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Well, once again, welcome to this month's Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name is Andrew Murray. My name is Sarah Johanneson Murray. For those of you who perhaps have never listened to the show, they run every third Friday of the month from 7 till 8 p.m. We're both licensed medical herbalists. We practice here in Northern California. We see a wide range of people and increasingly are consulting with people by telephone across the country. As usual, it has become very popular and almost indispensable because of the wealth of
information and the alternative approach to the same subjects that we felt we knew at one point in time, but it's certainly getting a re-education. We'll be joined by Dr. Raymond Peat, PhD, who spent the last 40 years in research, providing a wealth of newsletters. He's written several books. It's probably more like 50 years now. And he doesn't sell anything. So that's the kind of neat thing. He's very altruistic. And I know from just personally how much time he gives freely in terms of me asking him questions about various clients with getting his perspective
and his insight onto it. And also I've heard from hundreds of people from all over the country and all around the world, from people from Australia, from Europe, Canada, who have written to me and said that they either got responses from him or they consulted in the past with him. And some people have talked about 20 or 30 years and they've been following what he's been advocating. So I'm always very pleased to have him on the show. There is something new I wanted to make
sure that people that are listening to the show tonight take note of because the call-in number has changed. So I'm looking at this new temporary call-in number. It used to be 9233911, but the temporary number here is now 777. We got a 707 area code. Yeah, 707 area code. That's if you're in the area. 777-5397. I still imagine there is a 1-800 number. They haven't said anything about that changing and I'll confirm that with the, yeah, we think that's probably still the same. That's 1-800-568-3723. 1-800-568-3723. That's 800 K-M-U-D-RAD. So the regular number for people
in the area, the 707 number again, and I'll call this out again a bit later, is 777-5397. So from 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o'clock, you're invited to call in with any questions related to this month's subject of exploring the precautionary principle. And people are welcome to call in regarding the show or if they have other questions, Dr. Raymond Peake is always very keen to answer questions and he's always got a, he always has a remedy or an explanation even for the strangest questions. So
not that you should ask strange questions to test him, but anyway, so I just want to open the show. I did a little bit of digging around this morning knowing that the subject was going to be this phrase "precautionary principle". So the term "cautionary" or "precautionary principle" is not a new concept. It has its roots in antiquity and is the maxim supporting the heritage of herbal medicine. First, do no harm. The Hippocratic oath by which all practitioners of medicine still swear allegiance is the same and its meaning remains unchanged, though modern practices have swerved
off the road and are far from on the straight and narrow path leading to safe and effective medicines which we could all benefit from in this time of knowledge. We know the Greek legend of Pandora and her box once opened and in the world it could never be put back in and the price to humanity was great. So I ask you the question, why does nature not come up with the best way forward and why do we seek to usurp it rather than learn from it and use it as a guide as we should?
Some good scientists do, no doubt, but we live in a world ruled by greed and power, especially over others, and are far from a universally altruistic state. GMOs, for example, are very contentious and it completely defies logic to have Chernobyls and Fukushimas all over the planet with waste-lasting millennia and weapons of truly mass destruction with us always. Pandora's box was open for sure, but we are lured by the potential of virtually limitless clean energy by fusion reaction as we are by the lies that the GMO scientists foster regarding feeding the starving planet's
population. The precautionary principle as applied to medicines and foods can be seen in Europe where it is codified into law, but purposely not here in the US. This is up for discussion and whilst not a political show, the politics of nations with their attendant controlling vested interests and lobbyists most definitely are implicated in the lack thereof. Now the world charter for nature adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1982 was the first international endorsement of the precautionary principle and the principle was implemented in an international
treaty as early as 1987 at the Montreal Protocol and among other international treaties and declarations is reflected in the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development signed at the UN Conference on Environment and Development. Now the United States has opposed the use of the term principle because this term has special connotations in legal language due to the fact that the principle of law is a source of law. Now this is the legal status of the precautionary principle in the European Union and it has informed much EU policy including areas
