Ep 154: Root Cause Medicine: One Doctor’s Wake-Up Call with Dr. Ben Edwards

Introduction and Guest Welcome 0:00

Hi, it's Dr. Laura with Connect My Brain. Thanks so much for tuning in to the podcast today and we have a very special guest. I'm so excited for my audience to hear from Dr Ben Edwards. He has a podcast too and he's going to tell you all about his stuff as we move along. But this is going to be a conversation. Here's two different worlds professionally. I'm a chiropractor, he's a medical doctor, and we both share the innate wisdom of the human body. So welcome, Dr. Edwards. We're so glad to have you here.

Hey, so happy to to here, thank you for the invitation, Absolutely. So we were just talking before we got started and we really do share a lot of the wonderfulness of The Human Body and I would just love for you to share with my audience your perspective as an MD and how you were trained and what have you learned over the course of your professional life and and Yeah. Well, my training is as a medical doctor, as you said, so that's a very conventional mindset, which I came from a long line of MDs.

Both my granddads were MD's in the little town where I grew up, and two uncles that are MD, a great, great granddad, MD.

Conventional Medical Training and Symptom Treatment 1:29

So I'm just allopathic, MD only, that's all I knew. I didn't know about chiropractors. Didn't, literally didn' know anything about them in college, med school. Never been to one, never heard of one. never talked to anybody who'd been the one I mean, my family just didn''t do anything out of the just alopath. So I didn't know about alternative anything, holistic anything. Didn't about nutrition either. Doctors aren't trained in nutrition. 80% of medical schools do zero nutrition lectures. My school, UT Houston, which is a great school, the Texas Medical Center.

It's a multi-acre center, two medical schools, Baylor College of Medicine, University of Texas, Houston Medical School, nursing school there, dental school pharmacy school. Tons of hospitals, MD Anderson cancer hospitals there. So it was a good institution to learn a very specific way of doing medicine. So my training was just that very, very narrow. Now, looking back, I see was narrow, but going into that, my thought was, this is one of the best schools there is. MD Anderson is on the Best Cancer Hospitals.

I'm going to learn all there to go out to, my dream job was go to a small town, be a Small Town Country doctor, kind of, so to speak, like my grandads were. They took care of the whole family. they delivered babies, did house calls, they did surgeries, took of you from cradle to grave. I mean, there are those old school GPs. Well, that was my goal. That's what I wanted to do. So go med school, go residency, and then go Out to West Texas in a little tiny community out there. And I was the only doctor in the county and I Was doing what i was trained to Again, not knowing, total ignorant, but I thought I'd learned it all.

And what I learned was a prescription pad, write a pharmaceutical prescription for your symptom. which I thought all these symptoms were diseases, and I though these diseases came from who knows where. In med school, they call it unknown etiology, is the terminology. It just means we don't know what causes this. We don' know causes high blood pressure, we dont' what cause diabetes, We dont know cause autoimmune disease, but we know it causes cancer. So there is this unknown ideology thing. And then there are some theories like the gene theory.

All these disease are just coming through my genetics, through family line. So either they just kind of come from nowhere, we don't know what, or from our genes, basically meaning we're victims. There's nothing we can do about this. If you get diabetes, you did it. I mean, the American Diabetes Association's own website says type two diabetes is not a choice. It's a chronic progressive disease. Now these are quotes from a few years ago. Haven't looked lately, but basically the point of the AD American diabetes association website was if you give this disease, You'll have it forever.

You can manage for a little bit with food and diet and exercise, but you'll need medication. And then after a while, you will need insulin. It just lays out this progressive course, chronic progressive disease. Okay, so that's what I just thought. Everything was like this. You get these random diseases for who knows what reason, or your genetics, and we just have pharmaceuticals to treat the diseases. And I'm kind of spending a minute here because to drive this point home, this is how doctors are trained.

I had a little old lady come, this was years ago. So after seven years of conventional medicine, I learned nutrition matters and other things matter. And so I shifted to more holistic, and that was 13 years. But before the shift, down in this little county clinic, only doctor in the county, doing house calls, covering the nursing home, the Friday night football game team doctor, county jail, juvenile detention center, all that, just living my dream. Seeing 40 to 50 patients a day, The only way to do that is seven minute visits.

All you can do in a seven-minute visit is treat a symptom. So I had a little old lady come in on a Friday afternoon. She did not have an appointment. It was late in the afternoon, I needed to get to the football game, so a walk-in, unannounced walk in with chest pain. I was a bit frustrated, even though I didn't show it. You know, sweet and kind, and I'm a Christian, trying to love my neighbor, but on the inside, An old lady with chest pain, with no appointment, walking in on a Friday afternoon, it's gonna be a heart attack.

And this is gonna take extra long. It's been a long week and all that self-centered stuff. But, you know, I'm a highly trained doctor, so right away I started asking her a few questions. And the questions were related to the chest pain. I said, okay, ma'am, is this chest paint like a heaviness, like pressure, a squeeze, that tight like an elephant sitting on your chest, more on the left side kind of, and more kind maybe going to your left arm, maybe up your It's worse when you do activity like carrying groceries or walk up some steps or it's better if you sit down and relax.

