Episode 27 - Academic Insanity - Shoemaker’s Reversal on Mold Illness and What It Means for CIRS Patients

In this episode, listeners learn more about Erik Johnson's concept of academic insanity and  the specific tactics doctors and researchers employ to discredit patients. In addition, we chat more about Dr. Shoemaker's reversal on mold illness and what this means for CIRS patients, how we've normalized illness, and how the system selects unethical doctors through market pressure. 

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Transcript

Kealy Severson: 0:06

Thank you for joining our podcast where I, Kealy Severson, Erik Johnson, and Alicia Swamy are exposing mold. Today we're having a casual round table discussion about a little thing Erik Johnson likes to refer to as academic insanity. Before we dive into it, I will briefly

explain the concept: 0:27

it is the key and lock and gate to not being able to know anything that hasn't already been known, which means you are an idiot for asking questions. If you want to research something that you have a hypothesis on, how dare you suggest this. You must have research to prove what you're saying before you have research to prove what you're saying. The circle argument round and round and round that keeps researchers eyes closed from looking at anything that isn't already in a peer reviewed published journal. Erik, tell us your experience about academic insanity.

Erik Johnson: 1:11

Well, you expressed it perfectly. That's exactly the problem. It's like the ultimate catch 22, a researcher can't be induced to look into something without something in their peer reviewed literature that tells them to look into it. Now in terms of the toxic mold phenomenon, back in the 1980s, there was nothing in the literature. So we literally could not ask any researchers to look into it because they would say, well, it's just an allergy. And if we intimated if we showed any evidence, if we even suggested that there was more to it than that, you prove it. You don't have any science. And they've held the line at this for the last 35 years, when the original chronic fatigue syndrome outbreak happened, a whole bunch of teachers got sick in the single room. And they asked for help with what they believe was mold. It seemed to be mold. It was in the heating and ventilation system and they clearly pointed at that and it is documented that they asked for help with this. Well, researchers, they did look in the literature. And they said, well, mold is just an allergy. So no. And the very point of asking for mold was used against them to say, since we already know, we know all about mold. So no, we're not going to do it. So the tricky teachers when they had an opportunity to ambush Dr. Gary Holmes, in the middle of his investigation into the Lake Tahoe mystery illness, they went straight to him and having learned their lesson about asking for mold. They just said, well look in the room. Just look in the room. Well, what do you want us to examine in the room? Well, the air filters actually, these air filters have not been changed for a long time and we suspect based on our observations and our symptoms, that whatever is affecting us will be found in those air filters. Okay, so what do you think is in their filters? Well, mold. We already told you, mold is just an allergy. So the circular logic, this philosophy, that everything there is to be known as already in their literature became a weapon against discovering anything new and that's the concept of academic insanity.

Kealy Severson: 3:27

If you like this is a weapon that's used against us in conversation when we have interviews with people who kind of subscribe to this way of thinking. I was personally really surprised in a recent interview, where I was like talking about and referencing the difficulty and the inability of homeowners or renters to really assess a mycotoxin profile in their house because we all know that those tests, they're not available to the average person who wants to know what's in their house. And the argument kind of that spun around. Well, of course, we can test for any kind of mycotoxin Oh, well, you need you need this specific assay for that specific mycotoxin. But the person was referencing mycotoxins found in food, and how they test mycotoxins for food. And it seems like some of the head researchers, they know that we can inhale this stuff, they know it's not just in our food. So where's the disconnect in understanding that we're actually talking about lack of assessment for a sick person, not really for the research of their food? Does that make sense?

Erik Johnson: 4:39

Absolutely. The only research into mycotoxins was in the veterinary literature. They had assessed the effects of aflatoxins and even trichothecenes on animals, but there was nothing about human health effects. Nothing about sick buildings. The concept didn't even know sick building syndrome didn't even exist prior to the 1970s. And since there was no medical literature, nothing about the human health effects of toxic mold, they constrained their concepts of what mold can do, only to ingestion. That finally started to break down in 1986, with the Dr. William Croft paper, on the toxic black mold, which was funded by the US Army, by the way, go army and that was just a year too late in order for the chronic fatigue syndrome researchers to see it. So in their minds, there was no evidence for inhalation of mold as any kind of hazard and they fixated on that. And that is, again, where they're holding the line now. Over and over again, homeowners fear that mold is making them sick, obviously, inhaled mold, they're not eating the sheetrock. And they point at it and the researchers fixate, again, with their idea that until they have some proof, they don't have to respond to the inhalation aspect of toxic mold exposure.

Kealy Severson: 6:08

I have to ask myself, because I notice when we have these conversations with people, there's specific tactics that are used, and it's the same tactics, I'm noticing a pattern. When you start asking questions that could uncover information that would bridge a gap in information, certain professionals in the industry start to play this word spinning game where they'll suddenly start to tell you that the conversation can't continue because you're not using terms correctly.

Erik Johnson: 6:42

Yep, that is a complete, deceptive disingenuous tactic. It is a ploy. It is a cheap, sleazy trick that researchers play on each other all the time, like when mold first hit the news, no record of mold being a problem. I mean, everybody knows about mold on oranges, mold on bread, mold on cheese, you know, mold is not a secret, that the common molds are just part of the environment, and nothing to pay attention to. So when the first media accounts of the dreaded black mold, became well known, it became the dreaded black mold, the toxic mold, the mold, all you had to say was the mold, the mold illness, and everybody knew exactly what you're talking about because this is what hit the media, the black mold. Well, pretty soon, researchers started to say, Well, you can't say that, because mold is everywhere, obviously. But we are talking about the black mold. And since it's embedded in our early literature, in the newspaper accounts, in people's descriptions, we are talking about the mold, there's really no reason to play this game. We all know what we're talking about. It's the black mold that's making people sick, if there are other molds that are capable of causing illness, fine. But the first one was the black mold. We can't go back and erase all the newspapers that said so. So for these researchers to play that little game, about mold is everywhere and you can't say mold, is completely deceptive. It is only a trick meant to shut you up.

Kealy Severson: 8:21

I actually did look at a military handbook that was shared with me and it is how doctors in the military are supposed to respond to people in the military living in moldy military housing. When they come to their doctor for health complaints from mold. They have a propaganda manual of how they're supposed to respond. Now, I'm noticing a lot of the same terminology, the same responses, and the same information coming from what I saw in that manual, spoken from the same people who are what we would call deniers you know where they they play with this word play, they've probably testified for the defense to protect a company's interest in a mold claim. So they have a label that makes them an authority, it's a really specific type of wordplay.

Alicia Swamy: 9:17

It's important to look at the funding sources that they're receiving to do their studies. Whose payroll are they on? Because as soon as you recover and find out that information, you're going to know their perspective. And you're going to understand that okay, if this is a person that is working for the insurance companies, even though they are these respected, researchers, you know that their opinion is going to err in favor of these insurance companies.

Erik Johnson: 9:43

Yeah, we used to call those insurance whores. I mean, they have sold their souls. They have betrayed their Hippocratic oath. They've got no scruples, no integrity whatsoever. These people are really scum of the earth. I can't emphasize that enough. These people are beneath contempt. Now, if you simply look at the literature on what the mold, the dreaded black mold is capable of, there's no reason to go up in somebody's face and deny that their complaints about mold have any basis. I mean, there's so much evidence that under certain circumstances, this toxic mold can disable immune function. To play these games, is we really need to call this out and expose them, and shame them into changing their ways, because that's the only way to slow them down.