beyond environmental policy down to general product safety, the use of additives for use in animal nutrition, the incineration of waste and the regulation of genetically modified organisms. And another point as I have mentioned the nuclear industry is Chris Busby's article which we'll get into later and the invocation in Europe of the Euratom suicide clause. So without much further ado Dr Peat are you with us? Yep. Thanks so much for joining us again we do appreciate your giving your time. So getting into the precautionary principle and I know we
have covered you know the concept the Hippocratic Oath, first do no harm, medical fraud etc. But what is it we wanted to bring out here with the precautionary principle given that it's law in Europe and it's not here and let's go and start this discussion by opening up with where you are most intimately concerned with this for the good of change. Just after I got out of graduate school and was doing consulting and practical projects people were talking about whether natural remedies were any better than pharmaceutical chemical remedies and that started me thinking
about what the difference really is and a substance such as progesterone I think is a good illustration. Just yesterday someone asked me told me the story of his wife being prescribed a new synthetic progestin. I looked up some articles on it and they described it as being designed to resemble as closely as possible the natural molecule progesterone and a couple other molecules in the last 10 years or so have claimed that they are closer than any of the other synthetic progestins to natural progesterone and that is very interesting that progesterone
has existed in animals since animals began and these other substances in the case of this recent one it has existed in the universe only for 10 years and so we pretty well know that natural progesterone is safe because it has been doing its thing in organisms forever. This new one has a group on it a cyanide group that never was attached to a natural steroid molecule so it's undoubtedly doing many things that natural progesterone doesn't do but how soon will we know what the ultimate side effects of this historically unique intervention in the organism,
what will they be 100 years from now in the descendants of the people who are being treated with it now. And why did they put the cyanide on there is that to make it a patentable medicine? That's part of it yeah they are making things as close to progesterone as they can but they can't patent progesterone so they have something as close to it as they can get but the actual natural substance is cheap and the drug companies aren't interested in promoting something with very little profit because everyone can compete.
When you use herbal remedies even if there is one specific active agent that you're looking for like in a foxglove, the digit dallas type effect, you're not only going to have supporting surrounding metabolites that are acting somewhat like drugs but you know that that natural form of the molecule has existed in plant cells since the plant became what it is. And the fact is that the structure and the biochemistry of plant and animal cells is very similar. We have the same basic types of enzymes and energy producing reactions.
Photosynthesis is the main difference between plants and animals and movement. Animals have specialized movement systems but for the basic chemistry plants are very parallel to animals and so we know that those molecules are compatible with at least many kinds of life where if you invent a molecule it might seem very similar but you really can't know until you have tried it for the whole lifetime of a particular organism and in the case of diethylstilbestrol, DES, it was introduced as an estrogen to treat menopause and to improve
pregnancy. It was called the female hormone and so the argument was that if you were having trouble carrying a pregnancy that was because something was defective in your femaleness so they gave you more of the female hormone and there were already many things known about the harm of the molecule at that time but it was given to millions of women and 20 or 30 years later they were seeing that the children both male and female and even the grandchildren apparently have been
injured by their mother's use of this synthetic estrogen. So that shows that the development of sickness which in the case of cancer an individual might not show the fact that they got cancer from an exposure to a chemical might be 40 years after the exposure so with a six-month animal study you aren't going to have a clue as to whether it might cause cancer in the old age of the person who uses it or even in their children or grandchildren and now in the last 15 or 20 years the idea of
epigenetic change has been accepted and what you do to one individual is now recognized to have the effect several generations into the future and one of those common effects which is now recognized as a type of epigenetic change or damage is called genomic instability where even the DNA which might not be mutated in the first day or week or year of exposure but the genome itself becomes destabilized even in subsequent generations so that there are mutations being created in later generations from an early exposure.