Is it associated with maybe you get a little sweaty and a lightheaded and maybe short of breath? Is it that or is this chest pain more in the center of your chest and it radiates straight up your throat and is more of a burning sensation? And it's worse when you lay down at night and its worse with spicy food and this better if you drink a little milk or take a thumbs. Cause both those are chest pains. And she said that one, meaning the second one. So that's it. I mean, real quick, that 30 seconds.

What I was trained to do in school, and all doctors are trained do, is take the patient's symptoms that she's telling you, or he's tellin' you and match the symptom to a label. So I labeled this lady reflux, acid ref flux, gastroesophageal reflux disease, GERD. That was the label, Now the game's over, it's a matching game, game over. I matched it, boom, I win. And so once we make the match, and you can do this with anything, headaches. Is it a tight band around the forehead that squeezes better with ibuprofen?

That's a tension headache. Is on one side only like right behind your eye like an ice pick and light makes it worse, like bright lights and noise better in a dark room? that's migraine. You know, is it under your pressure and associated with like snot and when you bend over it's worse and if I push here, that is a sinus headache? Well, that's the matching game. I need them. You said headache. Well I got to just match you to one of those because there's a pharmaceutical for migraines. There's different pharmaceuticals for tension headache and there is a different one for sinus and same with this lady's chest pain.

So I matched her game over 30 seconds. you know I was so good at that game That's why we were successful in that little town, because you can do 50 patients a day, that way you could make money. The county clinic had been losing money for 10 years, and they told me when they hired me, you gotta turn this thing around, the taxpayers are tired of putting the bill. So we did that, so everybody was super happy. But back to the little old lady, I told her, all right, ma'am, as I'm writing the prescription for Nexium, 40 milligrams, one a days, number 30, six refills, put her name and her date of birth, rip it off, then I hand her the prescriptions, And she says, Doc, I don't want to take that.

You're just treating my symptoms. And I bet your audience totally understands what that lady was talking about. But in the moment, I'm like, what treating symptoms? What do you mean? And she said, yeah, you're just treating my symptom. I want you to get to the root cause. And I was like what? I don't know. No, I am treating your disease. This is a disease, gastroesophageal reflux disease you know, D is for disease GERD. Anyway, she just wouldn't go with it. And so I tried to scare into it and said, ma'am, if you don't take this medicine, this acid in your esophagus, not only is it going to wake you up at night and hurt you and you're going be in pain and suffering, but you increase your risk for cancer of the esopagus when acid's in there the whole time,

The Turning Point: Root Causes and Healing 9:46

which is a true statement because those cells aren't designed to see acid. Your stomach is because it has a nice mucus layer to protect it. Anyways, I tried to scare her into it. She wasn't buying it, she's like, nope, i'm not taking that. I don't want to take your treatment of symptoms. So then I kind of went biblical on her and said, look, Adam and Eve, they sinned. They brought in death, disease, and dying into the earth. You know, it's just the way it is. We live in a fallen world and, you know lucky for you, God made doctors that are real smart and figured all this out and then figured out these medicines to help you feel better.

And she wasn't buying that either. So I finally just said, well ma'am, there's only two options here. Option one, don't take this medicine and just suffer and maybe get cancer. option two, take the medicine, and don' suffer. But it's only that, only option one, option two. And so this is the problem with physicians trained in America. It's the reason we're in this healthcare crisis. We are trained very narrowly, a pharmaceutical or scalpel is two options. Those are the two tools we have in our toolbox.

That's it. So we use scalpels and pharmaceuticals for everything. Well, there's not a chronic disease that I know of that's from a deficiency of any pharmaceutical or scalpel, so we're just not trained. It is absolutely mind-boggling when you really, like when doctors get this, they're shocked, and it took me a while to get it, that, I was just trained to treat a symptom. I wasn't trained for option three, fix it. And that's what that lady was asking me to do is fix. Well, doctors don't know how to fix now.

Trauma surgery, you know, excluding surgical stuff and mostly trauma related. Yeah, we're super good at that. But the top killers in America, heart disease, cancer, kidney disease stroke, Alzheimer's dementia, all that kind of stuff. Chronic disease. Nine out of your top 10 killers directly related to food. And doctors get zero food education. $4.5 trillion a year we spend on quote-unquote health care in this country, and 90% of those dollars are for chronic diseases. But doctors aren't trained to fix them.

We're trained the treat the symptoms. Asthma manage hypertension manage diabetes manage everything so management versus fix it the Analogy I give is my wife had a real slowly Tiny little hole in her tire on her vehicle, and it was such a small hole the air went out real real slow So it took about five days for it to get flat. What you had an air compressor, not just aired it up and She's good to go. She can get to her appointments and take the kids and do her things. And it was fine. Just slowly it would get flatter.

About the fourth, fifth day, I'd hear it up again. No problem. We just kept doing that. Doing that, doing it. It was so easy, cheap. My copay covers it, doesn't take any time, it's convenient, all that and we don't think. about the unintended long-term negative consequences of the cheap convenient quick fix thing, the treat a symptom thing. So like with her car, I didn't think about when that tire's getting a little lower every day, that that's messing with the shocks and the stress, The alignment is getting off.

The other tires are probably on to take more of pressure. I increased her risk for a blowout and a rollover and bad accident, all that. We didn' think of any of those long term. The other example I give people, it's like if you went home this evening, sat down on your couch watching TV and all of a sudden smoke starts filling up your living room. Well, you could hop up real quick, open the front door, opened the windows, turn the fans on and get that smoke cleared out so you can see and you breathe.

