference. And that’s about the weight of one stick. One and a half sticks, I should say, of pez candy. I’m about to eat a stick and a half of pez candy with drugs in it, so I hope I survive. This, is my last episode. Thanks for listening. go listen to atheist, community of Austin shows. but here we go. I don’t know how to do it. I’m just going to chug it. Wow. Okay. It is sweet. I assume that’s loud on the mic. I have a lot of water to help me get this down. Sorry for the crunching, but I want to demonstrate on camera. I don’t want to cut away from this. So you can see I’m eating 200 plus homeopathic pain pills in one go. This is a lot. Okay. Water. Oh, it’s sickeningly sweet. All right. It’s getting there. Stick with me. Okay. More water. I’m not feeling anything yet. Okay. Near the end, maybe I’ll cut some of this stuff out, but I need to leave it in. Maybe I’ll play music or something over so you don’t have to listen to me chew this stuff. Sorry.

I just overdosed on 48 pain relief pills, according to the label
All right, so other than diabetes, what is this going to do to me? Well, to understand that, we have to understand what I just took. I just overdosed. They told me that a dosage of pain relief here was five. Let me check the label. Five pills, right? Is what we read. So, that is, I just took 48 doses of pain relief medicine, and I should be very quickly if this were effective pain relief. You know what pain relief is? We just went through an opioid epidemic. Things that actually relieve pain can be very addictive, but certainly they can really shut you down, and kill you if you take a bunch of them, right? Sleeping pills, pain relief pills. These are the things that people take a lot of to kill themselves. so any second now, I should start feeling pretty high. Not, feeling any pain or anything like that. So right now, I’m not detecting any change, but we’ll see as we go through.

Cam: Companies must submit new drug application with FDA before marketing medicine
So what did I just take? Hypericum perforatum. Well, that’s St. John’s wort, you may ask. Why did they call it on the label in very big letters, as you can see hypericum perforatum 30 c. You have to understand how cam works, you know, complementary alternative medicine. Cam works by writing a tight balance between trying to appear legit, evidence driven medicine, science based, you know, substances, treatments. So on one hand, they want to appear legit. See, for example, the drug fact panel. See, for example, the, the, bottling, that has a safety label, tamper proof resistance. The, lot numbers on the lot numbers on the packaging. the note that if you take too many, you should contact the poison control center. Oop, I just had one pop out of my mouth. Sorry. They get stuck in between your teeth. So on one hand, they’re trying to appear legit. They’re trying to appear like they are professional, scientists, like they are, in fact, a medical company or doctors themselves. But they know they can’t do that by law because they don’t have the studies to back up their claims. FDA, regulations, and the act itself says your drug has to be safe and effective, and you need to be able to prove that before you can market something as a drug. So to market, something as a drug, like Tylenol comes out with a new medicine, it’s no longer acetaminophen, it’s some other substance. They will have to fill out what’s called a new drug application with the FDA before they can even market the drug. And marketing is a broad term. Market can mean the verb of marketing, like, hey, I’m telling the world about this. But your marketing can also be a noun in that, that is almost synonymous with labeling, which can be very broadly defined as well. What is on the box is your marketing, is your labeling, but also what’s on your website, what’s in your commercials. What do you say in the, in the papers that you give to doctors when you’re trying to convince them to prescribe this? So before you can do any of that, you have to submit a new drug application. And a new drug application is expensive. It’s expensive. Not because there’s a, like a huge filing fee. I don’t even know what it is currently, but it, But because you can’t submit one without also submitting a bunch of evidence from clinical trials that are properly run, they can’t just be, hey, we found five people on the street. We gave them some, some of these, hypericum perforatum. And every single one of them said as soon as we told them that we gave them pain medicine, that they felt better. Therefore, this stuff obviously works. No, that doesn’t cut it. You have to have, clinical trials, double blind studies. You have to have control groups, you have to have, placebos, all of those things in there to see and prove to the FDA that this stuff does what you say it is. So you’re going to say what your claims are, right. Your claims in a drug is relieves pain. This says nerve pain relief for radiating shooting pain. And its uses are, remember, radiating or shooting pain, pains in the leg and back and toothache. So back pain, toothache, pain, and radiating pain. So you need to go and run studies. If you were the big boys, if you were the adults in the room that were serious about trying to help your fellow human, you would use science. You would fuck around and write it down. As we, as we know, that’s the definition of science. You go screw around with stuff and you write it down. That’s what differentiates screwing around with science is in science, we write it down and we remember what happened, and we take very careful notes, and then we think of ways that we could try to disprove what we’re claiming. So you’d find a group of patients that are suffering from these things, you would split them up. In one group, you’d give them these sugar pills with no hypericum perforatum in them. In the other group, you’d give them the sugar pills with hypericum perforatum. Although one needs to. We will discuss whether or not there’s any actually in here. And then you would see the difference, right? If there is a statistically significant difference, and ideally, in this study, not only do the patients not know who’s getting what, but the doctors don’t either. That’s what we call by, what we mean by a double blind study.