Estrogen and ionizing radiation have many overlapping similarities. You can get a synergy between a certain dose of radiation and a certain dose of energy of estrogen which is more than additive. It's like adding extra radiation to an x-ray if you have an exposure already to estrogen. So it's like a potentiating effect. Yeah. So let me just expand this concept of the precautionary principle. So just for people that are listening I hadn't actually heard of this specific principle and didn't recognize
that actually it was a point in law written into law in the European Union so that what it seeks to do and correct me if I'm wrong it seems seeks to bring a real legal action into play against malfeasant activities perpetrated by different companies who would bring a product to market and subsequently harm people because they either didn't do enough testing or they covered up the testing and will get into the fraud side of medicine which is fairly well known in terms
of how prevalent it is. But that this law there actually protects well I guess it protects people that have been hurt and injured and or the covers the cost of environmental cleanup. And I did notice that a lot of it initially was aimed at environmental effects of degradation degradative effects of whatever substance that was leaked into the environment, polluted rivers etc. So initially there was a lot of environmental things and I think the Earth Summit etc. was the forbearer of what later became not through lack of being initiated in the
beginning but from a rollover effect became things to involve medicines, food safety, you know very many different things that you would come into contact with as an organism yourself and maybe not be directly responsible for but were you know exposed to it from the companies producing it so that there is a direct recourse in law. But the American and I'm not saying this is wrong and I'm really not saying one is better than the other but what I'd like you to bring out later is the
benefit of the obvious results of careful testing, careful planning, true scientific evaluation of the facts, not covering up any skewed results to put your product in a bad light but being totally honest and I think this is where all of the concept of fraud and damage and claims and insurance and all the things that put up the cost of everything to everybody because it's all additive in its own right. It's really just down to dishonesty at the heart of it all. I think if you look at
why these things happen and why GlaxoSmithKline pay out 36 billion in reparations for drugs and that's just one of them. I think about things like Vioxx and other companies that have produced drugs that have been shown to give sudden death or they give people dementia or whatever it is, you know it's a harmful effect and so the whole tenet of first do no harm it's got to be the most important thing and that really goes hand in hand with being totally honest and being scientific
about what you're doing so that you're open to scrutiny. It's thrown out there, it's peer-reviewed etc and the results are what the results are and you move forward and that's how real progress is made. I'm not saying that a lot of times things can be born out of mistakes and turn out to produce better things but in terms of the precautionary principle and European law covering that and we'll get into the, you mentioned earlier that this character Busby, Chris Busby in England,
he's basically bringing this what they call the Euratom suicide clause and we'll bring out here a little bit later on just how many more deaths have now been attributed to radioactive waste either from Sellafield in England, radioactive material being incinerated and or dumped into the oceans, washed up on the shores, big leukemia incidences, whether it's Chernobyl and all the people dying there with thyroid cancer, whether it's in Japan from Nagasaki and Hiroshima and how that all brought out what the effects of radiation were and the American government definitely
downplayed it so they could maintain research but what he said now and again we'll get into this a bit later on but he said that ultimately it's almost 150 times the relative risk that was given in the publication that showed this so that it was more like 90,000 people a year are dying as a direct result of Hiroshima and Nagasaki annually, it's not like a one-time thing, it's an annual event and it's ultimately it's complete and out corporate manslaughter and so he wants to try and through the European court ultimately bring around the end of
radioactive waste being dumped and whole nuclear power stations being a thing of the past and you know nuclear energy being a thing of the past. I just wanted to get back to the medicines, Dr. Eaton, you mentioned if these some of these drugs are causing genetic problems and cancers 40 years later and then in the grandchildren of mothers who took synthetic estrogen type drugs whilst pregnant, how can drug companies test these products safely? I mean would they have seen some problems within a reasonable amount of time in animal studies? Yeah, by the 1930s,
years before the estrogens came on the pharmaceutical market, they were already identified as very potent carcinogens and promoters of brain defects, movement disorders, personality changes, inflammation of practically all tissue, cancer development in every organ of the body, not just the breast and uterus but brain, kidney, lung, all types of cancer were already known at the time that these came on the market and that they were abortifacient. Estrogen was clearly identified before 1940 as a powerful birth control or actually early abortifacient.
And despite that, it was sold for almost 20 years to prevent miscarriage, exactly the opposite of what it was known to actually do. So fraud was the driving force behind the whole estrogen replacement therapy so-called. It started with the knowledge that it was in many cases doing exactly the opposite of what they were selling it to do. But what do you think about new drugs that they might not have that knowledge? I mean do you think there's ways to safely test them?
