Do We Have A Healthcare Or Disease Management System? With Dr. Joe Jacko

In this episode, Adiel Gorel and Dr. Joe Jacko dig into the state of the healthcare system, and the many ways it has morphed into a disease management system. Several topics are covered, including: the hidden forces shaping your doctor’s recommendations; why most patients never hear all their options; how the FDA and Big Pharma influence your care; and why lifestyle mastery beats prescription dependency. Dr. Jacko is a passionate medical expert, who speaks with the authority of both experience as a physician, and as someone who has been inside the very system he now hopes to edify people about. Discover the many ways you can take back your health and make better decisions about your care with the support of your primary healthcare provider by showing up better informed.

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Do We Have A Healthcare Or Disease Management System? With Dr. Joe Jacko

Empowering Yourself To Reclaim Your Wellness Autonomy

It’s great to be here with you again. This is very exciting. We have a wonderful guest, Dr. Joe Jacko. Joe, welcome to the show.

I appreciate the opportunity.

The Athlete’s Eye: Dr. Joe Jacko’s Medical Journey And Holistic Philosophy

I know we are going to learn a lot of things from you, and I’m very excited for that. I’m always a learning hog. Give us the background. Probably a great way to get started is if you tell us the route that brought you to where you are.

Growing up, I was very much an athlete. I, unfortunately, got hurt a lot and spent a lot of time in emergency rooms. That created my interest in medicine. During medical school and residency training, all the things we were learning, I was looking at it through the eyes of an athlete. When we treat athletes, the goal is optimal function.

I did sports medicine for quite a bit, and then from 2012 to 2022, I was doing more sick care medicine. Everybody was frustrated because the goal was not getting people to optimal function. We were just putting a Band-Aid on and, in my opinion, an over-reliance on medications. A part of my frustration and a part of writing the book was that experience. I get a little frustrated with the way medicine is practiced with too much emphasis on medications. We tend to overlook the foundations of medicine. There are some other things that led me to write the book that I’m sure we’re going to talk a little bit about.

That’s my journey in a nutshell. Through the book, I was hoping to convey to the readers that they’re not getting all the information they need to make the best healthcare decisions. Many times, medical science is not as pure as mathematics and physics. Sometimes, the science can be a little bit tainted. Here in the US, the medical education and training are largely funded and directly by the pharmaceutical companies, and that influences the overall practice of medicine.

Correct me if I have the wrong impression, but from so many of the doctors that we interviewed on the show and so many of the MDs that are my friends, my impression of medical school is that it’s a big Excel spreadsheet. The condition, the medicine. The condition, the drug. It’s an Excel spreadsheet. Is there something to that?

Decoding Efficacy: The Deceptive Difference Between Relative And Absolute Risk

There may be something to it now. That didn’t exist when I trained. I was in medical school from ’82 to ’86. That was before all this technology. It’s becoming very QuickBooks medicine. We have developed this mindset that every medical condition has a molecular cause, and therefore, there’s a molecular or chemical solution to it.

It sounds very heartening to hear that having been an athlete, you became a doctor who dealt with athletic injuries. I’m thinking. What about the poor couch potato? I’m a couch potato specialist, but then I realized that’s most people.

I thought there should be a beach medicine fellowship. My opinion is that the model that we should practice medicine through is looking at the athlete. I try to treat all my patients as athletes, whether they’re a 93-year-old female or a 15-year-old high school athlete. We always try to achieve optimal function. Mainly, that’s going to be through exercise, nutrition, and lifestyle. The way the system is set up, there’s very little time during the office visit to cover those important aspects of health.

I agree that everybody’s an athlete. Whether you are in the Olympics and you’re trying to break the World Record, or you’re trying to break your own record from when you were 92, you’re an athlete. You’re an athlete relative to yourself.

Everybody should strive to be the best person they can be. With some of my older patients, as they get older, I try to get them to think about the future. I’m like, “You’re 60 now. What do you want to be doing when you’re 80 or 85?” Many times, they’ll say things that they’re not even doing now. I’m like, “I’m not sure how you’re going to walk 3 miles of a mountain when you’re 85, when you’re not even doing that at 60.” I try to get them to think ahead.