Kealy Severson: 10:35

I see things going in a more legal direction with mold. We spoke with Shelley in a previous podcast, and there's there's more military families that are filing lawsuits. You know, I wonder if we're going to see an uptick in in these kinds of lawsuits and I just wonder where the CIRS diagnosis from a water damage building that research in those findings are now saying it's really not mold, but a bacteria in that environment. I'm wondering how this is going to be hurtful, potentially, to people's legal cases? Is this something that's going to eventually be used to say, Well, even if you have CIRS, it's not for mold. It's from this bacteria. So it's not mold illness. So your mold reports don't matter. That's a concerning line of thought. And the other thing with all of the focus on the genetics is I don't believe and I haven't spoke with anyone who's ever corrected me on this and we've talked to a lot of people, but I don't believe that there's a genetic profile that can withstand the type of poisons that are used in biowarfare like trichothecenes.

Erik Johnson: 11:44

You know, it's good to stick to Stachybotrys in order to make a point, because the toxins from this particular mold are known to disable innate immune function of any creature that they've tested it on. I mean, there's no exceptions. There's no, it's toxic. It prevents cell walls reproduction. It's a protein synthesis inhibitor. So I mean, it's a toxin.

Kealy Severson: 12:10

But how can you be so sure about that?

Erik Johnson: 12:13

Vast amounts of studies. In particular, though, the atranones, it's been tested, it's been isolated and tested, and found to specifically inhibit mitosis, cell division and reproduction. So if you can perform something like this in vitro, you're not going to overcome it with brain retraining, you're not going to somehow evade a toxic effect by supplements, you might mitigate some of the immune damage that it's done. But certainly the the studies on Stachybotrys are sufficient to establish that this is a very powerful mold and you can't really mix it up with all the other ones, in order to defeat somebody's argument that mold is making them sick. Now in terms of the CIRS phenomenon, when Dr. Shoemaker started out, it was actually looking at pfisteria toxins on the Chesapeake with microcystis, with toxins coming out of the sediment microcystins, and he noticed that people responded to this cholestyramine it cleared up their diarrhea, reduced their brain fog, it seemed to be extracting something, a toxin from their intestines, and it had a beneficial effect. And that was the initial basis of Dr. Shoemaker's, surviving mold and biotoxin concepts. He eventually branched into sick building syndrome, and wondered if the cholestyramine might work for this toxic mold and that started the old mold empire so to speak, and for a while there, his interest in chronic fatigue syndrome for a long time, seemed to be leading towards connecting his concepts with this ICD official approved Center for Disease Control created syndrome, which meant that we had a really good chance of getting direct research into the toxic mold that was at ground zero for the syndrome. But over time, CIRS came to be applied to more and more alternate concepts, brown recluse spider bites, to ciguatoxin, and eventually various viruses. So it lost its way in terms of being useful as a research tool and now with Dr. Shoemaker's emphasis on actinomycetes, he has drifted so far away from having an interest in the toxic mold phenomenon that was considered a euphemism or synonymous for mold illness now being considered probable, not mold illness. So if you got a serious diagnosis From 2010 through 2019, it's probably mold. But if you have a Shoemaker doctor who has followed closely with Shoemaker has done in moving into actinomycetes, your new CIRS is probably not from mold. So therefore, you've got your diagnosis has been ripped out from under you, it's been changed. It's kind of similar to what happened with Holmes 1988 chronic fatigue syndrome, which has a specific exclusion for psychiatric illness. You cannot have a CFS diagnosis according to the original criteria, if you have any psychiatric disease. It's ruled out, that's to make sure that the research stays on track and you don't get sucked into what doctors always like to do by saying it's all in your head. Well, as the new definitions, the redefinitions emerged, that distinction got lost. And in the UK, in England, in particular, chronic fatigue syndrome went from being a non psychiatric disease to primarily a psychosomatic illness, a complete reversal. So that's another example of academic insanity here. Where the failure to stick with the program to isolate a data set and keep the integrity of that data set distinct for as long as you are trying to solve it. This is where researchers completely lose their way. And so yeah, I fear that CIRS has turned from something that could be used to establish your mold illness into something that can now work against you.

Kealy Severson: 16:39

Well, the thing in the UK is really interesting, that's really convenient for the housing Council, because I know they have a lot of problems with moldy housing there. I see it all the time. So if they can just go ahead and say it doesn't even make you sick, you're just crazy. That's a good reason not to let government own all of the housing.

Erik Johnson: 17:02

Well, you certainly have to look at their motives before you look at their science, because it's obvious that vested interests are driving the results that they want to find. Now, as far as the toxic mold phenomenon. If you look at any of the sick building incidents, you don't really need to go far to find this phenomenon. It's that certain people in certain parts of the building will get sick, while people in another room escape illness. This is no secret. It's clear from the anecdotal evidence, that proximity to certain molds and we have evidence for this and Stachybotrys, people that are right next to a colony of Stachybotrys can become deathly ill, whereas people in the same house, sometimes even on the other side of the room, escape illness. And you can see that this is often used against people, they go, Well, we tested the room, or we tested the building, and we didn't find sufficient levels of anything to cause illness. Well, if they are aware that somebody can have a bad experience, like maybe they opened up a wall, or maybe they were right next to a wall that had the Stachybotrys, that they are the exception to the rule that they're trying to use to disprove the presence of illness in that building and that was seen in the original chronic fatigue syndrome cohort, where there was a high concentration of toxins in one specific room where people in other parts of the school, or even in the rooms next door, they escaped illness, they recovered from that flu that came around and added an extra burden on to the sick building pressure on their immune systems that they were already dealing with. And we know that chronic fatigue syndrome researchers are aware of this, because in their abstract where they wrote about that room, they bring up the fact that one of the teachers sensed the presence of something toxic if that room, went up and sat in his camper, and he was the only one recovered, they would not have attached importance to the escape mechanism to the mold avoidance strategy had they not known it was important. And yet in the 35 years since this incident, they say that doesn't matter. We're only concerned with the sick people, not those who recover. So the circumstance under which he directed his own recovery are disallowed by the rules of their mental processes. And I consider that to be completely insane.

Alicia Swamy: 19:37

At this point it just seems that a lot of these organizations that study these chronic illnesses are just chasing their tails. They're going in circles and circles and circles and they're never really reaching the finish line. Maybe they're purposely trying to continue chasing their tail because that money will keep flowing, if they do reach the finish line that money may stop flowing from grants and other institutions, right?

Erik Johnson: 20:05

Yeah, we have to look very carefully at what a researcher is aware of how much they know and when they know what to look for that point where the knowledge that they are in possession of precludes the conclusions or lack of conclusions that they are generating. In other words, they know too much to behave in such an oblivious manner. And that's where they crossed the line from being genuinely confused into corruption.

Alicia Swamy: 20:37

So that's how you can tell the difference between a trustworthy scientist compared to an untrustworthy scientist or researcher?

