Have you ever wondered why we actually need to get a pap smear or why the testing guidelines frequently change? The presence of HPV or the Human Papilloma Virus is associated with an increased risk of cervical cancer and is the reason behind the pap smear. A pap smear looks at the health of the cells in our cervix and the presence of HPV. When abnormal cells are found, it is usually recommended that we have those cells removed at the risk of the functionality of our cervix. In this eye-opening conversation with Nathan Riley, MD, we learn the statistics around actually developing cervical cancer even with an abnormal pap smear, the risks versus benefits of the Gardasil vaccine, and the long-term consequences of cervical procedures, particularly as it relates to a woman's birth experience. Nathan encourages us to think about the HPV virus as we would any virus that we come into contact with in our environment. It's not the virus that we should fear, but rather the response of our immune systems, which can be influenced by modifiable risk factors. If you are due for your pap or have an abnormal result, be sure to listen to this episode. Nathan Riley MD ********** Connect with us on Patreon for our exclusive content. Work with Cynthia: Work with Trisha:
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You have to look at this from both angles. Now, if you did nothing, you got this HPV result, you did nothing within two years, the general population 90% of the general population is going to see that signal change to negative without doing anything else. So that has to really come into conversation when we're talking about HPV and cervical cancer and all of this, I feel like there's so much fear around this. But actually, in reality, the junk that's in this vaccine actually poses a greater risk of harming you or your child than cervical cancer itself.
I'm Cynthia Overgard, owner of HypnoBirthing of Connecticut, childbirth advocate and postpartum support specialist. And I'm Trisha Ludwig, certified nurse midwife and international board certified lactation consultant. And this is the Down To Birth Podcast. Childbirth is something we're made to do. But how do we have our safest and most satisfying experience in today's medical culture? Let's dispel the myths and get down to birth.
I I was just in South Africa. Interestingly, and I was with these group birth workers in the United States. And we were sitting with indigenous midwives really kind of in ceremony and community with them. And when they asked who are you, us Westerners like to give our name or title, our credentials or whatever favorite color where we grew up. And when they asked that they they're really trying to ask, like, who are you? How do you show up in the world. So I'm a very conscious father. I'm a person who cares deeply about my work. I also did a fellowship here and end of life care and palliative care, which is really complicated illness, and complicated decision making. I brought that into my birth work. And now I do homebirth. I do functional women's health care. I do quite a bit of other stuff in a toolkit that is far broader than just pharmaceuticals, and surgery nowaday. So, I think today we're going to talk about this, the illusion of the cervical cancer vaccine. And this the mystified, overly mystified cervical cancer screening process and maybe what people can bring into their own lives in order to make sure that these things are not really necessarily front and center as as with regards to things to worry about in your everyday life.
But you do have a name? Oh, we call you Nathan Riley
Some people call me Nathan Riley. Some people call me Dr. Riley other other people call me like a complete a-hole. And we haven't heard that one. So Nathan, welcome back to the show. I think this is is this time number three or four?
Maybe three? Yeah, it's an organized comeback. Yeah, three. Yeah, we've already ripped for like an hour, because I just like hanging out with you guys. You can get me and I get you. And yeah, good to be back.
So you have a special interest in the natural treatment for HPV, right, the human papilloma virus, which is an extremely common, sexually transmitted infection that both men and women experience. But this is this is the thing that when we go for our annual pap smears that we're being screened for, I think many women just get their pap smears, they don't really even know why they hardly know how often they should go anymore, because the guidelines are constantly changing. But one of the biggest, one of the biggest problems that I see with it is that the reason part of the reason the guidelines are always changing is because we are over treating cervix with these procedures that are potentially causing scar tissue and damage and things that may impact a woman's ability to give birth easily. So for young women, which is when HPV is really common, and commonly found most of the time these infections will resolve without dramatic treatment. And so I would love to have you talk to us a little bit about your experience with this and what women can do to help reverse HPV naturally and are when they really do need to, to to be treated because obviously if it is a high risk strain, the risk of cervical cancer is high. And that's very serious. Yeah.