There was a book that I once read. It wasn’t written by an MD. It was written by a person who, at age 46, found himself very overweight and in very bad shape. He got jolted into spending a year becoming better, and he wrote a book about it. The transformation is quite striking. There’s another book. It came to me. The title of the book is A Dud at 70… A Stud at 80! And How to Do It. That’s an actual book.

It’s great to see those types of transformations. Going back to the first example you gave, unfortunately, for many of us, we have to hit rock bottom before we will make the necessary changes.

The Tipping Point: Three Personal Experiences That Led To Writing The Book

You wrote a book, and we are going to go into what made you, but let’s go into the reasoning there. To write a book of that nature, something must have not just driven you to it as a single goal, but it must have been a process.

It was certainly a process that probably evolved over about fifteen years. In the book, I talk about 3 situations or 3 circumstances that made me question what we were being taught in medical school. One had to deal with athletes and anabolic steroids. There was a movement to try to convince athletes not to use them. They did studies that made anabolic steroids look like they did not work, but they were not using the same doses that athletes do. Everybody knew they worked, but the medical profession, particularly the sports medicine community, lost a lot of trust among athletes from doing that. They tried to scare the athletes from not using them.

A second scenario came back into the sick care medicine. There are a lot of new drugs on the market that I didn’t know anything about or very little about, and I had to learn them. I ended up meeting with pharmaceutical reps over lunch. They would bring me and my staff lunch. I caught on to how they market their drugs. They share only part of the data, and that’s the data they want you to know so that you will prescribe medications.

The third situation was COVID. I thought there was a lot of dishonesty and some unethical behavior within the medical profession. There is misinformation both outside medicine, but some of the misinformation, in my opinion, comes from within the walls of the medical profession. That’s what was the last straw for me.

Even those of us who are not specialists can see. I don’t watch the commercials on television, but sometimes, you get to see them. You are busy with something else, and you see a commercial for a drug. The screen is filled with beautiful people running, enjoying life in the field, and doing beautiful, amazing things, and then there’s a list and a voice narrating the litany of side effects and horrors that can come.

Sometimes, the commercial is for the side effects. It’s like, “If you have side effects, you are going to be enjoying life again using our miracle drug.” Even as a regular person, you get a sense of what you said. When the salespeople came to you, they focused on what works and went very quickly about what is negative, right?

Correct. That’s part of it. They make the drug look like it works better than it does through sleight of hand and statistical manipulation, if you will. First of all, for those commercials, the TV networks get about 10% of their revenue from the pharmaceutical ads. If you were watching the Olympics, probably every other ad was a pharmaceutical advertisement or commercial.

They go through all those side effects, which, in my opinion, most people can look up. In my opinion, they should add a few more additional information. They talk about what the relative risk is, like, “If you take this drug, your risk of heart disease or heart attack will go down 30%.” What they don’t tell you, though, is that 100 people have to take the medication for 5 years to prevent that 1 heart attack. That’s part of what I was referring to when I said patients aren’t getting all the information they need.

The difference between relative and absolute, I believe, has also been on the surface there during COVID as to the effectiveness of the new vaccines. They were given a number that was relative, and then some people say, “The absolute is very different.” The absolute apparently is what counts. Can you talk about that?

Correct. Going to the vaccines, they reported a 95% efficacy rate, but it took 22,000 patients to be vaccinated to prevent 1 COVID death. That part was kept away from the public. During the emergency use authorization, those numbers were not yet known. The way they got to 95% is in the control group of people who did not get vaccinated.

0.88% got COVID during the study period, so less than 1%. It makes you wonder. Did it spread that rampant as we were led to believe? In the group that got the vaccine, it was 0.4%. The difference between 0.88% and 0.04% is 0.84%. You divide that by 0.8%, and you get a 95% efficacy rate. Still, even in people who did not get the vaccine, there was less than a 1% chance of getting COVID.

That is a little bit worrisome because, never mind even the details of a particular drug or vaccine. We know that they’re all likely to carry side effects.