Erik Johnson: 20:45

Exactly. In terms of chronic fatigue syndrome, for as long as they don't really know about toxic mold, we can assume that there's no reason for them to attach any particular importance to it. Why would they respond to toxic mold, it's I mean, but spread all over the world that chronic fatigue syndrome is probably a virus, it acted like a virus. So that's their conceptual framework. As long as they don't know too much about toxic mold, we can expect that it's perfectly reasonable for them to ignore it. Well, once they become a mold specialist, once they realize that mold can disable immune function, and allow the proliferation or the reactivation of viruses, then the words mold at ground zero for chronic fatigue syndrome are meaningful to them. They can no longer ignore them without either having a really poor memory, or some kind of disingenuous agenda.

Alicia Swamy: 21:42

And that's the problem, I feel like we have completely tainted scientific research, because industry is able to throw money out to find or validate their business, their products. And so that really just taints the whole field of science. If that scientist is being funded by Big Pharma, then you know, that scientist is bought, that scientist is not a genuine investigator.

Erik Johnson: 22:09

Now, there's a terrific book about the history of the tactics used by Big Tobacco to suppress, trivialize, and diminish the evidence of the harm of smoking, the dangers of smoking. Tobacco companies were fully aware of the dangers of their product all along and they never really denied it. They simply created uncertainty and doubt in this book, doubt is their product shows exactly how these effective tactics managed to guide people away from drawing any definite conclusions. And all these same tactics, these same strategies, the same ploys are being applied to toxic mold. And it's really fascinating to see how effective this simple derailing of clues, of evidence can be. And we've grown to expect this from institutes, from researchers who are obviously under the thumb of some kind of superior authority. But what's really surprising is the independent doctors and researchers who somehow seem to fail in reaching obvious conclusions, such as if a person keeps pointing to a mold, and you test it, and it turns out to be a well known, highly publicized toxic mold. But perhaps there's something to look into there.

Alicia Swamy: 23:31

The denial of this throws up a major red flag. Why is this being suppresse so hardcore? I mean, this is really trying to be shoved into the dirt.

Kealy Severson: 23:43

Well, the real problem is Erik actually just wants to make this all about himself.

Erik Johnson: 23:49

Yeah, that's a good tactic. And you know, when one of the early clusters of chronic fatigue syndrome was reported in Lyndonville on the other side of the country, in New York, the doctor who publicized his own cluster, Dr. David S. Bell was dealing with his own sick building syndrome situation where a whole bunch of children got sick in a school and 16 air quality experts could not find the cause. They failed to find the cause, the parents were swearing that the school must be poisonous, but the experts could not find a cause. So the conclusion was, it's probably just another cluster of chronic fatigue syndrome or viral illness. Well, Dr. Bell was a wonderful guy, but there was something in his mind that caused him to lapse into relying on the science, the existing science, rather than trusting the parents. So we really need a sociological investigation into what happens to a researchers mind when they are so blinded by the dogma of their faith and the invincibility of their peer review literature, that they cannot even consider that the parents might have been telling the truth.

Kealy Severson: 25:05

We saw a really prime example of exactly what you're saying, Erik and our interview yesterday because the person we interviewed when we tried to emphasize the dangers of Stachybotrys the position was, well, you know that there's other molds that are dangerous and Stachybotrys isn't always found in tests. And then about 20 minutes later into the interview, the person was like, Well, you know, it's rarely ever picked up so it's not always going to be found. Seemingly not realizing that they kind of can't not kind of absolutely contradicted their own entire point about saying, we can't focus on it, because it's never there, and then going ahead and admitting and while you know, it absolutely could be there and just not be found. They don't realize like that's hypocritical.

Erik Johnson: 25:49

I don't think that they really are confused about that, the way they become upset, and they start really getting angry about it shows that they can see the cognitive dissonance in their own argument. So I think one of the main things we have to do is don't accept that people are genuinely confused, because they're probably not. Ask them, do you really not understand the concept here? If we really start nailing them on these disparities, I believe we can pressure them to confess to they're really not confused. If you isolate a mold and it has demonstrable toxic properties, you know that when somebody is pointing at a mold, it's not going to be the everywhere kind of mold. They want to know about the mold that's making them sick. And the fact that they may not know the name of the mold, or the name of the poisons involved, is no reason to deny their complaint.

Kealy Severson: 26:46

Yeah, that's a big part of this is patient patients are not allowed to self report, patients are not allowed to go into their doctor's office and say, hey, look, I found this, I read about it, can you help me with this? They're going to be told, mold doesn't do that it can't make you sick. That's pseudoscience, they're not going to be supported. And there is no test that's going to verify from your mainstream doctor. And part of that is the result of that this hasn't been looked into. There shouldn't be a test, there should be a test, you can go to your doctor to to see if your mold sick, there shouldn't be shouldn't there?

Erik Johnson: 27:26

Well, I can appreciate that this is a confusing paradigm, especially since that we are under the impression that mold is actually changing, it's morphing. It's becoming more pathogenic. So whatever it's doing is not going to be found in the old literature. So we can accept that. But what is really unacceptable, is the arguments that because it's not in their literature, there's no reason to look, to respond to listen to patients.

Alicia Swamy: 27:55

There's like an indoctrination of people believing genetics, like it's all in the genetics. And if you don't have these certain genetics, it's not gonna affect you. That is the most absurd thing I've ever heard because it almost just takes the blame away from what's going on in the environment and puts it right back on the patient. And we keep seeing this in our patient populations with doctors. The doctors will say, well, you're unhealthy, because you have bad genes, you're unhealthy because you're not eating enough vegetables, or you're not exercising enough and no one is bothering to look at what's going on in their environment.

Erik Johnson: 28:34

Yea doctors like to say that the new precision medicine, the ability to assess each individual patient is a great step forward. And it is. But it's kind of deceptive. When you apply this idea of this philosophy, to an entire building full of sick people. When a bunch of people all become sick at the same place, and they start complaining about toxins in that area. It's time to forget about the precision medicine and start looking at the environment. So you really have to watch doctors carefully to find out when they're using genetics, or the idea of your diet, or some factor within you as an excuse to neglect looking to the environmental aspect.

Kealy Severson: 29:23

I don't know if this is my imagination. But I sometimes get this sense or this picture or this visual where they're just doing this whole like propaganda switch where they're inserting it into the generations where 10, 20, 30 years everyone is going to think any illness is only going to come down to genetics. Oh well you have the gene for that. It just has Dr. Mengele written all over it to just say everything is a genetic issue and when you blame the genes of the patients, and don't have a conversation about how the environment can affect gene expression, it seems like we're going to be in a continuous cycle, where we're just looking at the genes and what genes you have, and how your genes are failing, and how your genes are mutated because your body is a piece of shit, you can't trust it. And never talk about how the environment could be breaking down and changing those things. I think it's a really dangerous direction for medicine to be just focused on what are my genes, and when people are treated for mold illness, and then they don't get better. And they say, Oh, well, it's because this gene, no, maybe it was because you're not remediating what you're reacting to, and no one's having that conversation.