Well, I think for those out there who are familiar with some of this, I think a little bit about what I'm going to say is going to be very confronting, but I want I want to invite people to just lean into the possibility that maybe we can reframe this whole conversation a little bit to to a in order for you to feel empowered around this as opposed to that, you know, the way that many of my colleagues might counsel you is like you've got this HPV if we don't do something here, you're gonna die. I'm sorry. or cancer, like that's really like that fear actually doesn't serve us in almost any regard, especially in childbirth, especially in things like this. So, as you mentioned, the incidence of this, which is how many people are living with, sorry, the prevalence of this how many people are living with HPV, which is just a swab that goes in the cervical canal and around the cervix? It comes back positive and has come back positive for about 80 million people. As of right now, that's men and women. And every year it's about 14 million more people are diagnosed. So the issue here is that based on our like, it's the American Society for colposcopy and cervical pathology, I believe, as CCP they come up with these guidelines based on you know, the, they feed it into a cog they, you know, they are constantly working with this study for Gynecologic Oncology, like they're they're trying to come up with a coordinated protocolized way of managing this positive HPV screen. Okay, so the typical experience for a young woman is after about the age of 21 or so you're gonna go back on routine intervals to the gynecologist, they're going to place you in stirrups, they're going to place in a speculum one of these cold duckbill things. And we're going to collect a swab from the cervical canal and the surface of the cervix to look for two things. One, are there abnormal cells there, which has a pap smear to screen, and two, is there a high risk strain of human papilloma virus present on this swab. And based on the combination of those results, you're going to be asked to come back at varying intervals as maybe as soon as six months, as long as maybe 12 months in order to have a repeat screen or we do a painful biopsy, which is called a Copa scopic evaluation and biopsy without anesthesia, we take a chunk of tissue out of a sexual organ, your cervix. And then based on those results, you may find yourself within a couple months or so facing an opportunity to have something called a leap procedure and otherwise excisional procedure where we remove a piece of the cervix in hopes of fixing the problem. Now the issue here is what is happening from the time that you get that abnormal screen to the repeat in the future. And that's where I found myself to be very underwhelmed with the education and the counseling I was providing, as if something's going to change. Six months later, when we haven't given you any tools, you know, to empower yourself around getting whatever is going on upstream that is causing this immune dysregulation, which is the persistent HPV, or even these abnormal cells appearing on the cervix. So this is a big giant void in the general woman's experience going to her OB GYN in pregnancy, in her routine, well, woman care where we're not providing enough tools. And now I've provided I've, I've created a new program that is all around that. Because frankly, I'd rather teach you things that are able to help you, you know, make you better and to understand some of these principles as opposed to just saying, leave it to me, I would love for you to come back in and then we'll just lop that off, and it will be taken care of it. Because these are not solutions. We don't solve anything by lopping off a sexual organ, we get rid of the signal, it's like putting the turning the light off in your car dashboard without ever getting to the root issue of why that light was turned on in the first place. So we'll we'll we'll start there.
So HPV is just another virus that we can tract in the body like any virus that we come across, and we obviously can suppress the activity of viruses by things that we do or don't do in our lifestyle. And we can exacerbate the activity of viruses by our lifestyle, diet, nutrition, all that stuff as well. So if a young woman or any woman at any stage, but especially young women, because they seem to be the ones that are most subject to these maybe too aggressive and unnecessary procedures, has a pap smear test positive for HPV, which at least 80% of people have been exposed to this.
It's probably upwards of 100%, honestly, okay, yeah. Yeah.
And about half of those cases are high risk strains.
At least half Yeah, at least half. Yeah.
So she gets test positive has maybe some abnormal, there's varying degrees of the abnormal cell results that could come back the a typical or the low grade variety or the high grade variety. She has no idea what to do with this information. And she's told the code, have a colposcopy as you said and maybe have some of her cervix removed. Tell us what you would do instead.
Yeah, well, the the sort of the solutions that are offered I think by people like us, you know, you're a CNM I'm an OB we've got Nurse Practice. Here's your family practitioners, we've got a lot of different people that are doing these screens. But what I think is lacking is is really insight into, you know, when we talk about informed consent in childbirth, what are the risks, benefits and alternatives to that therapy? Or if I don't do the therapy, what are the risks, benefits and alternatives, right? So you have to look at this from both angles. Now, if you did nothing, you got this HPV result, you did nothing. Within two years, the general population 90% of the general population is going to see that signal change to negative without doing anything else. The younger you are, the more likely that is to happen. But even if you go in for that Copa, scopic biopsy and they collect a tissue sample, right, the way that we stratify that is cervical intraepithelial, neoplasia, one, two or three, and the next step from that is like carcinoma in situ. And the next step from that is full blown invasive cancer. So if you were to get one of those cin results, CIN one, CIN two or three, the the risk of those progressing needs to be weighed against the risk of those regressing if nothing is done. And then, based on the law of averages, we have to then ask what can I do as an individual in order to ensure that I'm going to fall below the average or above the average if I don't do those things, and that's where I think a lot of the lifestyle modification, a lot of these modifiable risk factors, can I think be very, very helpful if we were just offering some basic lifestyle things that can increase the likelihood that your sin three, let's say, will regress. And the baseline risk, by the way is 5050. So even at sin three, you have a 50% chance of that regressing completely by itself. How often do you think women are told that? Never, because I don't think any woman who gets a sin three on a colposcopy or biopsy is going to do nothing? What is sin one, two, and three again.