No treatments without some potential downside. We’re supposed to practice personalized medicine, but we practice population health medicine. In other words, we’ll put 100 people on blood pressure, knowing only 1 is going to benefit from it. The thinking is, “If these 99 don’t benefit, at least we’re not hurting them.” We can’t say that with any certainty. Whenever you take a drug and you’re taking it long-term, we’re changing your physiology in ways we don’t fully understand.

Those are very key words, what you said. When you study that drug for blood pressure, let’s say, you can study a certain pathway, but there’s no way you can study all the pathways in all of the processes of the body.

That’s right. You don’t know how it’s affecting other organ systems. Along those lines, we don’t know how it is affecting people. What drives their use is that, from an insurance carrier, it’s cheaper many times to pay for that drug in 99 patients that it’s not going to benefit, as long as that 1 heart attack or 1 stroke they save saves them money. Do you see what I’m saying?

Yeah, but also, I see a little trap in the very words you said. When you listen to what you say, you naturally recoil a little bit. You’re giving a certain drug for blood pressure, let’s say, to 99 people without any reason. Who knows what side effects there are? The words you used could be a great retort for them to say, “If we can prevent one death, isn’t it worth it?” That sounds so angelic and so beautiful, doesn’t it?

It works on a lot of people. They’re giving that blood pressure to 99 patients who have high blood pressure. That’s where we confuse patients. You think you’re taking medicine to lower your blood pressure, your blood sugar, or your cholesterol. That’s not the real reason you’re taking it. You are taking that medication to prevent the complications of those conditions, mainly heart attacks and strokes. We can show everybody that your blood pressure or your cholesterol is coming down, but that doesn’t mean we’re preventing a heart attack or a stroke in you.

Beyond Prescriptions: Reclaiming Health With Sun, Sleep, And Natural Light

On this show, we interview a lot of people who talk about life practices that lead, hopefully, to better results in every domain. We have had a lot of people here talk about being out in the natural light, the sunlight. There is so much science about the frequencies that the sun gives off and how our bodies have adapted to that over hundreds of millions of years.

We have had people talk about what all the wavelengths from the very shortest one at UVB to the longest one at infrared are doing to us and our mitochondria, and being out in the light, not necessarily in the sun. Some of us can get burned in the sun, but being in the light, which nowadays we are not. We spend time indoors.

What happens at night? It used to be at nightfall, there was maybe a little fire, and then people went to bed. There wasn’t a television. There wasn’t a phone. Now, we get a blue light. It so happens that the blue light is the signal for alertness, like, “It’s the middle of the day.” That can have a very bad effect on sleep. This is only with light. Never mind food. Never mind exercise. All of these things sometimes don’t get to the stage that they merit because it’s so seductive to take a pill, and then you don’t have to do anything else.

Correct. Unfortunately, we’ve developed a society that wants a quick fix. Going back to your comments about the sun, I read an article not too long ago where the sun penetrating their eyes has universal benefits on your overall health. For people who don’t like the sun, if they gradually increase or titrate their sun exposure, they’ll start feeling better.

Somebody I interviewed here said something brilliant. She said, “Let’s say you are very light-skinned and you are prone to getting burned. Use nature’s sunscreen. That’s called shade.”

Cleopatra used olive oil.

She might have had olive skin. We never know. You said before that maybe half of all commercials on TV are for drugs. The impression that you get very superficially is that the other half are for fast food. It’s a perfect compliment. There’s an ad for fast food followed by an ad for a drug. Your path has been charted. All you need to do is get the fast food, and there’s going to be a drug for whatever it causes.

The markers are very clever. They know what they’re doing. Regardless of the product. They know how to get us to use their product.

The Financial Empire: How Profit Motives Drive Both Fast Food And Pharma

The emphasis on society, especially in the United States, is always financial. In other words, you can rarely go wrong looking for the money. Even when you see junk food or fast food commercials, many of them go into the price. They’re like, “You get 5 for $4.99. Now, we have a special. You get it with large fries only for $3.99 with a giant soda.” It’s price-based. From the other end, when we talked before about giving a drug to 99 people that it’s not going to have any effect on, it’s going to have an effect on the bottom line of somebody.