And then it is like just go sit back down the couch and keep watching T.V. because you got the smoke clear out. Obviously, if there is a fire in the kitchen, We need to go, it's fine to clear the smoke. It's fun to take the blood pressure pill, the acid reflux pill to whatever pill. To treat the emergencies. I do it all the time in my clinic. Someone walks in with a blood-pressure 200 over 120. They're getting a prescription, but that takes two seconds to do that. That's easy medicine. But now I'm going to spend a little time talking about root causes.

Why is that pressure high? and just doing this pill is not really decreasing your risk and that's probably my biggest pet peeve and we'll just talk heart disease because it's the number one killer. The number-one killer in the United States and our number 1 treatment for it is a statin medication which is for cholesterol. Well, if people knew that these statin drugs decrease their risk of heart attack by 0.8%, which is what the Journal of American College of Cardiology said in March of 22, they published a review study to see how effective are statins for heart-attack reduction, stroke reduction and all-cause mortality.

And we're around 1%. So people are walking around with a false sense of security. I'm taking my pharmaceutical to reduce my chance of heart attack. Did they know that reduction is only 1%? No, they don't. And that's why we're in this mess. We're only treating symptoms. The outcome, long-term outcomes are very poor. The medication we're using to treat the symptoms has its own risk profile, the third leading cause of death in America, pharmaceuticals. It's just a total mess because the system got co-opted.

About 1910, homeopathic medical schools were alive and well in this country in the late 1800s, 23 different homeopathy medical school, naturopathic schools, osteopath, allopath, chiropractic, herbalist, naturopathic medical school, all these different varieties, and they narrowed it down and started licensing only allopathic. About 1910, the Flexner Report did this. And that was it. All these natural healing modalities were marginalized, were made illegal, only MDs got licensed, MD's got trained with one curriculum, pharmaceutical.

So it's been 110, 20 years, whatever it has been, 125. And it's a failed experiment. It just doesn't work. And the public done, I mean, they're waking up now, but doctors don't know. I did not know any of this. All the stuff I just told you I didn't come out of school. And American doctors and their protocols were last place. Our outcomes are actually the worst. The lowest life expectancy, we die younger than anybody, more of our babies die than everybody, the highest infant mortality. We have the hardest chronic disease of anybody.

A third of kids have a chronic diseases now. We take more pharmaceuticals than anybody, go to the doctor more than anyone, spend twice as much money on quote-unquote health care to come in dead last place. I didn't know that either. So there's just so much that doctors are not trained in or ignorant of and aren't told the truth on long-term outcomes and that our protocols get the worst outcomes. I kind of forget the question. What changed you? Like, what was the event that I know it was, the lady asking you to fix it?

When did you really and what have you done differently now? Yep. So what did it for me interesting, on what's called the evidence-based pyramid that doctors are trained. You know, the highest form of evidence, randomized controlled trial, you know meta-analysis, but then down at the very bottom of the Evidence Pyramid, it barely even qualifies as evidence. And basically doctors were told, just ignore that, its called anecdotal. Anecdotal just means grandma took ivermectin for COVID and she got better in a day.

Well, that's just an anecdotal story. We need a big randomized controlled trial to prove that that wasn't just a coincidence in grandma, which I get it. I'm not anti-scientific method. The problem is a lot of the long-term studies are corrupted, co-opted. Who bought and paid for it? Is the data real? Did they massage that data,which they do? did they just shelve that study if it didn't fit there? a wanted outcome anyways, that's another story. But anecdotal, so just one person getting better, and that is what turned me.

So that little lady, before I knew anything in regards to the truth of the body can fix itself, those years before, the Lord brought that memory back to me later. What did it for me was my nurse practitioner. in that old clinic down there, in the county clinic. And he was conventional minded. Also, his dad was a doctor. That nurse had been diagnosed with celiac disease years before. If you eat gluten, wheat, you could have lots of symptoms. His were mainly GI symptoms, bloody stool, abdominal pain and cramping, fatigue, and just feel horrible.

So he eats gluten-free. He'd been eating gluten free forever. And he was strict. If a drug rep would bring a breakfast burrito to the clinic, he wouldn't just scrape the eggs off and eat the egg. No, because those eggs touched that wheat. So, across contamination, you know, He couldn't eat anything that had touched wheat, and he's real strict about it, or he'd get sick immediately. He knew this, had been this way for years, gluten-free. Well, one weekend, with his wife to a bed-and-breakfast, a getaway, little mini three-day long weekend vacation.

He tells the lady at the bed and breakfast he needs a gluten-free pancake because he's a celiac. And the ladies did that. She said, that's fine. I'll make that for you. But if you'd like to be cured of that, you go talk to this doctor over here. And my nurse practice did what you just did and what I did. I'm like, what? No, you don't cure celiac. And so he just said, okay, whatever. No. He tried to blow it off and ignore her. She just kept pestering him all weekend. The problem was that doctor, his office was actually in the bed and breakfast building.

So he went and talked to the guy, just to be polite. Well, that doctor, whatever he said, so convinced my nurse practitioner that the body and the immune system, because autoimmune just means your immune systems out of balance. Part of it's decided to go into attack mode, inappropriately attacking your own self. And there can be a reason for that. So the doctor convinced by nurse practice that potentially there's a trigger and a reasons your yourimmune systems are out-of-balance. And he gave them some things to do.