So this would be so when we screen a pap smear might say you have some abnormal cells, they might be low risk, they might be high risk, we're not totally sure, in order to confirm we need to get a full tissue sample. And then based on that, the pathologist is going to look at it under a microscope, and they're gonna say, Okay, we're not seeing any neoplasia, which is abnormal cells, or we're seeing just sin one that's like, just the surface layer, right? Like just a couple, and then send to is, hey, we've got now maybe full thickness, sin three is like, it is the whole thickness, and we might be looking at it breaking through the basement membrane, like, like, it's it's going to start growing into a tumor after that. Okay, so it's a stages thing I understand, right? And this was all thought to results due to an inflammatory process that's reflected in this HPV swab. Right? So what's very interesting here is that from the time that you're initially exposed to HPV, until you develop sin to, you know, somewhere in the middle there can take months to years, and then to go from sin to two invasive cancer. We're talking decades, decades. And this is actually I'm not like some sort of wizard with special data that I'm like, they didn't look at it, right. Like a colleague actually says this in their cervical cancer screening practice advisory, it will take decades, but hey, let's have you come back in a year, and we're gonna lop off your cervix, without giving you any tools to even increase the likelihood of it regressing on its own or even slowing the progression through more natural kind of lifestyle means. So sin three 50% chance of regressing without doing anything, you may not even be a healthy person 50% chance of regressing sin to 60% chance of regressing if you have sin one, you basically just have inflammation in the cervix. And there's about a 5% chance of that progressing to send to. And then if you're trying to do all the math, if if your particular case doesn't fall into regression or progression, it means it hasn't changed. Right. So what can be done in the meantime, that's really I think, kind of the brunt of what I do in my practice. It's it's like, okay, so you got the signal. Big deal. What can we do now? Are you just doomed to get cervical cancer and die? No, probably not. And in fact, statistically speaking, that's definitely not in your favor. But how can you increase the odds that you're not going to end up going down that path and needing one of these procedures, which by the way, can shorten the cervix, it can put you at risk of preterm birth, it can put you at risk of cervical scarring and stenosis. So these are not like without risk. Yeah, not without risk. Right. So what if a woman is like in her mid 40s? And isn't going to have any more babies? What about that temptation to just cut it out and be done with it? What's wrong with that? Mechanic? Rollback? Are you saying because they didn't identify where it's coming from a can show up again? Are you saying it can still cause problems in her life even beyond the childbearing years? Or that it's been effective? Tell me just let's rule that out for us. Like why is that not sure? At least a conclusive way to make sure it doesn't evolve into cancer?
Well, we know All that if you have abnormal pap, so you've had like a history of a leap procedure at age 25, let's say at 45. You let's say you had that leap at 35. Right 45 comes around you, you want to get your pesky uterus out of there, right, get the uterus and cervix out. You know, I wasn't thinking that I thought just like little a little biopsy.
Well, I mean, I'm embellishing. Well, a biopsy is, you know why FC is one thing. Usually it's from the result of the biopsy. That's the painful bite. We usually take random biopsies nowadays because we're not training people to do like really thorough Copa scopic evaluation like they still do in Europe. But when you get to the LEAP procedure, yeah, we generally act even without the hysterectomy, let's just talk about the lead. We act as if this organ has no purpose in the body, but for making babies. But in looking at our data, where they do hysterectomy is and they keep the cervix versus removed the cervix, that's called a partial, where they keep the cervix versus a total hysterectomy, they remove the cervix with it, they have found that women don't express any difference in sexual gratification. The problem is, is that now that women are starting to become to embrace their sexuality, again, we're getting past the original sin and all of these other sort of cultural narratives around women's sexuality, a lot of women are also starting to notice that their cervix is contributing to their overall sexual gratification. So if you were to ask who have even numb services, they might not notice any difference after having their cervix removed. But I have a lot of clients that say I can't orgasm now that I don't have my cervix. And it's not just one person, it's dozens of women who are telling me that which compels me to consider, you know, the work of like Emily Abbott, and some of these internal body workers, you know, your cervix is actually far more important than merely holding a baby in or opening to let sperm in whenever the time is right. And you know, in your cycle, it actually has so many nerve endings maybe are in a path of reawakening your own sexuality and losing a important erogenous region within your your vaginal canal might actually have a big impact on you going forward. But if we're just going to treat every single person the same, then you know, a robot could do that. That's not you meant like to slicing off a little piece of the cervix, and basically, the whole cervix would stay there, but they actually remove the whole thing. For this, we we so when you get to the point where we're going to do an excisional procedure, we take a hot wire, and we just go like like you're cutting a big roll of Bologna and we just chopped the top of it off. Basically, that's what a leap procedure is a loop electrosurgical excision procedure.