Scientific method is the best way to discern fact from fiction
And we should talk about this. This is gonna. I know, I can feel it already. I’m stretching into a third homeopathy or alternative medicine, episode. But it’s important. It’s important because this is one of the best examples. And this leads into my continuing series on people killing their children through religion, through faith healing. This method that we’ve come up with, that the FDA requires, is the single best method that humanity has ever come up with for discerning fact from fiction, because that’s what we’re trying to do, right? Joe Blow shows up and says he wants to sell you this pain relief medicine, and we want to know whether it’s going to kill our kids or if it’s going to work, or maybe neither, right? Is he a fraudster? Is he a murderer? Is he a huckster? Is he a legit scientist? Does he have something that will actually help? And what we have come up with as a group, as a species, is the scientific method. And the scientific method, as a quick review, is form a hypothesis. I believe that if I give the five of these pills every three times a day to people suffering toothaches, that within some period of time, they will self report, or there will be some other way we can measure that their toothache pain has lessened. That’s my hypothesis. Right. Then I come up with experiments I could do that are well designed, that rule out other explanations. Right? So that’s why we have what’s called double blind studies. Double blind means the patients don’t know which drug they got, which substance they ingested, but the people giving it to them also don’t know. So the way you would do this, mechanically, is you’d create a list of patients, and then an administrator of the study, who does not interact with the. With the people administering the drugs, does not interact with the patients, randomizes that group while controlling for certain things. So you have to control for age and weight and past health conditions and all those things. We’ve gotten really good at knowing how to do that, statistically speaking. And the larger the random sample size, the more confident you can be in, it being sort of neutral. When you randomize who participates in which group, you randomize the patients and which one gets. You can say, that’s a patient type a and a patient type b. And then randomly group a or group b gets the drug. The other group gets a placebo that, as much as possible, is exactly like the actual drug in every aspect, except it doesn’t have the substance in it that the drug company is claiming has, the effect being claimed. So here we know that this thing is really just, lactose and sucrose with some St. John’s wort in it. So I would give these pills to, let’s say, 500 people, that have pain, and I’d give lactose and sucrose balls that look just like this, but without the St. John’s wort, to another 500 equally positioned, groups of people. But the. The people giving the drugs, just know that your patient a type and your patient type b. I’m giving you drug a. I’m giving you drug b. I don’t know which one is the actual drug. That’s how it works. Double blind. Then the person behind the curtain. Then. Excuse me. Then the healthcare professionals monitor the situation. If there is measurable effects like this kills bacteria, we can take samples and prove that the bacteria is going away with pain. It’s self reporting. Show, tell me on a scale, show me on the chart of happy face to frowny face how bad you’re feeling. And I measure that every hour, let’s say, and I have them point at the chart, if they’re kids or I have them several number or whatever it may be, and over time, they will self report a change. Either it’s going to get it worse or it’s going to get better, maybe stay the same. Right. The key here is since nobody knows who got what and the patients don’t know, they’re just being told that they’re getting this stuff, they might all say that their pain is receding. They might all say that. But we will be able to tell if some group recedes at a faster rate or recedes further or goes away completely compared to the, to the first group. Right. If there’s a difference that’s statistically significant between those two groups, we can say, aha, uh-huh this is better than placebo or maybe even worse than placebo. But usually you don’t see that. You see it’s better than placebo or it’s not. Because if both groups say, yeah, you know, on average, we used to be at a pain level seven, and after 4 hours after receiving this treatment, I’m at a pain level five. Okay, if you both did that, then St. John’s wort in this dose did not make a single difference. You could just take a sugar pill and believe you’re taking a, taking some medicine and you’ll, you’ll feel better. You’ll self report that you’re feeling better. But if, if the St. John’s wort groups all got down to a two and everybody else is up at a five, or that’s where the averages were, we might have some statistically significant evidence to show that this homeopathic dose of St. John’s wort is effective at relieving toothaches. That’s how science works. We are very careful to craft these experiments. We are very careful to make sure that we have peer review of these experiments when we submit these experiments to be published. Because most of these, these drug companies will want to publish their studies as further evidence of, hey, not only did we give you the evidence, FDA, we’re publishing them, and they’re going through peer review. And everybody says what happens during peer review in the industry? Who are not related to you. They’re neutral observers that are experts at experimental design. Or the drugs that, the family of drugs that you’re working on, they review your methodology. Did you use double blind? Did you use. Did you include a placebo? Were there any other control factors? Can I think of any other factors you didn’t control for that might explain the difference. If there is a difference and if everything looks good, then those people will all say, I can’t see any problems with this. Yes. Paper or journal that you were submitted to, go ahead and publish this. This looks legit. I’m an expert. I’m neutral. Go ahead and publish. Are they wrong? Sometimes, yes. People can be fooled. People can be wrong. People can. People can be, you know, bought, or people can have friends. That happens all the time. I mean, errors, not the being bought part. but the greatest thing about science is the reason you publish studies is so that other people can go replicate them. One of the easiest ways to go and get your master’s or PhD in any given subject is to take published studies in your field and replicate them and verify or disprove what’s going on. The single best way to win the Nobel Prize and to win millions of dollars and to become a chair of a department at a university of your choice is to overturn previously held knowledge in science. Something to remember that is. That is what science all about. Try to prove yourself wrong. Try to prove other people wrong. That’s how you become famous.