They were all natural, they weren't prescribing. It was basically dietary and some supplements, a lot of focus on gut microbiome, the bacteria in the gut, all that. My nurse got convinced to try it. He did. Over three to four months, he put these protocols into practice. he didn't tell me he was doing this. Now I was noticing over these three to four months, my Nurse Pratt just had this glow about his complexion was like better. And he was trimming up the kind of puffy and flame, he wasn't way overweight, but just, you know, a little extra 10 pounds of puffiness.

He had trimmed up, complexions good, his mood's good. His energy is good he just has this, He's given off a vitality, healthy feel. And then he comes to me one day, Doc, I know it's gonna be hard to believe, but I've been doing some things over the past three to four months, and I'm pretty sure I have cured myself of my celiac disease. And I laughed at him. Like, is this April Fool's today? And like I kind of made fun of him a little bit, laughed him, whatever. What are you talking about? You don't cure that.

And he was like, no, I'm telling you, think I can eat wheat and be fine. I was, like what in the world are you talking about? And, he went straight to the break room in our clinic, went back to our breakroom where a drug rep had brought some breakfast burritos and he brought one back and started chowing down on it right in front of me at the nurse's station. And then he went for lunch. He went to the local burger joint, got a burger, wheat bun, and then drug rep brought cookies that afternoon and he ate these cookies.

So three glutens in one day, and I'm thinking, you're crazy. You're gonna be so sick tomorrow, You probably gonna call in, I'll have to see your patients. And he came back the next day totally fine. He stayed fine, that was a moment where I had to recognize it and try to figure something out in my head. What just happened? I mean, he's telling me he did some things to create this health. But in my mind, I'm thinking, there's no way. So maybe God just miracle healed him. Maybe this is a one-off, or maybe it's a delayed reaction.

He'll react in a week, you know, something. And he's telling me, no doc, I'm healed, and I've seen it with my own eyes. He's not lying. I mean, watching him eat this stuff, he is not sick, He is fine. So I just was struggling at that moment thinking really about my next celiac patient. Am I going to have a celia patient come in someday and what am I gonna do? Am i gonna just give him the med school answer, eat gluten free the rest of your life? Or am i going give an option? Not just some big old sales pitch, snake oil, I can cure every disease.

No, not arrogance and cocky, but just the option of, hey, here's what I know. Here's, what UT Houston taught me. here is what the American Medical Association, American Association of Family Practitioners, the GI Association eat gluten free. But there's this other option. I know nothing about it. It's just a one-off. it's an anecdotal. Who knows? It probably, it just, I don't even know. But if you want to talk to my nurse practice and do whatever he did, that's up to you. You know, all natural stuff.

That was the decision I had to make. Am I going to stick with one option or am I gonna give two options, let the patient choose?

Measles, Vaccines, and Childhood Immunity 24:28

In my ethical, moral obligation, I felt like I had to at least say, hey, my nurse prac had that and now he's symptom free. Somehow he is in remission if you want to talk to him. That was it. So that was the first step. But then I have to call that doctor because this nurse pracc is under my authority. If he going to be doing stuff in that room under license, that I kind of have know what he doing. I call the doctor up like, who are you? What are you doing? What kind of doctor are? You what kind?

Of quackery what? Kind of holistic Hocus Pocus you don't crystals or whatever and you know doctors are just so prideful and we're so close-minded but That doctor took my call. He was very polite pretty aggressive, too and he just started coming at me with truth truth, truth And he was saying some stuff that just resonated with that part of me, that the truth will resonate with a part us. It'll touch us, whether it's, hey, it just makes sense, or something about that, I just know that's right. That's that piece of us that can just resonate the trick.

So that guy was sayin' stuff, and it was dingin' with the that truth part me. I'd call him a spirit man. But then my intellectual man kicks in and is like, there is no way what he's saying could be true. How is he right? How could that be right and everyone, all the smart people at Harvard, Mayo and Hopkins and Duke and UT Houston are all wrong. There is no way. So that part, you know, when you get into this cognitive dissonance of, man, this kind of makes sense, but there's no and how could this be?

And back and forth. We just kind went back-and-forth on the telephone for a long time. And he would send me articles to read and videos to watch and conferences to go to and books to write. One big one was a stomach acid book by Jonathan Wright, where it just made such sense. A stomach, acid like in that lady, that little old lady. The normal pH in our stomach is a pH of 1 to 2, and battery acid is 1.5. So what that book that he recommended I read reminded me was, well, physiology, every physiology textbook has this normal human gastric pH 1-2, that will trigger that valve to squeeze tight.

The one between the stomach and the esophagus, it'll squeeze type to keep all the acid down where it's supposed to be, where you don't get heartburn. So that lady's problem actually, even though I told her seven years before, I said, you're making too much stomach acid. You need Nexium. That was not the truth. she was actually not making enough stomach acid. She was still making some. Her pH though was probably a four or five, still acidic. Anything below seven is acidic, but not acidic enough to get that valve to squeeze shut.