Yeah, often they still currently have the knowledge and hide it or don't want to look for it. If someone suspects that it might have a certain kind of effect, they will carefully avoid in their applications for approval. They will avoid discussion of the mechanisms that could cause it to be harmful. The whole DNA revolution, it happens that there were changes in the way people were thinking about the nature of science at the same time that the biology was being shifted over to a study of the DNA molecule rather than actual the facts of inheritance.
And I see it as a coordinated effort sponsored by the government to support industry in its ability to evade responsibility. If you just look at ordinary liability, you know, the ordinary liability principles in law would make it impossible for many of these industries to function. The insurance needed for a nuclear plant would be prohibitive. The insurance needed for vaccines and for many drugs. Well, they're indemnified, aren't they, for vaccines? They're legally indemnified and held unblameable. He's saying that because the insurance would be
so great. They're just, they get off without having to get any insurance. Yeah, and even without putting this explicitly into the law as indemnification beforehand, the cleanup projects of the great chemical contaminants around the country, these are being done at public taxpayer expense rather than holding the profiting corporations responsible for the full cost of clean up. So it's a win-win situation for the offending corporations and a lose-lose for the taxpayers and the general population. Yeah. Great. Well, you're listening to Ask Your Web, Dr. KMED
Garboville, 91.1 FM from 7.30 till the end of the show. Callers are welcome to call in with any questions either related to this or unrelated to this month's subject or the precautionary principle. There's a number in the 707 area that's changed and it's 707-777-5397. If you're on the web and you're listening and you're in different countries, like you've had people phoning from Australia and Well, actually, they'll have to call us. I don't know, a seven number. Okay. I'm just pointing out
In the country. There is an 800 number and I think some people have tried the Skype number, but I'm not too sure if that is available. But anyway, there's an 800 number. It's 800-568-3723 and obviously the show can be downloaded anytime after the end of the show for people that are in, you know, different countries or different time zones and they want to hear the full content of the show. So, Dr. Peat, where are we going? So, I was thinking the last things we were talking about
in terms of indemnification of these corporations basically being protected by the government and the government being bought out by lobbyists. I think that's a very important point that adds to the fact that America did not sign on to this precautionary principle. Yeah, the government not only is working for the corporations in their immediate liabilities protecting them, but if you go back to the late 1930s again in the 1940s, even the very nature of the way science is done and the philosophy of science of what explains the goodness of science, the government
has intervened in ways that support this irresponsibility of the corporations. If you look at ancient science from Aristotle's time on down to about the 19th century, you see that cause and effect were central ideas and around the middle of the last century, people started as saying that with the quantum physics ideas, they were starting to question whether cause and effect was a real thing. And that's very nice for the polluting corporations. But there are people now, foundations and lawyers hired by corporations going around the country denying the common sense
idea of cause and effect and saying that if you claim that this is dangerous, the thing that we're selling you, you have to prove absolutely that you are being harmed by it or killed by it or whatever. You're saying this is the get out clause that America has in terms of its policy? Yeah, it's putting all the responsibility on the consumer. Interesting. And then you have to have enough money and enough time and manpower to fight it. Let me just hold that thought one second, Dr. Peay, I don't mean to interrupt you,
but we did get somebody calling in. So let's take this caller and see where we're going with this call. Where are you from, caller? What's your question? Hi, my name is Jeremy. I'm calling from Atlanta, Atlanta, Georgia. Yes, sir. Cool. What's your question, Jeremy? Well, I have a question a little off topic for Dr. Peay. It's about progesterone and my wife. We've been poof of free for about two years now, and we've been trying to kind of overcome her estrogen dominance. She's 32 and she's been struggling with estrogen dominance ever since
she was probably about eight when she hit puberty. She's had really inconsistent periods and all that. Her waking temps in the morning had been at 94.9 and just removing the poof, we were able to get it up to 97.1. And then back in June, we started doing progesterone with that. And we were following Dr. Lee's progesterone therapy and doing about 100 milligrams a day. And it actually started her cycles up. She was not having cycles at all. And they were very erratic. And then they kind of