So then there's scar tissue. That's what the there's lots of scar tissue. Yeah.
So how many stories have you heard of women who have had, oh, just a minor leap procedure for potentially not even not even a cin diagnosis, but like a high shutter HPV, like it just positive could be low grade could be high grade, just these, these procedures on the cervix on young women are so common. And then we hear the stories in the birth world of the cervix that wouldn't dilate, that wouldn't go past six centimeters that, you know, had a cervical tear, because maybe there was scar tissue that was, you know, inhibiting proper dilation.
Yeah. Yeah, hearing that alone.
So important for especially young women, and obviously, to your point about the sexual enjoyment for older women to to understand that there are alternatives. So can you talk to us about what that would look like? What would like what should somebody do as far as their diet lifestyle? Yeah. So supplements, whatever it is, if they get this diagnosis and don't want to do a procedure?
Yeah, there are. So let me start by saying that I actually don't believe that HPV causes cervical cancer, I think that when we pick up on the signal that HPV is there, I actually think that that is telling us that something is going on upstream. And I actually invite women to consider have you been, you know, given a gift of a positive signal, so that you can start to look upstream as to what is going on. And the reason I say that is that just because we do the leap, or we do a hysterectomy or whatever, you're still going to be compelled to continue screening for nearly the rest of your, you know, your life, I mean, up until 65. But even after that, if you had a you know, a leap or something at age 50. And now you had your hysterectomy at age 65, you're going to be compelled to continue screening there after for a number of years, because we haven't solved any problem. So if HPV is not the problem, and perhaps it's reflecting that there's some cells being damaged and whatnot, then we have to consider what is going on upstream that is leading to this immune dysregulation. And when we consider over the course of a whole a woman's entire life, right? You're getting lots of antibiotics, you're getting lots of thing you're on birth control for 10 years, all of these things can lead to quite a bit of immune dysregulation. So what I encourage people to consider is that these virus things are not out to get us if they were out number 150 to one, we cannot continue to be at war with nature with viruses, because they are not even living things. They are, if anything, they're like messengers. And if your body is unable to integrate this new upgrade to your operating system that you either got through sex through your environment through touching a doorknob, it viruses are, they're everywhere. They're like ubiquitous every moment of every part of your day, you're going to be exposed. If you if you consider that some people are getting sick, when they get exposed to this and some people are not, I think it really, really helps us to consider what can I do in order to integrate the message of this virus. Otherwise, it's a losing battle to consider that we've got viruses everywhere. And as soon as I get exposed, I'm dead in my tracks like it just isn't true. So. So going back to what you actually said, what I would like people to consider without going into the real really, really, you know, the depths of lifestyle modification, I would like to everybody just to consider that if you're regularly exercising, you're eating nourishing foods, and you're getting adequate sleep, you're probably going to extend your health span and your lifespan by about 50% by just focusing on those three things. And a reason for that is because without adequate sleep and rest and recovery without a balancing out of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous responses in your body, without getting adequate nutrition, and adequate B vitamins and all of the other micronutrients and things like beef liver, without doing that, your body is naturally going to fall out of balance. And there's very, very few signals for young women as to when something is off to important ones are persistent HPV and, and abnormalities in your menstrual cycle, when those two things start to pop up, I take it immediately as great. We now know that there's something wrong, thank goodness that the engine light went on, because now we can start to look upstream to figure out how did this fall out of balance in the first place? So I'll start there. I'll maybe I'll stop there for a moment. I'm curious what you guys think.
I think it makes perfect sense. I mean, certainly I hadn't really thought of HPV in that way, I certainly think that way about the menstrual cycle being the fifth vital sign of the body. But to your point, if you have a virus in the body that is persistent that your body hasn't cleared, just like any other virus that we come into contact with. We clear it over time, some do much better job with that than others. And that all comes back to basically your immune function. Right. So why would HPV Why would HPV necessarily be different?