So her valve was weak and popped open easily and here it came. What I should have done if I knew the truth was do things to encourage her stomach-acid pumps to work better. and to get that pH back down to a battery acid level. And then that valve would have squeezed shut, her heartburn would've gone away, she would been fine. So that was one book in one aha moment. He would send me other things, but a big one was, he said, type two diabetes, totally reversible. And this was in 2011. I think probably a lot of people have heard about type 2 diabetes getting reversed now with keto, low-carb fasting, all that kind of stuff.

But back then, it was like mind-blowing. And I told them, there's no way, if that were true, UT Houston endocrinologist would have taught me that. If that were true, the doctors, attending physicians in my residency program who are great guys, super smart, love the Lord, they love people, would have taught me that. So there's no way that what you just said could be true and make all of them a liar. And he said, no they're not liars, you're just ignorant. because the American Diabetes Association says it's a chronic progressive disease and all the doctors are trained in that system.

That's just what they believe. So that's what, you know, and he said, just go Google this guy. He was an engineer on YouTube, reversed his diabetes. It wasn't even a doctor. And I watched that video that night and I thought, oh my word, this guy reversed his diabetes. And that was another key moment in the journey because half of Garza County, the county I was practicing in, was diabetic. The other half was going to be diabetic, and if you're diabetic you just increase your risk of Alzheimer's, heart attack, stroke, cancer, all these top killers.

So just reversing diabetes, you lower your risks of all of these diseases across the board. That was huge. If we just learned that part, how to reverse diabetes, that would help people so much. But the final thing, because, you know, do you just get into this? How can this be? And the normal human nature of, if this is true, what's this mean for my job? What's it mean from my paycheck? Which just means, What does it me for our reputation? what people think of me? I mean, oh, that's playing too. So it's a lot there.

And so this guy was just kind of getting tired of me, dragging my feet and we were so successful. I didn't mention, not to brag, but because those 50 visits a day, seven minute visits, the income was there for the county. The taxpayers totally off the hook. We didn' t need their money anymore. They were still being taxed. so the tax money was built up a million dollars in the Tax Account of the healthcare district. They built a million dollar brand new clinic and in one year paid off the bank note again.

And a year after that at the million dollars back again, so I mean, a $1 million clinic paid for a billion dollars in the Bank. The Washington Post came and did a front page story from Washington, D.C. So I, mean all that was there too. the town's happy, the board is happy.The taxpayers are happy the Washington post front pages were famous. We got extra money. I'm getting a good bonus check. All that's in play. But still this truth part. And so the final nail in the coffin for me. to commit to the truth on this was when that doctor said, I'm tired of arguing with you, send me your 10 sickest patients, and I'll just show you.

And he said the sick is to be sick, that you've referred them to every specialist. They've been sick for years, they've tried every pharmaceutical and every protocol and surgery and everything, but they're not better. Like the worst lupus, the worse fibromyalgia, worst diabetic, whatever. I had some really sick patients there that had been to all the specialists. And they all went and they came back better and most were all the way. Like off their meds. No more diabetes, no more high blood pressure, and no acid reflux.

It was incredible. These were my own patients, so I knew these people. I lived in this little town, went to church with them, saw them at the grocery store, I prescribed most of those medications they were on. And I referred them to all those specialists. So, these were anecdotal. powerful, like a 74-year-old man who was over 300 pounds on nine medications. Three of those were for diabetes and his blood sugar was still creeping up despite three different meds. And I told him it's time for insulin.

because we couldn't get his sugar under control. He refused, said, I'm not doing any shots. I'll die. And he said pretty much I am ready to die because I can't do anything. My feet burn. They have no energy. In my recliner all day every day. Not living. Basically a dead man sitting here. So that's the state this guy was in. I met this doctor that really says there's no such thing as diseases. They're all consequences. And if you weren't born with it, you probably don't have to keep it and you can get to the root cause of it.

Anyways, that 74 year old man signed me up. He was willing to do whatever. So after three to four months that guy came back, that patient came, back he had lost over 40 pounds, he was off all his meds and his blood sugar was totally normal. He wasn't diabetic anymore, He was out working in the garden with his grandkids, had his life back and he came to my office showing me the labs and to thank me for sending him to that doctor because he he has his live back. So when those 10 people got well, that's it.

I'm all in. And so that was about 13 years ago. Actually got fired because I told the board, hey, I've learned how to help people get to the root of it, but it takes one hour minimum, sometimes two hours for a visit instead of seven minutes. Obviously the math's not going to work. If I do an hour, can only see seven, eight, nine, 10 patients a day instead 50. The money, we're going back in the red. We're gonna lose money. I tried to make a way for it to work, and it just wasn't going to, so they fired me.

So, I started Veritas Medical 13 years ago. And since then, we've just continued to try to seek the truth and have discovered that the very foundational principles of nutrition, hydration, movement, instead of sitting all day, in peace, inside of chronic stress, The body needs certain inputs and it'll function like a well-engineered machine. Your Ferrari will function if you give it everything the Ferrari engineer who built it told you to give in the owner's manual. and don't put the wrong things in.

Now, the human body is the same. Put the right inputs in, don' put wrong in the difference between us and the Ferrari. You can put in wrong stuff, you can high fructose corn syrup and seed oils and stress, stress and sit all day in toxins and microplastics and smoking. And it'll still function. Now it'll start to break down and you'll have lots of smoke filling up in your living room, lots symptoms, and your life will be decreased. The American lifespan is decreasing. So there are consequences to this lack of good stewardship, but the body is so resilient.