Erik Johnson: 30:38

Now, one thing I like to use as a litmus test, is whatever they're saying, just apply that to the Alexander Fleming discovery of penicillin. Now, just imagine if Alexander Fleming had noticed the bacterial inhibition zone in this petri dish, because this mold accidentally grew in the petri dish saw this, Wow, this is amazing observation here, it's killing this bacteria in this zone all around the mold. The first person you show it to say, well, that's just one mold, mold is everywhere, and that's just one bacteria. So you can't say that. And besides, you're just one scientist. You're just one researcher. You know, the very words that they're saying, if they went into not just Alexander Fleming but Semmelweis, or John Snow with the London cholera epidemic, if you applied that mental process to any discovery in the history of discovery, it would be prevented. It would stop it right there. So that's a real easy way to watch for academic insanity. The mold is everywhere, that's just classic. Or you can't say mold.

Alicia Swamy: 31:48

Have we covered everything, we really need to get every angle.

Erik Johnson: 31:53

I don't know, there's just so much to this insanity. Probably the most egregious example of academic insanity is that the chronic fatigue syndrome has been hugely publicized hugely. I mean, it's famous. And you would think that a researcher would want to know everything they could about it and they would look back into history and realize that this investigation, this Holmes committee, the Gary Holmes data set, it started in a very small, narrow, specific way. If you want to isolate the variables, what's the first rule in science? Go to the beginning, started the beginning, basic science 101. So the first thought of any researcher who's confused about chronic fatigue syndrome would be go to the beginning, how close to the start of this syndrome, this Holmes definition can we get? Well, actually, we can narrow it down to the very reason that he was called to come investigate a certain school, a certain room, three teachers with what was apparently an inability to control epstein barr virus all in one room. That is a very narrow and discrete data set. And that is the one that started chronic fatigue syndrome. So by refusing to look or shall I say, neglecting to look, they are breaking the most basic rule of science and it might be a mistake, they might be a poor researcher, they might be athletes, apathetic, they might be incompetent, it might be a long drive, the difficulties, just too much of a hassle. For whatever reason, they decided to neglect the basic rule of science. Fine, that's a mistake. But when they are offered this information on a silver platter, when a survivor of that very incident, comes to them with documented evidence, hands it to them and says, I can tell you about the incident started the syndrome and they refuse. Well, that's no longer mistake. That's not a problem with selective memory, or apathy or incompetence. That's corruption.

Alicia Swamy: 34:06

When you look at the corruption that we uncovered with Arnold Mann, the investigative journalist that blew the lid off toxic mold in the '90s. He nailed it right on the head saying they don't look into what they don't want found out.

Erik Johnson: 34:20

Yeah, Arnold Mann talked about how he got his story on the cover of Time Magazine, Time Magazine, and waited for his phone to ring off the hook for the inquiries to come in and they did not materialize. So it's pretty clear that doctors, they went out of their way to evade pursuing this paradigm.

Alicia Swamy: 34:46

Absolutely. Arnold said in his interview with us that you know, he was a speaker at the EPA conference during that time, and the head of the EPA didn't even show up to do her speech after he talked about the mold. You know, the only people that were calling him were the the hygienists, the the microbiologist asking, oh, when's your next article coming out because our business is going to be booming.

Erik Johnson: 35:12

Yeah, doctors hide behind a facade of being scientists saying, Well, if I had good enough evidence, then I would respond. And then they take it one step farther into saying, well, you must not have had good that evidence, or I would have responded.

Alicia Swamy: 35:32

You know, what that made me think about something that we talked about before and that's even even the people that are chosen to be doctors. Can you talk more about that?

Erik Johnson: 35:42

Well, Sir William Osler, pointed out, the medical mind needs to be refreshed by new challenges, because they grow lazy. And they become entrenched in their own knowledge, their paradigm, their power and their dogma. And he said, those in positions of learning need to be challenged, to make sure that they keep an open mind. And his famous words, listen to the patient, you will tell you his diagnosis. Well, that's the classic way of taking advantage of the way a person will focus on their own situation, and bring out the clues that are most important. And in terms of the sick building paradigm, this is exactly what people done over and over again. And doctors are resistant to that, they've fallen into their their dogma, and it appears that our institutions of learning have contoured themselves in such a way that those who can spit out information recite the peer reviewed literature by rote have become so dominant, that the artist, the creator, those with a mindset, like Sir William Osler listen to the patient and looking for new clues have been entirely weeded out of the system.

Kealy Severson: 37:08

Sounds like medicine in general is in trouble if that's the type of practitioner that society is inducting into the system.

Erik Johnson: 37:16

I think that's clear to be seeing entire medical system is in deep trouble. They have lost their way. years ago, nurses were taught that before the introduction of antidepressants, that if a patient had a sudden increase in anxiety, and depressive symptoms, this was hypoxia, basic lack of oxygen. That was their first suspect. No longer, now you complain about depression, and you get a pill instantly.

Kealy Severson: 37:44

Well, not only that, but what tests are they doing to see if your serotonin or your neuro transmitters or your dopamine needs to be regulated? I mean, they're messing with people's brain chemistry, pregnant women, nursing women, with literally nothing more than just a questionnaire, Do you feel sad? You know, I was on all that stuff when I was nursing my son, my oldest. I wish somebody would have said, hey, look, you need some fresh air. This is hypoxia.

Erik Johnson: 38:14

The even give antidepressants to dogs now. Yeah, and dogs,

Alicia Swamy: 38:18

They try to find every market they can sell their bullshit

Kealy Severson: 38:21

That is sick.

Erik Johnson: 38:22

Now dogs get sick in sick buildings. One of the most famous stories, famous early stories is Johnny Carson's sidekick, Ed McMahon. "Death mold killed my dog," Ed McMahon gets sick, and his dog muffin dies, he blames it squarely on toxic mold. Now maybe he can't prove it. Maybe he doesn't have anything in the peer reviewed literature can prove the death mold killed his dog. But isn't that enough for a doctor to at least take a look at the situation?

Kealy Severson: 38:55

Doctors seem to just be an in action extension of the research arm and the research arm really needs to be examined, because not everything is allowed to be looked at. You can only know what's looked at, you know, and they're only acting in accordance to the standards set by that research. I feel like doctors really need to be asking a lot more questions about like who's guiding and controlling all of their information and setting that standard of care and why are they not thinking outside the box? Why are they denying patients treatment for COVID and saying you know what, just go to the hospital if you turn purple?

Erik Johnson: 39:33

Patients have become almost like people with Stockholm Syndrome. They defend their doctors against accusations of incompetence, or, you know, outright duplicity. And say, well, the doctor wasn't trained in that field. Wasn't trained in that field? A whole bunch of people get sick in a building. But that's okay. The doctor doesn't have to look he doesn't have to wonder about the building because he wasn't trained for it. That's absurd. That's the craziest thing I've ever heard.

Kealy Severson: 40:03

I've said for a really long time, cops need to know as much about the law they're enforcing, as lawyers do and doctors need to know as much about prescriptions that they're prescribing as the pharmacists do. It's the the way the disconnected information here, where they don't even know what each other is doing is just, it's insane.