I do feel slightly ill after eating too much candy after Halloween
So here. and by the way, I’m. Now, I’m. I’m. It’s been 1015 minutes since I taken, my pills. I do feel slightly. I don’t know, ill like, you know, when you eat a whole bunch of candy after Halloween? I feel that way, but I don’t know if I really feel that way or if it’s because I’m talking a lot under the lights and it’s video, so there’s extra pressure. Or because, I I know I ate all this candy, so I’m self aware of it, but I do have that slightly. Slightly? Yeah. I think I ate too much sweet stuff. I need to go drink water or, take, some salt, you know, potato chips or something. Hold on.

Certain drugs will require FDA approval before they can be marketed
All right, so when FDA gets this information from companies, they’ve done their studies, they submit their new drug application, their NDA. they, too, have a panel of experts that review it. And sometimes this can take decades. Certain drugs will be. There will not only be a scientific aspect, there will. But there may also be a political aspect that we cannot deny. If we were to come along and invent the brand new abortion on demand pill that, if you take it within a certain amount of time, it will cause a painless abortion and ideal situations, all that sort of stuff, the FDA is going to, is going to be able to, from a science standpoint, say whether or not it’s safe and effective. But you can bet whatever administration’s in power, keep in mind the president is in charge of the FDA. Ultimately, that administration is going to recognize there’s a politically charged issue there, and they may hold off on rendering any opinion. Right now, you, then, if you are the manufacturer of that pill, could sue, saying, hey, you’re, you are actually not following up to what you should be doing as the FDA. You are treating me differently than other drug manufacturers for no legit reason. And you might have a good case there, but the vast majority of times, it’s not even political. It’s like, hey, we’ve got a new treatment for sickle cell anemia. Yeah, great. Get it out onto the market. We all approve of it. We’ve got a new treatment for pain that’s cheaper, easier to produce, safer, has fewer side effects. Great, get it out on the market. So that’s what, quote, unquote, the big boys do when they want to really help somebody, when they want to cure diseases, when they want to help you with your pain, and even small things, when they want to help you prevent sunburn. Right? Sunburn is regulated by, excuse me. Sunscreen is regulated by the FDA. Sunglasses are regulated by the FDA as a medical device. They’re a. They’re a device that helps cure, treat, prevent disease in humans. All right? So sunglasses help prevent you having skin, cancer, eye cancer, all sorts of problems with sun in your eyes. Same thing with, with, skin cream, sunscreen. so that’s what we do. None of that happened. Absolutely none of what I described happened with this drug. I’m bending this package up as I talk, as a sort of a habit. I’ll go. I’ll go to the other one. That was either empty or I previously opened it. I’m guessing I previously opened this. I’m losing, you know, I’m getting old. I need. I need some homeopathic drugs to help my memory. so with this, none of that happened with this drug. They did not have to file an NDA. They did not have to run any studies whatsoever on the effectiveness or safety of this. All they had to do was say, hey, this is hypericum perforatum 30 c. HP us. Hp us. And we’ll get to why that matters. As long as you say that’s what’s in there. You don’t have to get any prior approval to start marketing this. Now, if you later have found out that that’s not what’s in here, you’re going to violate other laws. Consumer protection agency is going to come after you. There’s fraud laws out there. There’s