Yeah, you know, I have you guys had anybody that you've lost to dementia? Have you ever seen that that disease? I've seen it with friends belong? Yeah. It's like one of the most devastating things I've ever seen, you know, I used to do a lot of palliative and hospice work. And, frankly, if we could find a cure for that, I think we would really, really be doing well. Right. But just like with cancer, I think we've been looking at the signal instead of focusing on what is causing the signal. So in Alzheimer's, a great example is the so we get these like towel bundles, these like little myofascial bundles of tissue that form all over the brain. It's like It's like pathognomonic, as we say, for Alzheimer's, like it is the only thing you ever see. Like, like, it's it's the only condition associated with these little bundles. So naturally, our molecular biologists, these brilliant researchers have focused on trying to find targeted therapy to to remove those and resolve those bundles, but it hasn't led to any better outcomes in our in our sort of prognostication or even our mitigation strategies around Alzheimer's. So those tal bundles are to Alzheimer's disease what HPV is to cervical cancer, there is something going on in the body, and this signal is now popping up positive. What is the causes? Is the problem the HPV or is the problem that somewhere upstream, you lack the ability to integrate this because of some immune dysregulation, this regulatory issue, which again, back to the number of vaccines you've had, the number of antibiotics you've had, how your your gut is operating? Have you been on birth control, all of these things lead downstream to immune dysregulation. They lead to autoimmune conditions, all of this type of stuff. So I'd rather look upstream and figure out how can we get that signal to turn off without becoming myopically focused on the signal itself.
The Western medical world has instilled in all of us the notion that we get zapped, right we get zapped with cancer and if you're a family member gotten zapped with it you're more likely to get zapped with it and you get zapped with Alzheimer's and dementia and you get zapped with HPV. And the truth is, I mean, even with dementia and Alzheimer's, which is such a big mystery, they are even saying now already it is preventable when someone has it. That's another story, but it's preventable. And sleep. As you already said, sleep is like one of the major contributors to preventing such a thing. And there are many others and risk factors. But again, like, if there are risk factors associated with any of these things, then we know that you don't just get zapped with it because then the risk factors wouldn't exist. Right. It's very fatalistic. Yeah, it is fatalistic, and it absolves people of their own responsibility in their health. Yeah. And then it empowers the medical world to say, well, let us just cut this out of you. Get rid of it, do this to you, and you say, please help me save me. So I'm just fascinated by this. And I didn't really ever give this any thought with HPV, but I never even considered that I was thinking that way. I never really think about HPV, but what I've heard about it, I'm just like, my thought questions. I was like, why did we literally never hear about this before? Now? You know, they, they tried to make it a big thing. Why did we never hear about this when I was growing up? And parents were afraid of their kids having sex? It was for STIs. And it was for pregnancy? No one was like, Oh, God, we hope our child doesn't have sex and end up with cancer. So they totally changed the narrative around this too. So why didn't you tell number one that was remember what like around what I remember exactly when? Yeah, it was around 2005, when Governor of Texas, Rick Perry was, was had a little partnership with his former chief of staff who went to work for a vaccine manufacturer. And he made it state law. And it was the first time a vaccine became state law. And I was waving flags to anyone who would listen to me that talks about have never been part of a state law. But he was he got campaign contributions for it for passing that law. And it was unethical. And you know, the various database started skyrocketing with side effects. But I thought this is weird. I really resented seeing the media. I remember Oprah did an episode on it. And I was really frustrated, because she was saying things to her guests like, Well, do you think this will remote promiscuity if they get the vaccine? And I was like, Oh, my gosh, can we distract the public anymore? From the actual controversy here? The issue here is not promoting promiscuity. The issue is why are we doing this to kids? And yeah, anyway, I can go on a rant that obviously you can see, I've, I'm informed in that little sliver of the conversation and not much else. But I'll let you take it from here and tell us what you think. Yeah, no?
Well, you know, first off, I wanted to really quickly just note that despite investing, you know, 10s of billions of dollars, just in the past decade alone on cancer therapies, we're not getting anywhere with cancer treatment, I mean, there is no decrease in the number of cancers, we're getting better at detecting them, we have nothing, we have no ways of getting it to go away entirely. And that's because we've been focused on the sort of gene that we have these like these, these oncogenes, right? Like this is a genetic disease, and your genes are going to lead to cancer unless we can, we can, you know, execute, you know, different functions within your genome. And, frankly, that this the reality that cancer is embedded in our genes, and that you're fatalistically, you're just going to get this is complete nonsense. They've actually done studies where they take healthy cells and cancer cells, and they switch their nuclei. What do you think happens when a healthy cell receives the cancerous nuclei? So to speak from the cancer cell? What do you think happens? The cancer can't thrive? Yeah, the healthy cell stays healthy despite getting a cancerous, cancerous nucleus, and vice versa for the cancer. So it still gets still craps out, because even though it has a healthy nucleus, so the point here being that the environment around your genes is fully responsible for how those genes are expressed. And even if you have a propensity, can you get yourself below or above that? That that, you know, average line, right? Because nobody's average, everybody falls above or below the average. So can you get yourself below average, for your likelihood to develop a dementia or cancer or whatever? That's, that's the whole conversation here. So with that in mind, most people feel that they are going to be on the lower end of that bell curve of Will I die of cervical cancer, especially parents with young kids, especially parents with little girls. Is my kid going to die of cervical cancer someday? Well, I sure as heck hope not. And I'm going to, I'm going to I'm going to stand behind the safety of a vaccine in order to ensure that that's how this was marketed in 2003 to 2006. There was a campaign it was called the be one less campaign and it was heavily heavily financed. There were doctors Getting paid 1000s of dollars to do public talks at community centers in their clinical practices. Every OB GYN and family practice. Had a poster on the wall and it said be one less than the campaign kind of on the commercials there was even a Superbowl ad if I recall. It was you know, little kids saying to the camera Mom, did you know or Dad Did you know little boys and little girls who are now going to be offered this as a part of the 72 doses of vaccines that they get from the age, you know, day one of life to age 18? Now this HPV thing it's either a two or three vaccine series. It is rampant, like if you don't get it, you're considered a total looney tune. But before 2003 Before this period, there was no market for this so Merck and heard about it even heard about it even heard HPV thing never heard those those letters.