Alicia Swamy: 40:26

Well, I'd like to say that that's the majority of their their medical education is actually pharmacology. They're not being investigators of the body and really looking at, okay, what's breaking it down? What are these mechanisms? What are the root causes? It's more about, oh, if your patient is manifesting X,Y,Z symptom, we're going to give them this drug, or this drug, or that drug. It's never ever about prevention, about looking into external sources, which just kills me, because these people are going in, and spending almost half a million, a million dollars to become these professionals. And they're learning a bunch of bullshit and it's like, do the people that go into this profession, do they not understand this is no one like, alarmed by this? Like, where is the mental disconnect here?

Kealy Severson: 41:19

It's like natural medicine is quacks. So it's like, it's their whole mindset of like, that's the mainstream it's like they're almost indoctrinated into this belief, you have to, you have to subscribe to this belief that this is the ultimate authority to even be interested in pursuing that. And then you also have to be a kind of person who can completely be controlled and if you ask outside of the box questions, like are, not not willing or not able to ask outside of the box questions. And if you do have them, you have to keep them to your self, because they don't think people like me, or you, or you who are asking these hard hitting questions. I mean, we see how people respond to us. It's not welcomed. It's not welcomed.

Alicia Swamy: 42:06

Absolutely and there is a role that burnout plays in this too, because, okay, these medical schools are requiring these people to, you know, live based on nothing, to be in residency programs where they're on call 24/7 with no breaks. And the the rate of suicide within that profession is extremely high. It's like we're almost building psychopaths, because no normal person can perform at these levels, to be able to actually help a patient like, I feel like we are making these doctors sick themselves to where they're already mentally fucked up, that they can't even really help the patient population because of this rigorous, crazy, boys club type of medical schooling that they even have to go through.

Kealy Severson: 42:55

Like, maybe it's an indoctrination that ensures that they always conform because they just went through all of this torture. And now, they have, I don't know a quarter million of student loan debt hanging over their heads and the threat of losing their medical license if they don't tow the line.

Erik Johnson: 43:14

During the Lake Tahoe outbreak, the unveiling of the chronic active epstein barr virus is made possible by a new serology test. I mean, it could clearly establish that you had reactivated EBV and collapsed, epstein barr virus nuclear antigen, the enzyme they're the part of the immune system that keeps the epstein barr virus latent. And this has collapsed in a whole bunch of people and this was demonstrable. And the Chamber of Commerce really didn't want word of this getting out because it made Lake Tahoe look like it was sickness central, the epicenter of a new syndrome. So they wanted to suppress and all the doctors, except for Cheney and Peterson, fell into line, and started suppressing the results from these EBV serology tests. Now, these were not stupid people. They are just as capable of understanding the implications reactivated EBV as you or I. And yet, they said, well, it's controversial. We don't know it's not conclusive, because we don't know what's causing it. Right, that's why you're supposed to look. But at the time, anybody is my age, though remember that the epstein barr virus, the kissing disease, was just a normal, common, trivial kind of thing. It was fairly nasty virus but you get over within about three weeks. Any person with a normal healthy immune system could be counted on to beat this virus and then never get it again. Well, all that changed in 1985 and people started getting chronic epstein barr virus or intermittent reactions of epstein barr virus, and doctors can have this clearly explained to them that this is not normal, that if you see adult with the teenage kissing disease, get sick, and never recover, something is wrong with this picture. And yet they retreat behind. Well, I wasn't trained for that. Or it's controversial, which is a total cop out. So yeah, something's happened in our medical system, where now they have normalized this. They no longer treat the results of this EBV serology test as being an anomaly to be investigated. Oh, looks like you have chronic fatigue syndrome, too bad for you, and they dropped it.

Alicia Swamy: 45:43

And they do that with so many chronic diseases. I mean, we're starting to see like an explosion of these chronic illnesses, MS, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, an explosion of autoimmune diseases, and they have no answers.

Kealy Severson: 45:57

Well, and that's what scares me about blaming genetics, because it sounds like not only are they moving towards normalizing all illness, like, Oh, that's normal for you to always be sick. But it's also normal for your body to just have that problem because of your genes. So sorry.

Erik Johnson: 46:14

Yea, it's a total cop out. And they say, Well, that's because you have the HLA DR, the human leukocyte antigen profile, that makes you more susceptible. Well, if your dog get sick, they don't even have human leukocyte antigens. Yeah, with some recessive and rare genetic susceptibility. So they all happen to congregate in one room and in no other part of the school? This is crazy, critical thinking skills have gone out the window. It's amazing that people seize on this, it's like they're looking for an excuse for their own disability. And I did see this in the original chronic fatigue syndrome cohort, where when doctors started to turn it around, trying to blame something that slammed the crap out of my little town of incline village, when they tried to say, Well, you know, your diet could have been better, maybe you're under some stress. They started saying, Well, I guess there was something you know, I could have done better. Yeah, I have been working a little bit hard at school. Now wait a minute, these are people with decades of a track record of being healthy, living in a pristine mountain setting, with the best food available. And yet, somehow, even they were duped into switching it around, thanks to the pressure from doctors, trying to turn it around and focus on themselves. Rather than look at the big picture and see that this has gone ballistic.

Alicia Swamy: 47:46

People need to know that it's a tactic against them. It's not working for them. It's not finding any answers for them. It's merely to not have to look into the actual causes, not having to do the actual work that they are supposed to be doing and took an oath to do.

Erik Johnson: 48:02

Yeah, just the idea of performing that kind of shift is a reflection of the blame the patient attitude.

Alicia Swamy: 48:10

That's medical fraud.

Erik Johnson: 48:11

Well, they can hide behind feigning incompetence, or just saying, well, we'll know. So therefore, you know, you can't prove that one way or the other. But when the evidence suggests that it's not just one person, I mean, there's multiple people in the same location, they get sick, the pet gets sick, then for a doctor to ignore the obvious signs, that it's not a genetic predisposition. That's when it moves from innocent neglect, or some kind of mistake, into deliberate fraud and corruption.

Kealy Severson: 48:46

And of all the doctors that do speak about genetics, I don't ever hear any of them talk about how any toxins can affect gene expression. They just talk about genetic failures or cellular failures that are related to different genes. I just think what are people so unable to ask questions that haven't already been posed to them that they just hear someone in a white coat, say big words and think that's obviously just the beginning and the end?

Erik Johnson: 49:19

Yeah, people have been duped. They have been misled, they've forgotten that science. It's a thought process. It's not a person. Science isn't somebody in a white coat with a researcher on his name badge. Science is a way of thinking. It's a rational, systematic means for solving problems. Anybody can do science. And if your experiment is good, you are just as much of a scientist as the person in a white coat. And if anybody ever says you have no science, and what they're saying is you have no peer reviewed literature. That is a deceptive act that is intended to shut you down. Whereas if your methods are good, then you've got science.

Alicia Swamy: 50:02

Maybe in a nutshell, you can kind of talk about even if you put it in a peer reviewed journal, there still shortcomings of peer reviewed journals.

Erik Johnson: 50:10

Yeah, the doctors also say that nothing is ever really settled in science. You know, there's always questions. So really, you can't establish anything beyond a reasonable doubt, for all time. They use that as a means to avoid reaching conclusions about whether or not a building might be sick, might be affecting people. Well, we just don't know it's inconclusive. Well, if it comes to the point where a building is consistently making people sick, or a toxin is known to have a property that shows the potential to do what we see it doing. That's enough of a basis to proceed. So for doctors to fall back into, well, we just don't know. They're just being lazy and incompetent, they don't want to help you.