possibly misbranding. FDA might come after you, but with respect to getting approval as a drug product from the FDA before you can even market it, because keep in mind, that’s what we talked about last time with the sulfanilamide. Prior approval would have saved hundreds of lives. Prior approval did save tens of thousands of people from being born with birth defects in the thalidomide incident in our last episode. Right. That’s why we have drug companies get prior approval before they can even market a drug. This company did not have to do any of that. Why? Well, to understand that, we have to delve into the history of not only the, homeopathy itself, but the history of the FDA. So if you’ll go with me now on another journey, I hope you find this interesting. I promise this is all necessary to understand what’s going on here. And this is the problem. This is my side. My side note, I am not going to edit this too much. I’m going to just talk and put this video out here, because I think it’s important that people hear this. But here’s, here’s the core problem. This demonstrates the core problem of what we’re fighting against. I’ve told you that my point is to push back against misinformation, whether it be in the legal system, in civics and government, or in science, religion, whatever it may be. I don’t care if you’re religious, if you’re honest about it, I don’t care if you’re religious, as long as you don’t try to shove that into government and you don’t think that you have a right to tell other people how to live their lives from. From a legal perspective or even if you’re not an asshole in the streets. Right? Okay. I don’t care about that. What I do care about is when that misinformation is used to harm people or to trick people into potentially harming themselves, usually for profit from somebody. Now, because I care about that, I have to address, areas where I see that m misinformation being spread. The challenge is in this day and age, it is so easy to spread massive amounts of misinformation that it takes hours of discussion to disprove one point. And it takes seconds for some punty who has a computer algorithm to generate a bunch of memes and post them all online across a whole thousands of Facebook groups, trying to argue the opposite, right? This is a christian nation. It took when we did that episode last season with Kenneth Copeland giving his sermon where he said Washington knelt and kissed the Bible. Washington dedicated the country to God. Washington told the senators that we had to go down to a church and dedicate our newly founded country to God and that God, Washington said, so help me God. And that he spoke with Jesus. When Kenneth Copeland took like 30 seconds in his sermon to say all of those things, it took me a half an hour and calls to Mount Vernon’s, document repository and calls to Harvard’s research, legal research department and tons of hours of reading about this. It took all of that for me to try to do an honest debunking, right? And it took him 30 seconds to just get up and talk out of his ass and say whatever he wants. Same thing with the, show me, show me the toes guy. In our, earlier, in our first faith healing episode, right? Show me the toes. We, prayed and a woman’s toes grew back. And it takes the worldwide community of journalists to swoop in on that church and say, great, show us the evidence. Ah, a guy set up a website called showmethetoes.com dot. It took me, hours of reading up about him and his church and his practices and to learn about where does faith healing coming come from to try to educate people as to why you shouldn’t believe this stuff, right? I’m not saying don’t believe it if they bring you evidence. I’m saying don’t believe it just because he said so. Don’t believe it just because he’s a nice guy. Don’t believe it because he’s a kind, fatherly figure.