stabilized into a very short two-week cycle. And she was very consistent, but had a lot of PMS symptoms still. So I started doing more research on it and found out that some women were doing like 700 milligrams a day or more. So they were using their symptoms to dose. So we started doing the same thing using a 10% topical cream. And she's currently taking 900 milligrams per day, which we broke up into three, 300 milligram doses. She's doing it at each meal. And she's been doing
that since October. And that's topical? It's topical, yeah. And are you cycling it two weeks on, two weeks off? No, because she's still continuing her two-week cycle. So she hasn't even been having any sort of-- well, until the past month, when the two-week cycle starts, she actually won't-- the flow never begins. She'll spot for three or four days, and then it stops. And so it's like something is starting to tip with it. But I was concerned because that seems like an incredibly high dose. We've also been doing thyroid as well. We've been doing desiccated
beef thyroid. She's been doing 40 milligram tablets. And we had slowly ramped up to the point where we are now where she's doing one an hour for 12 hours out of the day. One 40 milligram desiccated thyroid tablet, you're saying? That's quite a bit. Dr. Peat, what do you think about this two-week cycle? And what do you think about that amount of thyroid glandular? And topical progesterone? Yeah, depending on what the vehicle is, sometimes only a very tiny fraction, 5% or less sometimes, of the progesterone used topically is actually getting into the body.
So it's really important to check, have a blood test once in a while. And the liver is always regulating the hormones. And when you are using progesterone all month, the liver develops over the first two weeks the ability to excrete it quickly. And so the following weeks, you're excreting it almost as fast as you can put it in. And the natural cycle has a rest of two weeks where the liver resets itself. So that a small amount being produced or absorbed will have a full effect. And then after about two weeks, the liver will start
excreting it faster. So its effect is reduced. So that's why we recommend that you take an internal progesterone like the Progest-E that you can find on the internet and then cycle it from full moon to new moon and then stop from new moon to full moon. And then hopefully you'll get into a cycle where you're ovulating at the full moon. That's when you start your Progest-E. And then you take that until new moon, which then you should have a period. The thyroid products are extremely variable. It's important to watch for changes in your
temperature and pulse rate and many other indicators like the color of lips and warmth of the fingers, the quality of sleep and digestion. And usually low thyroid, high estrogen, people have digestive problems. The estrogen tends to recycle when your thyroid is low. It is reabsorbed after being excreted into the intestine by the liver. It's reabsorbed and keeps the level high even when you aren't producing it. And so fiber in the diet, a raw carrot every day, sometimes is enough to get the estrogen down to the point that the cycles
are normalized. And especially the combination of a daily raw carrot and thyroid enough to keep your pulse and temperature up. And if you want a temperature and pulse chart, so you can chart it out and see what you're getting up to with your temperatures and pulses 15 to 90 minutes after eating breakfast and lunch, you can email us and we'll gladly send that to you so that you can have a look at it and it has the normal values of what you should be reaching.
Because 97.1 is an okay waking temperature, but after you eat, it should go up to at least 98.2 to 98.6 or 99. Yeah, she's been hitting 97.9, 98 after eating. And her temperature has been slowly, her waking temperature has been slowly rising. She actually hit 97.5 this morning. So it seems like everything's moving in a positive direction. We are doing the raw carrot every day as well. We have been for about three months. And that's why I was just concerned because I
know I've heard you talk about much lower doses of these things, you know, causing effects. And I was just worried that, you know, we're doing this really high dosing and it does seem to be working. There's no negative side effects, but it certainly seems like there should have been more substantial improvement in that period of time. I do find there's a very wide range of dose that people report back saying they use this much, they use that much. It does happen even with herbs, well, especially with things like cascara in terms of how much it
takes to elicit an easy bowel movement. And there are plenty of other herbs out there that some people quite easily consume, you know, 15 mil a day. And other people don't need anywhere near as much to get the same response. Things like valerian for sleep, it really wakes some people up, you know. So it is very variable physiologically how people react to things. Dr. Peat, what do you think about the 40 milligrams of desiccated every hour? What would the total be in the 24-hour period?