Kealy Severson: 50:59

Well, they can't hide forever. I mean, we're gonna keep singing the same tune and we're not going to stop, we're not going anywhere. So...

Erik Johnson: 51:07

I think what we need to do, rather than ask for science, from people who really don't want to give it to us, we really need to focus on just how reluctant they are to perform science. Shame them into behaving, because for so long as researchers fail to draw conclusions, they are throwing away their Hippocratic oath. They are instead of do no harm. It's do nothing so I don't get caught.

Alicia Swamy: 51:37

What we're really dealing with here with cancer and all autoimmune diseases and everything. The root cause really is environmental. We're pretending like it's genetics, and it's your food, and you're too sedentary. And we're completely missing the mark that our planet is on fire and flooding and parasite issues are on the rise, and algae blooms are on the rise, and tons and tons of fish are dying in the ocean. But it's your genetics.

Erik Johnson: 52:10

This is just psychotically bizarre that doctors would like work so hard to avoid finding out anything. Lyme disease, it was kind of a similar situation, a whole bunch of children and Lyme, Connecticut get diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. The housewife, basically Polly Murray, said, Wait a minute, that's supposed to be a rare genetic disease. Juvenile rheumatoid arthritis is statistically impossible, according to the way that they think it's a recessive thing in the population. There's too much of it for this to be possible. And she could not get doctors to listen to her, her stories in a book, the widening circle about her battle, just to get researchers to investigate this anomaly, because they all fell back into the same thing, blaming it on genetics. Yeah, they're, they're not learning from history. They're going backwards. They're getting worse.

Alicia Swamy: 53:07

I don't know how you can call yourself an expert and say that you know what you're doing and yet your patients are still definitely ill reaching out to us. Help me, What can you do for me? Obviously, your expertise in mold is failing you greatly.

Kealy Severson: 53:24

I love when people go to their mold doctor and then come back to the mold groups to ask everyone what they think of what their doctor I have these three medications does this sound right? Like Is that another question for the care provider you're working with?

Erik Johnson: 53:39

Really sad is the way the medical profession is behaving is so bad, that they're not just dragging themselves down. They are destroying the fundamentals of science, they're literally eradicating the the systematic methods of science from our cultural, you know, thought processes.

Kealy Severson: 54:00

And they feel justified in doing so.

Erik Johnson: 54:03

Yeah, they even feel proud of themselves.

Kealy Severson: 54:05

They feel superior.

Alicia Swamy: 54:07

Oh, I wonder how Shoemaker feels right now.

Kealy Severson: 54:10

Okay, so I just have a question about him. So he loses his license and now is the king of genetics for water damage CIRS, that's not more but it's bacteria. He loses his license for off label use of...

Erik Johnson: 54:27

Cholestyramine and Welchol and ACTOS.

Kealy Severson: 54:32

Here's the question, it's still in the protocol for practitioners to be using that medication so he lost his license for using it for mold illness. He now says mold illness isn't mold illness, it's actinomycetes illness, but these practitioners that are all doctors are still using this and an off label way to treat it the same way he has, but they haven't lost their licenses?

Erik Johnson: 54:56

It was a witch hunt. The Medical Board was after Shoemaker and they were looking for anything they could use against him and they found other what they called deficiencies. They said he said he had sloppy office management, and that he was pressuring patients to join his biotoxin foundation, that they were being coerced into becoming members. They said this was unethical. I don't really see where it is. I mean, people want to be part of the group, and they want to contribute to science. I see nothing wrong with that. But they were out to get in and that's all that was. Plus, Dr. Shoemaker's health was failing at that time, they tried to put conditions on his continued practice, where he would have to be monitored by somebody else. And between all the things that they were throwing at him, and the difficulties and expenses would have taken for him to continue, he just decided to call it a day.

Alicia Swamy: 55:52

Let's be real here, the doctors that actually do try to help and do speak out and do go out on a whim to not go with procedural whatever bullshit that they're given. These are the ones that are often losing their licenses, are being harassed and hounded, and given warnings and monitored. And that's just a fact. I mean, there's so many doctors that I know that I respect that I mean, Harvard trained, they just disappear, because they're not going with the narratives that they were taught in medical school, and they feel something different when they know, okay, let's try to do a little bit more of prevention instead of throwing pills on people or whatever the case. They get bogged down. And that's another fuckup within the system.

Erik Johnson: 56:39

Yeah, let me tell you a little story going back to Alexander Fleming and penicillin. In the Nobel acceptance prize winning acceptance speech, Fleming explained clearly that one had to be very cautious about using penicillin, because it was inevitable that it would create antibiotic resistance. And this was taught in every class, every high school class. I mean, just if you've ever heard the story of the discovery of penicillin, part of antibiotic resistance comes into into play here. It's absolutely known by everybody. And yet, doctors wound up prescribing antibiotics for flus, for viruses. They were handing out antibiotics like candy, knowing that it would create superbugs. How did this happen? How is it possible that everybody the medical mind, educated as they were, in what would be the inevitable result of the overuse of antibiotics? Why did they go ahead and do it anyway? I think what happened was, people started requesting it. And when a doctor said no, sorry, we don't want to, you know, create superbugs. They would say screw you, I'm going down the street to Dr. Jones, who will give it to me. So not only does Dr. Jones make the profit, but the doctor who denied it gets bad mouthed. And in this way, they get selected out of the deal. So that the unethical doctors, the ones who bend the rules, the ones who will give out all the drugs like candy, they get rewarded, and the others cannot compete. And market pressure takes them out of the picture. So the system selects for unethical doctors. And we see that in the same way in the mold paradigm with the antifungals. We know that the indiscretion with the antifungals will create resistant strains. There's no question about that. And yet, they are prescribing antifungals on the basis of symptoms without establishing if there's an infection. And this is dangerous, and they know it's dangerous, but they do it anyway. And those that proceed with that are making the profits and those that want to be more cautious, are being weeded out.

Alicia Swamy: 59:00

And the patients feel a false sense of security.

Erik Johnson: 59:03

Yep. So I think that's part of why the medical profession is being altered, towards skewed towards total loss of integrity. It's market pressure, an honest doctor cannot compete in this climate.

Alicia Swamy: 59:18

That's that's a good point and often, the very few honest ones that you find are private practice, are functional medicine soctors are these doctors that, if you don't have money, you can't see them for like $200, $300, $400, $500 an hour visits with these doctors that you have to pay out of pocket.

Erik Johnson: 59:39

Yeah, I tried to explain to the Mold Congress to the Shoemaker doctors when I was a speaker, I made it clear that my goal was to connect mode to the chronic fatigue syndrome, for the purpose of raising awareness and getting all chronic fatigue syndrome doctors to take another look at mold. If there's a definite, tangible link. There's a provable link between this syndrome and toxic mold, that means that every single doctor that conferred a CFS diagnosis will have to become mold literate. In this way, we won't have the problem of high priced mold experts, gouging people, because the awareness will become universal. And I explained this. And I made it clear to these good doctors. And they saw the sense in this. And they turned around and decided that was the last thing they wanted to do. They like things exactly the way they are and they decided to separate chronic fatigue syndrome from toxic mold, knowing that this cannot be done, when the original cohort was based on this very, very phenomenon. So they went out of their way to kind of forget what science integrity is all about, and apparently was for their own agenda. You can see I'm a little pissed off, that I tried to do something good in the world here, raise awareness of the toxic mold, help clear up some of the confusion about chronic fatigue syndrome, and instead, they turned me into the bad guy for it.