It's amazing. And if you just make some little changes, start the back off on these inputs that are no good and start increase the inputs are beneficial, then suddenly, boom, health returns to the And the more the doctor can get out of the way and his arrogance and pride and intelligence, and I can sound horrible, but like anti-doctor and it's just a doctor needs to align with the natural healing modalities. And that's what all those other healthcare true healers were doing, homeopathy, naturopathy.

Chiropractic, herbalists, all those things that were around, they all came alongside and lined up with, in conjunction with the native intelligence and healing capacity of the body. That was awesome. Allopathic just comes in and crushes a symptom. High blood sugar is a symptoms. We can give you a pill to make you urinate out your sugar, so the blood-sugar levels lower, but you didn't fix the carburetor. The carburator is what should be burning that sugar and your carburiator's not burning the sugar anymore.

It's backing up in the fuel line, spilling into... So you got to fix a carburerator. No pill will do that. And that's the same across the board. Everything is rooted in inflammation. Inflammation is routed in a carburetor, which is your mitochondria inside your cell. And the mitochondrion has got to take fuel plus oxygen plus spark plug to create energy called ATP, and you create exhaust. It's a black smoke coming out your tailpipe. and the American carburetors are not being stewarded, so our miles per gallon are way down, our black smoke out the tailpipe way up, that's inflammation.

And you can Google cancer and inflammation, autoimmune and information, autism and an inflammation depression and inflation, heart attacks, stroke and in inflammation and there's a connection with inflammation in every single disease, Alzheimer's, brain on fire. And the reason these things are on fire is because these inputs into our carburetor are not the right inputs. And so the body is amazingly designed. It'll fix itself. We get it with a paper cut, we get with the broken bone, We don't worry about that.

A paper cuts gonna heal up, it's gonna clot, heal, grow new skin. Nobody thinks twice about it. Well, that's all the way through your system. The body will fix it self if you steward it, give it what it needs and avoid what doesn't. Wow, this is just so wonderful to connect with a medical person that thinks the way that you do. But I'm going to shift gears on you. You've been talking on your podcast a lot, and I am sure people have heard about this. But we had some outbreaks of measles. I think the vaccine issue is a big one.

And it bothers me that we can't talk about it. If you bring it up, it just creates tension. Yep. and I just don't think it should be that way. It's something that I thing we have to look at. But you've had individualized experiences with some families, haven't you? That the child had measles. Yes, so there was a group of Mennonites in a community about 90 miles south of my office in Lubbock, and I was asked to come down and evaluate some of the kids. After one little girl died, it turns out she died from pneumonia because she didn't get appropriate antibiotic treatment, but the siblings were sick with measles.

The mom was real scared, didn t want to go back to the hospital. They called me. I went down there, made a house call, evaluated them and ended up evaluating over 200 kids in the ensuing three days or so or the next week. But anyway, so yeah, I learned a lot during that about how to treat measles and also learned. A few things like most of the parents were actually vaccinated and pretty much none of. The kids were and so of course I'm curious as to why and the consistent answer I got was in our community in Gaines County in The Mennonite Community, there's 12 injured vaccine injured children.

And this community is very tight knit and they congregate a lot. They, not just at church, but family gatherings, weddings. I mean, they're just a tight-knit community. Lots of kids. It seems like every family had eight kids, just really interrelated, so word spreads real fast. and the whole anecdotal thing that medicine and medical doctors don't really listen to. If a mama says, hey, you know, baby Susie was meeting all her milestones in 18 months, gets this routine round of shots, and she suddenly is not making eye contact, then she quits talking and regresses into full-blown autism.

That's just kind of a common sense, even though it's anecdotally. And we get in trouble by not listening to these mamas. It's a big problem, but the vaccine injury issue was an issue for sure. And I agree with you, we need to be able to speak about, and this is what I've told every reporter that asked for an interview. At first I didn't really, I learned to start giving them my answer on email. I'm not going to talk to you unless we can talk about all three things. Let's talk prevention. Pros and cons of prevention.

Let's talk about treatment. And let's about hesitancy. Patients, there's some patients hesitant to do the prevention, the vaccine. There's physicians and healthcare workers hesitant do treatment So this hesitancy thing's a big deal. We need to talk about all of it. Let's come to the table, a common sense, non-political, but we've been psychologically brainwashed, really. Doctors absolutely are not taught the truth in med school. I can testify to this because I went to med-school, and I've talked to a lot of physicians, I'm not the only one coming out of the closet to say this, we're taught one thing in medical school, Here's a CDC schedule.

Memorize it for the test and then implement it in your clinic. Done. That's it. I never read a package insert. I didn't know what was in it. The history of vaccines. Dr. Suzanne Humphries has a book called Dissolving Illusions. It goes through all the history. But I did not realize that there was a 99% drop in infant mortality from all these childhood infectious diseases like measles and whooping cough and all of them. A 98 to 99 percent drop from 1900 to 1950. Death from these things went away.

And the vaccines didn't come in until the late 50s, early 60s. But the drop happened before then. I didn' t know that. Not a single pediatrician knows this, unless they've gone and read Dr. Humphrey's book or some other source like that, I promise you I'm talking pediatricians at the highest levels of our government, our healthcare institutions, or medical schools. This is the truth, and I've talked to them. You changed after the Industrial Revolution. when all the sanitation, nutrition, refrigeration, clean water, sewage treatment, all that, and Harvard, Dean of Harvard Medical School and the head of the Infectious Disease Society of America, his name was Dr.