I think you said 12 hours, once an hour for 12 hours. 480 milligrams. I've known people who needed that much of even armor thyroid. Is that about like six grains? Yeah, that's, you need to make a five-grain tablet of armor. And even veterinarians would routinely prescribe that much for a cocker spaniel that weighed 30 pounds. And I've known people who've needed one or two of those regularly. So it isn't unheard of to need that much, but it's important to watch for the signs. Yeah. And also too, products can be different. 40 milligrams of this
beef glandular could be very different than 40 milligrams of armor thyroid. Gotcha. So you're saying the science to be looking for, I mean, what we did to find the dosing level was basically we had been ramping it up until she began to get nauseous, you know, from taking it and then we backed it back down from there and that's kind of where we settled. Yeah, that's kind of unusual. Everything else seems to be fine. I mean, she's not having any negative side effects at all. Everything is functioning. She feels healthy.
I know the things that Dr. Peat always points out that are symptoms of over, overdosing, over consumption will be things like sweating with very minimal exercise, breathlessness with minimal exercise. Excessive appetite, overheating during strenuous exercise. Well, not strenuous even, but just... And a pulse over 100. You haven't mentioned what her pulse is. It's been in the mid 80s most of the time. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you never know. Here's the other thing with glandulars is it's such a variable product, like Dr. Peat says, you know, I think you could take a dozen different
glandular extracts and find different amounts within the same milligram dose of, you know, of a glandular. So that's, I think, in some part a reason to advocate synthetics just because they are very finely measured. So an Armour thyroid might be a better solution then? Well, Armour should be quantified. Yeah, it should be. There should be a spec sheet that comes with it that will tell you that there are this many micrograms of T3 and T4 and what it would, you know, what that ratio would be should be an ideal ratio.
Okay. Great. Well, we'll give those things a shot. I really appreciate the show. Thank you guys so much. You're welcome. Thanks. And Dr. Peat, thank you. You've really changed our lives and I really appreciate it. So thank you. Thank you. Be cool. One more thing for that listener is, you know, if she was going to start taking the Progesterone internally, she'd probably want to start with like an eighth of a teaspoon once a day and then maybe go up to twice a day. And an eighth of a teaspoon of Progesterone has 50 milligrams of Progesterone
in it. But you know, you absorb it pretty much all of it. Yeah. And if you keep it in your mouth. And the cycling is very important. Two weeks off every month. There you go. That should help her use it, lower dose more effectively. Okay. Thank you very much. Yeah, you're welcome. Okay. So we have another caller on the air. So caller, where are you from and what's your question? Hi, I'm from the San Francisco Bay Area. Hey, what's your question? And I have two questions. One, what can a man do to reverse
male pattern baldness? And then two, how can someone heal or improve a lower back herniated disc? Dr. Peat, male pattern baldness is the first question. It's often associated with low thyroid function. And so for your general health, you should look at the whole picture of your cholesterol and body temperature, energy need, calories required and so on. And specifically for the health of the scalp, there are a few simple things. Caffeine, for example, is a good stimulant of hair follicle,
hair production, rate of growth and so on. You don't want to put coffee on your head, but you can dissolve purified caffeine in rubbing alcohol, for example. And DHEA is another natural hormone that sometimes activates hair follicle function. And for a connective tissue, and especially the discs, the DHEA and thyroid again are crucial things. If thyroid function is low, all of the connective tissues tend to be waterlogged and somewhat soft and lacking resistance and elasticity. And DHEA is sometimes just normalizing your serum level of DHEA, which
might only take five milligrams a day. That can have very quick dramatic effects on connective tissues, ligaments, tendons, discs, knee cartilage and so on. You must be careful with DHEA because it can raise your estradiol levels. So you might want to have blood checks to make sure that your estradiol progesterone ratio is good in women and then your testosterone and estrogen ratio is okay for men. You want to use DHEA. I think the important thing with DHEA is to make sure that thyroid function is adequate enough because otherwise then that conversion to estradiol
can occur more likely. That's correct, isn't it, Dr. Peat? Yeah. Okay. Thank you for your call. Okay. So the number, if you live in the area, 707 number has changed. It's 777-5397. And there's an 800 number if you're not local, that's 800-568-3723. So anyway, to carry on with the precautionary principle subject of tonight, and I think we're going to have to carry this on next week because I got lots of other questions here I'd like to ask you, Dr. Peat. I mean next