Kealy Severson: 1:01:13

It speaks volumes for the way our society is headed and it kind of scares me that, you know, maybe my kids, or my grandkids, you know, maybe the future of medicine for them is going to be just blaming their bodies forever for genetics. What are the ramifications of all of this in the fallout? Like that's really concerning to me, very.

Erik Johnson: 1:01:37

Well, when groups of sick children in San Joaquin Valley started to show up, and were tested for pesticides. Guess what doctors did? They said, well, the pesticides are not excessive in these sick children. They have a genetic inability to clear pesticides, the genetic susceptibility to pesticides. So they began framing the sickness of these children as a genetic flaw.

Kealy Severson: 1:02:06

That's criminal.

Erik Johnson: 1:02:07

Nobody should be required to have genetic invincibility against a toxin that shouldn't even be on this planet.

Alicia Swamy: 1:02:15

Let's be real here. They say these things so these people don't get sued. Because if they attribute their issues to the toxicity, not to their bodies, all these parents are going to be suing the freakin company that spraying the pesticides.

Erik Johnson: 1:02:31

Now there was a movement a couple years ago, to change the name of multiple chemical sensitivity, away from MCS to environmental intolerance. It was purely psychological, here trying to deflect attention from chemicals to preserve the status quo. When we all know that the chemicals are the major problem.

Alicia Swamy: 1:02:53

I think what's really concerning is that I think the EPA has registered 80,000 chemicals in their database that are being used, and we've only studied, really studied a few 100 of them. And it's just like, how are we allowed, or who is is being allowed to produce these things and not thoroughly study them before putting them out there into the environment?

Erik Johnson: 1:03:15

In the Tahoe mystery illness. We saw environmental changes, a lot of things were going on with the algae bloom and the trees and all these people across a broad geographic area getting sick. And we were being bombarded with silver iodide cloud seeding. So we looked into that that was our major suspect. I read the patent for cloud seeding, that said, I mean, this is in the patent, this is the inventor describing this said they tested repeated applications of silver iodide to soil and found no significant disturbance in soil flora. But given the toxic effect that silver will have on micro organism, it is uncertain as to what constant and repeated perpetual application does. In other words, they were predicting that a few times and you might get away with it. But if you keep on cloud seeding, just as with antifungals, and antibiotics, you can count on this altering the flora and creating superbugs, resistant strains. It's part of the philosophy. What the mechanism what of the silver iodide accomplishes, is bound to result in this. But when we complained about the cloud seeding, they looked in the literature and said, You have no proof. You have no evidence you have no studies that show that this has any environmental effect, when the very patent for this predicts that if you do it long enough, there must necessarily be some kind of environmental ramifications.

Alicia Swamy: 1:04:56

That's really funny because I've been reaching out to nanoparticle medical researchers, I've reached out to everyone and they will not talk at all. Aside from them putting out the research, they don't they don't want any publicity on

Erik Johnson: 1:05:09

It is fascinating though, that if you look at the it. principle involved of what nanoparticles do. We know what they do, they kill microbes. We know what antibiotics, do. We know what antifungals, do. All of these, they will create resistant strains, it's inevitable. And yet, when a doctor or a researcher shuts off their mind and says you have no evidence, they are betraying the fact that they understand because they learned in basic high school science, that they it's a process, it's the principle involved, not this one application that counts. They're breaking the rules every time. The refrain in patient groups and among researchers is Well don't worry about the little stuff, because science is self correcting. Science is self correcting. And yet, everywhere I go, I'm told, well, the old evidence doesn't matter, we've moved on since then, well, if you fail to revisit the original premise, the original problem, that means there is no self correction in science.

Alicia Swamy: 1:06:16

If we are ever going to self correct, it's going to be too late. We'll kill ourselves by then.

Erik Johnson: 1:06:21

That seems to be what they're working for.

Kealy Severson: 1:06:24

Well, maybe we can lead by example, and start embarrassing them into being decent people because at least we say what we know, at least we don't try to sugarcoat easy answers with bullshit just because it's uncomfortable. And we're not afraid to turn people off just because we speak a really uncomfortable truth. Maybe if we can connect with a few more healthcare providers that are interested in the work that we're doing, we can kind of create this as a new paradigm. And this should be the normal, this should be a standard of healthcare, listening to patients, not thinking they're crazy, not blaming their bodies when the environment is making their bodies sick. I mean, we could hopefully create a movement.

Erik Johnson: 1:07:03

Exactly. It's not about the specific incident, we need to change the system. We need to wake people up, educate them, as to how to analyze their doctors to see when they're playing these cop out games.

Alicia Swamy: 1:07:17

And if someone else is not doing it, right, you got to do it yourself. And it's almost like we have to go rogue and complete our own research in order to get some honesty.

Erik Johnson: 1:07:25

It's the way of it.

Alicia Swamy: 1:07:26

It's an uphill battle with a boulder on our shoulders. But it's it's the work that needs to be done.

Kealy Severson: 1:07:32

It reminds me of avia the Myth of Sisyphus when you're pushing the pushing the boulder because sometimes I swear, like we're just carrying this heavy ass rock up one side up the other side up the other side. It's absurd.

Erik Johnson: 1:07:49

Yeah, you know, it's amazing, because we have to look not just to doctors and researchers, but we have to look at patients, how they're behaving. Now, in terms of the mold at ground zero for chronic fatigue syndrome. I've educated many, many doctors, many CDC and NIH officials on this matter. So if anybody wanted to know if there was any evidence, any truth to what I say, they could simply go to one of these officials, one of these doctors in a public forum and ask them, this this guy, EriK, this guy claiming to be a prototype for chronic fatigue syndrome, the things that he's talking about? Is there any truth, any evidence for what he says? And patients will not do this. I don't think that these officials would dare to denied that they were asked directly on camera. But by failing to ask the most basic questions, patients themselves are enabling this farce to continue.

Kealy Severson: 1:08:47

It's like being afraid to ask your boss for a raise, like what are people intimidated to stand up for themselves? I mean, this is your health, like, literally, it's your life on the line? Why do people think that the power of their health is in an external source? Like why do people think that the doctors could ever have more power and say over their health and what they do? People really subscribe to that. Well, I'll ask my doctor, ask your damn self. How do you feel?

Erik Johnson: 1:09:14

The discovery of H. pylori is a terrific example of this exact thing, because once this was publicized, how long she's taken for the entire medical profession to learn, oh, wow, we've got a treatment for ulcers. I mean, it's caused by a bacterium, we know it's bacterium it is, and we can treat it. A couple days a month, maximum. 20 years later, they do a survey and find that 20% of specialists, gastroenterologist didn't know about it. 50% of general practitioners didn't know about it 20 years later, and so I wondered, what about the patients? Have they heard about this? And I started asking them and they said, Well, that's up to my doctor. He's the specialist. He's the one who's supposed to know. I'm going well, we've got a circumstance here, where your doctor doesn't know. You have ulcers, he's not treating you, he didn't even test you for H. pylori. What are you going to do about it? And I found that consistently, patients go, nothing. That's it. That's my doctor's problem, not mine. Really, I thought you were the one in pain?