That's right. That's right. So now suddenly, everybody's talking about this, Oprah's talking about this, all of this stuff? Well, where did this come from? Why did we suddenly start talking about this? Well, there was a company there's a company they, they're still the company that makes Gardasil, which is Gardasil nine, that's the only FDA approved vaccine against cervical cancer in the United States. Merck, one of these big pharma companies had just lost millions of dollars like 10s of millions because of some bad stuff that was happening with a drug that released called Vioxx. And Vioxx. Vioxx was an alternative to ibuprofen. And then people started taking it everywhere, it was massively being prescribed. And then people started dropping died of heart attacks. This is why we don't give NSAIDs. Now, any NSAID to anybody was in any sort of cardiac active cardiac disease. Now, as a result of that Merck had to make up a bunch of money. So they said, What is not what what area in the pharmaceutical market isn't being hit? Cervical cancer is very scary. Let's create a whole PR campaign around this and call it the be one less campaign and money back.
And it was 2006 when they launched that campaign. And I remember that they declared we're now moving into the teen market. That was how they phrased it. The vaccine manufacturers, they basically tapped every possibility of vaccinating the younger children. We're now moving into the teen market, but the word market Yes, feel that so gross.
Yeah. So gross. So of course, if it worked, that would be really, really great. But we'll let's wait on that. Because a lot of people when they hear the word, this this V word, they it's not V for vagina V for vaccine, when they hear this word, they they immediately start to think about neurologic injuries and they think about all this type of stuff. Well, I was not even compelled to go down this path, like people think I'm like the quack of quacks. But I was totally on board with vaccines until the whole thing that happened during the past couple years. The schmo COVID stuff all starts unfolding. And I'm like, Okay, we've got two little girls now. We've got to have this conversation with the pediatricians about vaccines, or do we have to go to the pediatricians at all because that's all that they seem to want to do to our girls. And so I was like, my wife was kind of on the fence and I had to go really, really deep. And what I ended up finding was that most of these vaccines, including Gardasil has, they they were never even compared against a true placebo controlled vial, meaning sterile saline. They were never compared against that. Instead, their foe SIBO had a lot of the ingredients that are probably more harmful than the viral particle itself. That's in the Gardasil nine vaccine, things like a amorphous aluminum hydroxy phosphate sulfate, which is a proprietary aluminum salt that is extra potent according to Merck. And we don't really know why it's added, they say it can help to stimulate a more robust immune response. But the issue is that when you open up the brains of both Alzheimer's, people living with Alzheimer's and people living with autism, at the end of their life, they have big clumps of aluminum that do not belong in the brain. So the next question is, how did it get into the brain? Well, fortunately, a lot of drug manufacturers add something called polysorbate 80, which is an emulsifying agent you find in salad dressings, and it helps to distribute all of the contents of the vial evenly, so that when you put your needle in there and draw ups, one cc or whatever, and shoot it into the the arm of somebody who's getting the Gardasil nine, that they're getting all of the constituent parts, that's great. It's called an emulsifier and emulsifier. And like it blends it all together into one thing.
Exactly. It helps vinegar and oil mix, and helps it get into the brain. It helps it helps things cross the blood brain barrier. So great, we've emulsified it. It's evenly distributed, but now we have a very, very highly potent, highly toxic aluminum salt that's added to a vial. We've added something that helps it cross the blood brain barrier. And when you Merck presented this data to the FDA, you've got a group of people who got the, the the actual vaccine and you have a bunch of people who got this faux SIBO and the adverse events look the same because the terrible riskiest ingredients in both categories She's no riskier than non ethical.