Edward Cass, he looked at all this data. Mayo looked at all this data, Boston University, McKinley McKenley, husband and wife epidemiologists looked all the data. Geier, this is like 2010, American Journal of Pediatrics, he looked to all of the date and published it. Hopkins researchers have looked it, they've all concluded the same thing. It wasn't doctors and medical interventions like vaccines and antibiotics, especially the vaccines because they weren't even around. it was these other things.

It was the terrain, as I like to say. The problem in modern time is our internal terrain is so messed up. So we're asking the wrong questions. Like on the measles thing, it's not to me whether you can prevent it, not prevent How can you build health in a body so you have long-term longevity, resiliency, and lifespan? Because what if you can prevent, fill-in-the-blank thing early in life, but that prevention triggers something in the body, so that you lose resiliency and lose health, you increase inflammation later in your life and increase chronic disease, then you decrease lifespan.

So we've got to look at big picture, or cause mortality. If SIDS deaths, sudden infant deaths if they cluster around the two, four, six month visits where the shots are given, if the cluster there instead of evenly distributed throughout the year, We ought to time out and do a deep dive and look at that. Well, now there's six or seven studies that show this clustering. But like you said, we're not even allowed to talk about it. And people have totally forgotten the fact that if we build our resiliency, We can get measles, chickenpox, and all the child, And we can overcome them.

And there's evidence that shows when you do overcome them, it creates an immune system that's balanced and strong and prevent you decrease your risk of cancer and heart attacks in the future. What's that have to do with your immune systems? Well, cancer comes when a weak immune can't kill it, and hard attacks are related to inflammation, related an imbalanced immune. Everything's related inflammation and immune So that's why these kids that avoid the vaccine to overcome childhood illnesses studies show have overall health.

It's better. Yes. So there's a lot to restore doctors to. There is so much. But I actually I've seen it personally because my kids have had chickenpox and I just kept them home. And now they've got natural immunity. And there's lots of evidence. Dr. Vera Schreibner, she's definitely an older resource, but she was one of the first ones that came out talking about that the illnesses occur in childhood because you're trying to build that immune system, and she totally said the same thing you just said, that these illnesses prevent certain things down the road.

So I just think it's important that we look at the truth. I love how many times you've said That part is where we have to get to rather than only perpetuating an industry. And my goodness, it's 2025. Why couldn't we had more information today than we even had 10, 20 years ago and make better decisions? And healthcare today, I mean, i've been in practice for 30 years. And I've seen many things happen, different age-related. There were certain things that happened to a lot of the 12-year-olds, then it became what happened the 8- year-old, and now all the toddlers who were exposed to the social blocking during COVID.

And now the practice, we're getting more toddler now than we've had in a very long time. What are the complaints? social delay, language delay emotional dysregulation and that was something that they already found six months into COVID that this was really impacting the development of the child. I believe we're losing a generation of people and just the idea of So many kids today being labeled autistic, I just think that would raise a red flag for anybody. Don't you think it's just too much? Well, you're talking way too common sense language.

We've lost common-sense. compassion and keeping the patient first and actually listening to the patients. The original definition of evidence-based medicine was the best peer-reviewed published evidence in conjunction with the clinician's experience, in clinical experience trumps published data. Just like my clinical experiences in the measles showed that Budesonite and inhaled steroid works really good for the lung inflammation that this particular strain of measels was causing. Well, the ivory tower doctors are saying, no, that's inappropriate.

They're saying that based off some intellectual evidence-based or lack thereof, and no clinical experience at all. But clinical experiments trumps the data, but patient values trump clinical experiences. We've got to flip this thing back to where patients are number one. They're the boss, they're in charge. If they want to try something, especially if it's benign and safer than Tylenol, i.e.

Veritas Wellness and Closing Remarks 47:48

ivermectin, And when you have to bring a judge into a case to force a hospital to give ivermectin, and when he does and rules in favor of the patient, 99% of them survive in that ICU. And, when the judge rules negative, they can't have it. 99 percent of those patients are going to die. But we've just totally lost our, it's become politicized and it just, in our culture in general, we're so adversarial and prideful. And we can't confess when we get something wrong. We cannot. You have a horrible time just saying, I screwed up.

I got it wrong, sorry. It's awful. Someone I interviewed recently on my podcast said, hey, It is like we are in the middle of Maybe at the beginning of how it was 40 years ago with tobacco, or however many years, doctors used to recommend cigarettes. They'd be in advertisements saying, I recommend Camel. I recommended Marlboro. The evidence was there, but it was suppressed, manipulated, hidden, all that, and excuses made for 40 years. So we knew 40 before, this is killing people, it took 40 and basically a generation of doctors needed to die off for that truth to come out.

And it's the same with these inoculations we're doing, these shots we are doing with kids, I believe, the evidence is for sure there. There's neuroinflammation caused by aluminum that goes into the muscle. and mercury. It's just the evidence is overwhelming. The doctors are ignorant of it because of the massive suppression, brainwashing and manipulation. But we're finally moving through, I think we are almost critical mass because the moms. Unfortunately, millions of kids have been damaged. Our SIDS rates are higher than any country.

but it's taken all this damage and death and disease, but is breaking through finally and hopefully we'll get to this point of just like with the cigarettes. where now it's just common, obvious. You ask anyone on the street, does smoking cigarettes damage your lung and maybe increase cancer? Well, of course it does. No doctor or just person would argue that. And we'll get to that point, I think, where, hey, if you inject a newborn with aluminum, that inflames a brain, you know, could that increase your risk of neurodevelopmental and stuff?