Kealy Severson: 1:10:18

Yeah, I have a long term patient from my acupuncture clinic that I'm still in touch with. And every once in a while, she reaches out about her nerve pain. And I know she had an ongoing flood for quite a while and they stopped the flood, but they never, you know, removed any of what's rotting in, in the walls, and she'll reach out from time to time now that I'm not treating her with acupuncture, complaining of pain, you know, and I'll try to make the connection between environment and nerve damage, because that's actually a pretty common one with with mold exposures. And she brought it to her doctor and her doctor said, Oh, you don't need to worry about that. It just causes allergies, you know. And so it's this cycle where the patient is trapped. I mean, now that that patient's never going to explore that further, because the doctor is more credentialed than I am. I'm just like a lowly acupuncturist. I'm not even real health care provider. I'm an alternative health care provider. What do I know?

Alicia Swamy: 1:11:10

I wanted to share with you guys a few things my husband said the other day, he's always got these little nuggets of of genius. We were just talking about, you know, buying land and living off the grid and stuff. And he was just saying land and nature is an appreciating asset and your home is a depreciating asset, when it comes to your health. Because when you think about if your home is making you sick, not only are you having to repair it and do all this crazy stuff, there was money for that, then your health tanks, there goes all your money for that, then you have to find new housing, and you just start the cycle all over again.

Kealy Severson: 1:11:44

Well, nature may be depreciating in value soon to by the looks of it.

Erik Johnson: 1:11:49

Tt's like things are getting worse and worse, they don't even notice.

Kealy Severson: 1:11:52

I didn't want you to be right about what you were saying. I did not want to. Of course, as a healthcare provider, I wanted to have an answer to this, I wanted to have a simple solution or a workable solution for not only myself and my healthcare symptoms, but the patient base that I work with it is not convenient or easy to accept your theory. But when you have experiences that show you that Eril theory is the only thing that matches, this is not the convenient, easy road.

Erik Johnson: 1:12:24

Well just be prepared for this, because they're already saying that I've got some kind of Svengali personality and I've misled you.

Kealy Severson: 1:12:33

Well, I'm going to publish a book of all the texts where we argued for a year fighting up to the oven disclosure, and then that'll settle that.

Erik Johnson: 1:12:45

Well just think about what you're going to say when this comes up because it will.

Alicia Swamy: 1:12:49

Bring it on.

Kealy Severson: 1:12:50

I guess they're just gonna get uglier and uglier. I mean, every time we say something, every time we publish an uncomfortable truth, that's when people get pissed and start commenting little troll things. So you can kind of tell what their weak spots are because it rattles the hornet's nest, they all start buzzing around when you hit a sore spot. I just want to say to the brain retrainers, you know, because they their argument is well thought can influence genetic expression, you know, thought can influence neural connection and genetic expression. This gets to be a really circular argument when the fact that a toxic environment can also influence thought. I mean, we all know the quality of thoughts that we are able to possess when we're being completely poisoned. And that's a symptom of the brain not functioning well, not a symptom of not being able to be a positive person.

Erik Johnson: 1:13:39

Well, I don't know if they've hit you with this yet, but they will they will. They say, well, when you think that activates genes, and the genes run through your whole body and it has ramifications. So therefore, your thought processes are really a genetic process that affects your entire DNA. So everything is genetic, the mind and the body are inseparable, because your thinking involves genetic expression.

Kealy Severson: 1:14:08

So my question is there a neural retraining that can condition the brain to withstand yellow rain? What's the DNRS program for me to be able to be in a toxic, poisonous environment and not have any effects?

Erik Johnson: 1:14:26

Well, sometimes they point at the fakers of India, that people will plunge needles to their cheeks, and sleep on a bed of nails and do all these amazing things. They say, if you could exert the power of the mind, you could do all those things. You could go you could get shot, and you could control your blood flow and you could control your organs and you would survive where somebody else would die because you have all these amazing mental powers. I'm going great. But why should you have to do this? Even if you could? Why should you have to? Why can't we just live a normal life and operate within what's expected from the normal human body. Is that too much?

Alicia Swamy: 1:15:04

Well, there's another narrative coming out that oh your childhood trauma is linked with adverse health effects and chronic disease. And that was a major, major point that they had come out with a couple years ago and put all this money into this research.

Erik Johnson: 1:15:21

The prime mover behind that study for childhood abuse as a risk factor in chronic fatigue syndrome was Dr. William Reeves. So Dr. William Reeves and Keiji Fukuda are the principal architects of the Fukuda definition in which they state that there's no known risk factors for chronic fatigue syndrome. But then Reeves goes on to say, well we think the childhood abuse is probably a biggie. Well, Reeves and Fukuda are the same ones who did the study on the 1993, Twin Towers sick building syndrome incident identified a high rate of chronic fatigue syndrome as a result of this sick building syndrome. So they were fully aware that sick building syndrome is the risk factor for chronic fatigue syndrome. But somehow this managed to disappear from their new definition. It's bullshit fraud is what it is.

Alicia Swamy: 1:16:14

Thank you, everyone for joining us today. It was a wonderful conversation with Erik and Kealy and I, you can always count on us to give you the information that others will not. We spoke of some really hard truths today and just wanted to call out what has been happening in science. As we can see, science has basically been hijacked. And the information that's coming out, has a lot of bias, a lot of industry money is filtered in through science these days. And it seems like whoever is willing to take a nice paycheck, they'll publish whatever it is that you want. And so we just wanted to call this out. We wanted to call out the changes in science, the changes within doctors, that whole industry, but also the changes within people. What are we been observing, what's been happening to the people these days in terms of their health. We have all these random illnesses just popping up with no etiology. No one's really understanding what's going on, we understand what's going on. And Erik has pointed this out a long, long time ago, about 36 years ago, that mold is the root cause for a lot of issues. And it's something that's being ignored, because hey, take a lot of money away from the insurance companies, it will take a lot of money away from the American medical establishment. But we're reaching a breaking point here. We're battling a virus, COVID. And you know, now we're battling all these people that have these chronic diseases because of X, Y and Z. You mean to tell me we don't have any solutions? Or is it because the solutions could have been there, but have been pushed under the rug because of special interests. So these are really hard things to think about. These are really hard truths to take in. And I really hope that you guys understand that the information that we try to provide is to help you to be more of a conscious consumer, to be educated on what's happening, to question things, and to get to the bottom of stuff, to demand better, because if we don't, we're just going to keep ending up in the same trap. More people are going to get sick, more people are going to suffer. So it's time that we take a stand. Take a stand against the American medical establishment, take a stand against the insurance companies. Let's try to help and educate each other so that way, we are not victims to the systems, but rather we demand more from them. Thank you so much. Please like, share, comment, on our content. Also, check out our GoFundMe and Patreon pages to keep this podcast rolling. So thank you again. We'll see you next time.