It's just fucking fraud. Yeah, believable. Yeah, I do that. I just can't believe this, like, Who do they think they're fooling? And then they're fooling everybody anyway, like you're a doctor. And you had to go on a deep dive as a father to find this. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I hate to turn us all into cynics. But it's just all it really, it feels so gross. Yeah, I would hate to not be that guy to like, believe me. And so we have this big problem here, right, we've had this vaccine that has been deeply ingrained as an important part of our child's protective, you know, repertoire against something very terrible. Cervical cancer is awful. It's an awful way to die. But here's how things get, things get even worse when you actually look at the data. So the original Gardasil data showed that about 81 in 10,000, people had a serious adverse reaction, you know, up to death, but maybe as simple as some neuropathy or whatever, right? The risk of getting so that's at one in 10,000. This is from the safety data itself. Cervical cancer in a highly endemic area, like in East Africa is still a lot of work in Malawi, the risk of dying of getting cervical cancer is 4.27 in 10,000, in a highly endemic area, meaning it's even less likely in the United States. And therefore, you have a What is it 180 times greater risk of a serious of an adverse reaction from the vaccine itself, then you do have even getting cervical cancer in Malawi, one of the most destitute ly poor places on the on the planet. So that has to really come into conversation when we're talking about HPV and cervical cancer and all of this, I feel like there's so much fear around this. But actually, in reality, the junk that's in this vaccine actually poses a greater risk of harming you or your child than cervical cancer itself, which is really like as a doctor now you have to imagine like how much of a headache this gave me when I started reading the data? And it was just like, What am I supposed to tell families now? And if you got the vaccine now what? Like, can we unvaccinated? I don't even like that term, because you can't. But because doctors and midwives and nurse practitioners aren't being completely forthright with this information. I feel like it is becoming very, very confusing to so many families. And I do want to honor that, that everybody's doing these things out of love. Except I can't really imagine how Merck got this through the FDA without somebody being like a, what's in this box? I mean, what else is do the FDA, it's the you know, I mean, 60% of the shareholders of the CDC, I don't know if that's what it is this year, but it was like shareholders in the pharmaceutical stocks, they leave the government, they work at the pharmaceuticals there because they're all in bed together. And they're not really doing third party studies. But I think parents can really torture themselves over the statistics. And I think for many of us what the most harmful thing is just from I don't know the word, it's not quite spiritual, but I think it's almost like your paradigm in life. Yeah, do I in my heart, if God forbid, there's an adverse outcome of any measure? What scenario is more painful to me that I naturally developed something that was harmful? Or that I or child would have been absolutely fine, but I didn't believe I would. I intervened and I caused the harm. And I think that's it. That's it. That's it. Yeah. I mean, you guys are parents like this is? I'm curious been through the thought process. Yeah. Like, I'm against really, really bad practices. And I don't have enough compelling information here for me to say wholeheartedly, that every vaccine or even any vaccine is actually beneficial. The further I go down this rabbit hole, it's not that I'm anti that piece of technology, I actually think it's brilliant, the idea. But frankly, the way that we created a market for this, it was fraudulently really presented to the FDA, or at least maybe fraud, maybe fraud, even if fraud is an embellishment, it just seems a little bit unethical. You know what I mean? Like it's a PR campaign. Yeah. Like, like, you have to create a market for this. And then every doctor in the world is doing it. But it actually is there's ongoing litigation in every state around this vaccine. And that is, the reason for that is not just this whole issue with the first SIBO. They also, were advertising this as a means of preventing cervical cancer. The issue is that because cervical cancer cancer takes months to years to develop, if not decades, I mean, really, decades is what we're looking at, like many cancers, how could Merck create a PR campaign? Whenever you're saying hey, this thing could happen 30 years down the road. We all know how that works, right? If I said you have a risk of, of dying of a heart attack if you keep eating sugar, a lot of people are like, man, whatever. Doc, I feel great or smoking or whatever else, it doesn't work. So they need to make it more. It's, it's this is there's an urgency to this. And, and so what they used in their in their efficacy data. So we talked about safety, but it doesn't work, the efficacy data actually only looked at the surrogate markers of sin to incent three. And as we already described, most of that is going to go away on its own. So some of the ongoing litigation and there's in all 50 states, there's different, you know, lawsuits now happening. And Merck is now in very, very murky water once again, I just came up with that. And so, so by using these these surrogate markers, right, we can say, hey, it prevents you it we saw a decrease in the development of sin two and sin three. But does that really matter? If most of that's going to go away on its own and with some basic focusing on the physical, mental, emotional, and even spiritual elements of what constitutes a healthy person, you could get those numbers even lower. That doesn't look good for a PR campaign. But they have advertised this as a means of preventing cervical cancer, and that is just patently false. It's just not something they can even claim because they never actually looked at what's going to happen with cervical cancer rates over the next three decades.