One of the problems with medicine is that you have so many different corporate interests, and none of the interests are necessarily aligned. For the CEOs, their responsibility is to their shareholder, not necessarily to me or you, the consumer or the patient. The audience needs to understand that. There is a motive to generate profit, and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it has to be done within an ethical framework. What I’ve been seeing in my years of practicing is that as the medicines become corporatized, a lot of these ethical boundaries or barriers are being broken. It has almost become purely profit-driven.

At least there’s something honest and upfront about it. Nobody in a corporation, be it a medical, pharmaceutical, or anything, is making any bones about it. They’re beholden to their shareholders, and they want to maximize profit. At least that is very upfront, and it’s not hidden.

That’s correct. They probably could be a little bit more transparent in the way they present their studies to go over the absolute risk reduction, for instance. That way, a patient has a little bit more information to make the best decision for themselves. One of the points I make in the book is that each of us has to understand our own risk tolerance. Many people have a low risk tolerance, so if there’s a one in a million chance a drug might work, they want it. Some people want convincing, strong evidence that it’s going to work for them. They have a high risk tolerance. They don’t mind rolling the dice, if you will.

The other problem is that we, as physicians, have to understand our own risk tolerance because we tend to project it onto the patient. We’re frequently practicing defensive medicine. You don’t want to have a heart attack. I want you to have it, so I’m going to prescribe this, even with a small chance it may work. We each have to understand our risk tolerances.

The “CYA” Factor: Why Defensive Medicine Generates Patient Fear And Urgency

What about the CYA factor?

It’s a big factor.

I experienced it. I was in the kitchen and had a mishap with a very sharp knife. I cut straight and deep into the middle of my index finger. It’s almost healed. It seems to be okay, except a few days later, over here, not at the site of injury, it started feeling painful to the touch and a little inflamed. I went to the doctor. He said, “You probably have an inflammation of the tendon sheath.” He gave me antibiotics. It’s nothing that I am very thrilled about, but sometimes, you do it.

I’m still on the course, and I had a question. Maybe I shouldn’t have even asked it. I felt a slight tenderness here. I wasn’t even sure, but I called my physician and said, “Could it be related?” He said, “It could mean that the infection has migrated. The hand is so complex.” He referred me to a hand specialist, whom I’m going to see soon. He said, “She will suss out what’s going on.” Since then, everything seems to be fine.

I got an urgent call from them. Based on what he had written based on my voice on the phone, saying,

“I may feel a little tenderness here,” he used a term. When the specialist saw the term, she said, “You can’t wait until tomorrow. You must go to the ER right now because you could need surgical intervention. It’s urgent.” I had to talk to the surgeon on the phone and say, “I asked a question.”

She cares about me, but it’s covering the bases. It’s not taking any chances. The way she spoke was so scary to a patient. I cut my finger in the kitchen. Surgery? That’s a cover-your-ass. How much is that factoring into the way doctors are?

It’s hard to put a percentage on that, but we probably all encounter it every day. To some degree, we’re all probably doing that with our patients. You want to do the right thing. Unfortunately, there’s little room. If you’re wrong, you’re wrong. If a patient has a bad outcome, they have a bad outcome. You want to avoid that. In your particular case, I would’ve been more concerned if it were on this side rather than this side.

I go through that in the book. We’re very good at creating fear and making everything sound like it’s urgent. For instance, “Heart disease is the number one killer.” That sounds dire, but you have to understand that you need to know about 500 people to know 1 person who died of a heart problem in the past 12 months. Ironically, most people don’t even know 500 people. I see this a lot with patients. Their doctor tells them, “You need to be on a statin drug right now.” Usually, there’s time to work on the diet and exercise before you go to that step. We’re very good at scaring people and making things sound like they need immediate attention.

I’m curious. I’ll go back a step. Why would you be more concerned if it were on this side?

It’s because your cut is on this side, your palmar or volar side. If it’s on the tendon sheath, that’s going to go down this way.

My GP said, “The hand is so complex. The sheath is so complex.” I don’t even know, but he must have used a term that triggered her, and she got a little panicky. I am fascinated by your saying that you need to know 500 people statistically to know somebody who died of a heart attack or heart disease.

In the last twelve months.

That sounds so different from the message that you said one sentence prior, that heart disease is the number one killer.