Donald Trump makes thousands of claims without providing any evidence
Don’t believe it just because he says he’s, he says he knows the mind of God. Don’t believe it just because he’s the pastor of your church. Don’t believe it just because they’re a big old company that got tons of dollars to put onto an advertising site. Don’t believe it just because. Believe it after somebody provides you sufficient evidence. But to do that, it takes hours and hours and hours of effort to rebut one claim. This is something called a gish gallop. Gish gallop is a, rhetorical technique when you’re in a debate. It started back in the 1990s. There was this guy named Dwayne Gish, who was a creationist, a young earth creationist, and he would go and debate people. And his technique was he’d use his time. Let’s say he had ten minutes to talk. He would make a thousand claims that were all false. This is true, this is true, this is true, this is true. All of these claims about the moon dust and the rate at which the moon is receding and the fact that fossils aren’t found here and that there are no transitional species and all of these things, he’d make hundreds, if not thousands of claims. And then his opponent would get to the stand and have to be like, okay, I can address the first one, but the other 999, I don’t have time to do. And Dwayne Gish developed this technique, and somehow it was persuasive with young earth creationists. They wouldn’t see that. Oh, he’s asserting a bunch of stuff, but he’s not providing any evidence. And that’s what we see with, homeopathy, alternative medicine, religion, young, earth creationists, conspiracy theorists. You see gish gallop. You see claim, claim, claim. People call it flood the zone, right? Just put all these claims out here in politics, right? Trump just yesterday said that Joe Biden, during the raid on Mar a Lago, that was ready to issue the order to have Trump, ah, killed, right? He said Joe Biden was. Had his finger on the trigger, was ready to have me killed during that raid. There’s no evidence. There never will be of any evidence. There’s. It’s just claims. The. The election was stolen. The, documents are mine. I never. I never spoke to Russia. I never said those things to Ukraine. Well, I did see it say those things to Ukraine, but they’re totally legal. All of these things just claim, claim, claim. He lies a thousand times a day, Trump. And it’s exhausting for reporters to debunk every single one. And the sad point of it is, the sad truth of it is that, if he does, even if you do debunk him, his ardent supporters will ignore you and call you fake news and biased anyway, so that’s what we’re fighting against. I don’t. I don’t remember how we got on this point. I will self report that. I’m. I’m feeling fine. I’m actually feeling better now, than earlier, when I felt a little sick from. From the, sugar. So I must be getting past that sugar rush.

Let’s talk about homeopathy and the FDA
So where were we? We were talking about a new drug application and the fact that, Hypericum perforatum. from, Boyran. what are they called? Boyrin. Just Boyran. Not Boyran. World industry. Boyerin, Inc. In made in France, distributed by Boyerin, Inc. In the USA, from Newtown Square, Newton Square, Pennsylvania. so to explain why they don’t have to do that, let’s talk about, homeopathy and the FDA.

This episode ends on a cliffhanger about FDA’s treatment of homeopathy
Hi, this is editing cross examiner here. This episode ended up being very long. I’m going to split it into two episodes, so I’m going to end it here on the cliffhanger. The FDA’s treatment of homeopathy, which I think you’ll find very interesting, and it explains a lot about how the FDA is forced to allow this to go on. So please tune in for the next episode. I’ll put it up, pretty soon after this one, and we’ll see, if I do indeed overdose. So thank you for tuning in. I, look forward to talking to you again soon.

Speaker B: This has been the cross examiner podcast, the Internet’s courtroom in the case of rationality versus religion. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider subscribing. See you soon.