month. I don't think we're going to get a chance this evening. But anyway, it's all good. In terms of the cause and effect and what has been turned around, if like in this country whereby the onus is put on the consumer as it were to suffer the consequences and then bring to law or bring to court a, you know, a pursuable case, what do you think could be done that more closely models the European perspective in law codifying this precautionary principles without stifling
innovation? I think I always hear, and I'm not against it, I'm just trying to, I want to bring out a balanced perspective here that in this country, and I love America, God bless America, I really do love it, there is an option, an opportunity, the chance and innovation in this country I think is probably world leading. I know there's very brilliant people in China, there's brilliant people in most of Asia. In India. In India, absolutely, you know, so there's many, many peoples in the world all over, they're brilliant people and they're brilliant Russians,
you know, there's brilliant people all over in many different cultures and countries, but in America there is this kind of spirit of entrepreneurship and groundbreaking innovation and I always hear the argument, well that's going to get stifled if we put too many restrictions on, you know, say drug development that doesn't bring a product to market and it costs all these billions of dollars and, you know, we're going to stop people from getting involved in this kind of
thing. What do we, and I know that's not the case, but I just want to bring out what you're trying to bring up in terms of, so this is why not, so what have you got to say about the potential of stifling innovation with legislation like European legislation which tends to be mindlessly bureaucratic. How does that get avoided but still have the safety that we would all want to demand from a product as consumers? If the government would just stop stifling the exchange of
information that would, I think, would reduce the need for legislative power and enforcement. For example, when a product, a drug comes on the market with FDA approval, the FDA should make public all of the information that the drug company had at least, but they let the drug company keep secrets as business secrets that very often relate to the safety of the product. So the FDA tends to conspire to keep information away from the public that the public should have complete access to if the government is going to say this is an approved thing that
has the government support. Okay, because I think I'll bring out a little bit later if we have the time because we do have a call, but if we have time we'll get into this revelational piece of work by this this Jack Chris Busby in England and what he hopes to bring to pass is called the Eurotom Suicide Clause where he's basically going to use the same legislation that Europeans have to bring into law the precautionary principle and apply it to nuclear power stations and they
are going to fall flat on their face with this one because there's nowhere they can defend it. Okay, so we have a caller on the air, but let's take this caller. Caller, where are you from and what's your question? I'm actually from Pepperwood. Pepperwood, okay. So I live locally. Yeah, okay. What's your question? My question is I have reached the age of 60 and a colonoscopy is in my, is what everyone tells me I need to have even though I'm not having any digestive problems
it seems like something that you know like is a test that you're supposed to have and I'm just not sure I was wondering what you all thought about that. Dr. Peat, colonoscopy and possible revealing carcinoma in the bowel or... And or possible complications. What would you advise, Dr. Peat? Right, it's just you know seems like a routine thing when you reach a certain age they want you to have it now and it seems you know like it is I mean I know they've done
thousands of them and but it seems it is another thing that's invasive and if your body's not experiencing any problems I'm wondering can you hold off or is this something that's that is important I mean I know you want to prevent colon cancer but I'm just concerned about you know complications of surgery whatnot. My position is pretty extreme and I urge people to learn as much as they can but on colonoscopy if there's no radiation involved it's just a matter of the mechanics of it and
possibly the toxic effects of any sedative or anesthetic that they might use but when you relate it to the commonly done CAT scans and various x-ray exams I would put it on the potentially justified medical procedure while I would exclude almost always the CAT scans and radiation exams. The basic argument is that they find a certain amount of polyps that are precancerous or even have definite cancer in them that can be removed. I would just suggest that these no one really knows the natural history of a polyp because you would have to have