Well, yeah, obviously. It's like a common sense. I don't need, even though there are a ton of studies. So I hope we'll get there for the sake of the kids. But we'll see. Well, I think what Bobby Kennedy is doing and really pushing the studies, and I'm hoping that that happens too. And again, it's not about being an anti-vaxxer. It's about there's something harming. There's so many of them. and you have so many children that are not going in the right direction. Could we just put a pause on, take a look, investigate?

Because another great book is Turtles All the Way Down, and they go through all of the data. It's never been properly researched. So let's just a put pause button on and let check it out. And if we're wrong, we are wrong. But if you're correct, let's change it. And your feelings of what you want to do are valued, and the feelings what I want do, are value. You should have your own personal decision in how you wanna work your body. Yep. Now, the doctors that haven't read Turtles All the Way Down or Dissolving Delusion don't know the full data and are fully informed.

Unfortunately, they think they are, but they're not. They would answer you and say, well, we'd have this massive wave of childhood death from all the germs if we put a pause on the vaccine schedule, which that would bring to the table. Well, wait a minute. Let's look back to early 1900s, a 99% drop. That should trigger in your mind a question. How did that happen? How can we recreate that? and create that healthy immune system, but also this whole conversation about treatment. No one even gets to get to that point.

And I'm talking more integrative things and something as crazy as vitamin C. But there's so much data on intravenous and intramuscular high dose vitamin c. That's just one thing. I mean, there are so many alternative, quote unquote, alternative because they're natural and you can't patent them. But photobiomodulation is a scientific name, but UV light, red light therapies for immune system and germ killing. And you can do things in the body with light. There's 800 published studies just by Dr. Hamblin, much less all the other doctors on that subject.

Ozone, which is O3, herbs, homeopathy. there's a whole world of treatment. Even if the germs look like they're going to overtake us, great, let's treat it. I mean, it's between a strong immune system and sprinkling a few treatments, which a stronger immune systems, you don't even really need the treatments. But fine, sprinkle in a little bit, and there's so much evidence on the treatment, that's not even near having to come into the table of the conversation. to bring that in. So, yeah, there's so much.

We could just really sit here all day long. And this is a great conversation. I got to tell you, I feel so honored to have you with us today and share this information. It's really going to make the difference in the lives of many, even if it's just that Hey, maybe I'll read the book about illusions or turtles all the way down. Maybe I will take that next step and start to consider something different than what I've been doing. That's always been my thought to a parent is if what you're doing is working, stick with it.

But if it's not, think of something new. And there are there's so many options out there. Well, tell everybody how they can find you. Well our website, Veritas, that's V as in Victor, E-R-I-T-A-S. That's Latin for truth. So veritaswellnessmember.com is the website. I think it's my name on Instagram, Dr. Ben Edwards, YouTube. But it is all through our web site. You can the links to YouTube, our podcast, You're the Cure. And then we have a virtual wellness program. People can jump on there and learn how to not be a Standard American.

They can order a blood panel through our program and a wellness guide, a Wellness Navigator can guide them off the Standard America road onto the non-Standard American road if people need guidance on nutrition, hydration, movement, and peace. That's what our Wellness Navigators do. And my goal is for those health coaches, to be so busy and helping people so much. The medical clinic, which we do have in Lubbock, Texas, Veritas Medical, but the need for medical goes way, way way down. And that's what we're seeing over the last two years since we launched the wellness program.

It's grown, it's robust, its got a lot of testimonials coming out of people being healed. Never seen the medical side, the doctor. Now, do you do telehealth? We do for Texans, but across state lines, we just do the wellness stuff, which is all the health coaching. Which again, is getting to the root cause. All the doctor can really do is treat a symptom, Which it's fine to do. I don't want people to feel condemned for treating a symptoms. But it is symptom treatment. It's clearing the smoke. And it the Wellness Navigators who teach you how to get to kitchen and put out the fire.

So we do that across states lines and international lines. We have people from all over the world doing our wellness program. Well, that is just wonderful. And you just have so much to contribute, and God has really brought you to a place. You are a light, Dr. Edwards. I am so glad that I had an opportunity to hear your podcast, but to also have you here and just hear everything about how you got to where you are now. It's just such a joy. So thank you so You're very welcome. It's an honor for me to be on here.

I know you're touching a lot of lives, reaching a lots of people with the truth. So, I love to obviously talk, because I took the whole hour almost to answer one question, but I'm scratching about the Truth and people having an aha moment so they can not be a victim to this system that's not telling them the true. Thank you for the opportunity to come on and share. Well, that's my goal is to build the community, the world. And if you didn't get anything at the, you know, spelling the name or anything like that, feel free to go over to the website, connectmybrain.com and you can send me a message and I'll make sure you have all the information you need.

We'll also put his links in the show notes so that you could be sure and find Dr. Ben Edwards and Veritas Wellness. Thank you again for being with us. You're welcome.