Or we're just about 2020 years now with Yeah, exonerated the vaccine. So don't know, we don't even really have any data yet. Yeah, they're even the numbers haven't changed very much. We'll just say that. I mean, you would expect that a vaccine that was meant to prevent cervical cancer now that it's administered to, gosh, I don't even know probably 95% of nine year olds or beyond are getting this vaccine series, you would expect that this thing got squashed real fast. But we just don't know. We don't We won't know for another 50 years maybe. And just like with anything, what about all the harmful stuff? What if it did prevent cervical cancer, but there's a good chance you're also going to get some sort of neurologic disability?
Well, that to me shows that
it's Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah.
And by the way, I misremembered earlier, somehow came to me that it was 2007. It wasn't 2005 When Rick Perry passed that law, that first mandate, and it was a big deal. Yeah. And I knew it was going to be the beginning of new ones. And if only I knew how bad it would get how prescient right for what we just went through.
I I went deep on that. Yeah, I realized because I had my son in 2005. And he was a toddler. And I was 2007. Yeah, but it was the beginning of something massive, and we're usually busy looking the other way when these things are happening, but Oprah Barbara Walters, all the big shows had these, I guess, paid doctors come on to promote this thing. And they purposefully distracted us from the true risks. And no, I saw it in real time. Yeah, there's one other piece here that's relevant for people who are still going into their OB GYN. And by the way, I think aggressive screening for anything is really, really helpful, it's helpful to know that there might be something on the horizon so you can act if you don't have the positive screen, then there's no way you would have known. So our screens are not necessarily the best, but sometimes they are really reasonable to continue doing that. The question then though, is let's say that you already have HPV 16 And you don't do anything and it progresses it gets now you get the biopsy. It's you've got cin three and now let's say they do the LEAP procedure, right? And then they at that same visit, they're like, Hey, we're gonna do the lopping off of the cervix or what's called a cold knife cone. There's also eschar Radek therapies which are very intensive multi week multi. They're like topicals and creams. They go in the vagina, they're they they basically sear off the that layer, the top layer of cells in the cervix that's called eschar. Radek therapy, that's another option, but I digress. Once you've now got the HPV, right, you've already been exposed. You had your procedures, you're doing your best the OG doctor is probably going to say, I recommend getting the HPV vaccine, right this cervical cancer vaccine we've been talking about, because hey, it couldn't hurt. Well, actually from mercs own safety data, this is very, very challenging to understand or to to really acknowledge. But if you had HPV and you were given the vaccine, you actually had a higher risk of developing sin to insin three than somebody who didn't have HPV and got the vaccine. So this goes back into is HPV causing the cancer or is HPV a warning sign that something is going on in your immune system, which by the way, your immune system is responsible for scavenging precancerous cells, your immune system keeps all of those abnormal cells in check, hey, you're not going to, you're gonna keep growing despite our you know, this whole ecosystem, we're gonna gobble you up and chew you up and then spit you out. That's happening all the time, but you have to have a healthy immune system and are these vaccines, the aluminum salts to polysorbate 80. Not to mention years of birth control, not to mention gut dysbiosis, where 80% of your, your, your immune systems your immune cells live, if any of those elements are added to it, are you going to end up in a state of immune dysregulation? Are you going to develop autoimmune conditions, including Hashimotos? Are you going to end up having an inability and like an unhealthy immune response? Whenever another virus comes your way, which probably happened 10 times in this conversation, it all goes back to what can I do to nourish myself and help to support my body getting back to a state of harmony, and homeostasis? In which case, you're not going to even have to worry about little fragment of nucleic acid wrapped in protein that comes your way whenever you get onto the public bus and you, you know, touch your face. But that's not the conversation. That's habit that's happening and I feel like it's very disempowering. It's very fatalistic that, oh, there's nothing in your control. There's lots in your control. And if you can come work with somebody, if you can find somebody that sees this not as a doomsday and they're going to fear monger and they're actually willing to work with you on getting some of these systems in order, you're probably going to live longer anyways, it's not just about the HPV it's also like how are you showing up in the world? How are you living your life if you it's not optimal? There's probably something we can do to fine tune things a little bit. And that's really my whole message kind of in a nutshell.
Thank you for joining us at the Down To Birth Show. You can reach us @downtobirthshow on Instagram or email us at Contact@DownToBirthShow.com. All of Cynthia’s classes and Trisha’s breastfeeding services are offered live online, serving women and couples everywhere. Please remember this information is made available to you for educational and informational purposes only. It is in no way a substitute for medical advice. For our full disclaimer visit downtobirthshow.com/disclaimer. Thanks for tuning in, and as always, hear everyone and listen to yourself.
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