colonoscopy every month or so for years to watch the actual development of an individual polyp and I suspect that many polyps are the same way that many skin melanomas simply fall off and go away without even being noticed. So there's a certain ambiguity in the science that's used to justify them. In the few areas of the world where almost no one dies of intestinal or rectal cancer the colonoscopy is not done so that there's it happens that there's a close correlation between doing colonoscopies and having colon cancer. Right I think the other
thing I'd like to bring out Dr. Peat to remind me for interrupting but anybody over the age of 50 pretty much will be found to have some carcinoma somewhere in the body on autopsy correct? Yeah and it's been known for since at least the 1940s I think it was in JAMA someone published pictures of a biopsy made of various types of superficial injury cuts or stab wounds and such and showed that all of the features used to diagnose cancer in a pathological study
all of these features can be found in an ordinary healing wound. So right from the 1940s the documentation by biopsy slides and exam by skilled pathologists all of that has been put into question since all of those features abnormal cell arrangement abnormal cell structure and so on can be found in any healing wound. So if they had mixed up the slides and had someone's biopsy from a healing wound with someone's cancerous polyp they'd see the same thing and misdiagnose someone with a healing wound with cancer is that what you're saying basically? Well it implies that
if you don't follow that particular tumor or thing that you biopsied if you cut it out and study it you don't know whether it was in the process of healing or of not healing and so I think the rational approach is to do what you can that promotes healing rather than doing a biopsy. When you say that Dr. Peat then you mean to eat the right foods for your colon and your basic digestive tract health is that what I'm hearing you say? Yeah the areas where they don't get
colon cancer in effect are areas of Africa where they eat a high fiber diet. Right. Milk and fiber are very protective for the colon. Well I won't take all of your time thank you so much that is really very helpful for me. Thank you for your call caller. Dr. Peat I know we only have about four minutes left before we have to wrap up the top of the hour with contact information etc but I did want you just and this
is off the fly but I know you're going to be happy to answer it I wanted you just to reiterate the rationale behind pigments and skin melanosis pigments that are formed in the skin whether they be benign pre-cancerous or cancerous and how that effect of that cell change can be mitigated with progesterone given that the estrogenic stimulation with that area can certainly be a trigger for carcinoma. Yeah the tanning process is probably related to the formation of molds and melanomas the injury done to the cell by ultraviolet light you can create tanning by
practically any kind of injury to the skin not just ultraviolet light but it's a reaction to injury and so when cells are being injured for example by a progesterone deficiency stressed by stimulator substances such as estrogen or some of the nerve transmitter chemicals the stress reaction creates a pigment as a defense because the pigment is a free radical scavenger and as long as you're producing the pigment it's defending itself against the free radicals so that I think of moles as a defensive reaction a famous Israeli researcher Gershom Zaychek
has reviewed the evidence on melanoma surgery and he says it's very common for when you remove one confirmed melanoma often new ones will pop up almost immediately after the removal and he suggests that the presence of one is sending out signals that suppress the formation of new ones. Okay because there's definitely a bystander effect as well with cancers and there's definitely the well-documented risk of spread and or alarm alarm signals being spread that would then propagate that same reproduction. Anyway Dr. Peat thanks so much
for your time we've coming up to a couple of minutes so let me just the lights are buzzing. Was there anything else you wanted to say Dr. Peat before we close out the show? No just that the bystander effect is a vastly under investigated subject it relates to radiation, estrogen, any kind of injury spreading everywhere everywhere in the body. It's in the field of quantum mechanics right? All right thanks so much for your time. Thank you Dr. Peat. Okay thanks. Okay so thanks
for those people that called in for those people that have listened and tried to call at the end of the show here I'm sorry we didn't get to the phone there is a possibility here if you want to email you can email either me or Sarah you can go ahead and email me [email protected] if you have any questions that you didn't get a chance to ask perhaps. Okay so for those people that heard Dr. Peat and want to find out more about him www.raypeat.com