Whenever you hear a statistic like that, you have to ask, “It’s the number one killer, but how common is it?” We have about 345 million people in the country. About 1% die every year. Heart disease is around 700,000 of those 1% deaths. When you calculate it, it comes to about 500 people. If you’ve looked at the numbers in that sense, you would realize, “Maybe I don’t need to take this medicine yet. Maybe I have time to work on my lifestyle. I’m motivated to do that.” You can’t do that if you don’t know that information.

Debunking The Fear: The Real Numbers Behind The “Number One Killer” Statistic

That is very fascinating. If people take this from this episode, I’ll be happy because it’s changing the way you think about it. It changes the mindset. It changes the paradigm from saying it’s the number one killer. I agree. That’s a statement made out of thin air. You don’t know what the basis for it is. You say 500 people to find somebody who died of heart disease in the last year. That’s a completely different reality, which seems to be reality. It seems to be real. That’s a very different way to think about it. Would it be true that maybe some doctors feel scaring the public is not so bad? If you tell the public, “Heart disease is the number one killer,” maybe more people will eat less junk, eat better, or walk. Maybe scaring the public is not viewed as such a bad thing.

I would agree with that. Physicians are trying to motivate patients to get them to change their ways. A little scare factor is sometimes beneficial. It has to be done in the context of all the other information that we discussed. I read somewhere that we make about 35,000 decisions a day. It’s hard to believe that we make that many. Almost all of those were weighing risk and reward. Our brains are doing it intuitively.

In almost everything we do, we have to understand the risk and odds. Everything is a little bit of a gamble. Nothing works all the time. You have to know what the odds are of getting a disease. You have to know the odds of if you leave it alone, what’s going to happen? You have to know the odds of, “If I take medication or have this procedure, what are my odds of getting better?” You have to make the best decision for yourself.

There’s the whole thing about if you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail. You have a certain condition, and you talk to a surgeon. Wouldn’t the surgeon be biased, not even from a malicious standpoint, like, “I can cut it out. I can take it out.”

For instance, every patient a cardiologist sees has heart disease. In their mind, everybody has heart disease, and all the patients they have that die, die of heart disease. How you see a problem depends on where you stand and where in the medical process you’re seeing the problem. We’re all looking at it from a very limited prison.

Except when you talk about being a hammer and looking at everything as a nail. If you are a surgeon, you are bound to think about surgery. Surgery is also a moneymaker, isn’t it?

Sure is. It benefits the surgeon. It benefits the hospital, the anesthesiologist, the pathologist who has to look at the tissue, and so on. Let me backtrack. If you have two interventions that are both safe and effective, there’s a tendency to prescribe or lean towards a more expensive one.

Undoing The Gold Standard: Questioning The Manipulation Of Double-Blind Trials

I want to get your opinion on this. I don’t remember which drug it was for. Maybe it was for a vaccine, even. I don’t recall. I don’t come from medical science. I come from engineering. I studied a lot of physics and science from that end. When you have an experiment and you do it, especially when it’s in medicine, you do it double-blind. Double-blind is the gold standard. With a double-blind, there’s the placebo group, the group that gets the actual drug. Even the doctors don’t know. That is double-blind. That is great.

I became aware through the media that a few years ago, there was a development of either a drug or a vaccine. Something caught my eye that was very strange to me. They started the experiment, and then shortly after, they decided to unravel, undo, and stop the double-blind factor. The reason that was given, to me, was mind-blowing. The reason that was given is that they said, “This seemed to be so effective and so good that we don’t want to deprive the placebo people of this gem.” To me, that reads wrong. What do you think of that?

It may have been the COVID vaccines because that was supposed to be a three-year study. After about two months into it, they allowed the placebo group or the control group to cross over and receive the vaccine. It muddied the waters.

Why would they do that?

They’ll do it for a couple of reasons. Let’s say it’s a six-month study and they have positive results, but the results are going down from the 3rd month to the 4th month. They may cut it off at four months because they know that the trend is going to show that maybe it’s not as effective. Conversely, if it’s a 6-month study and it’s showing good numbers, but the numbers aren’t where they’re supposed to be, they may extend it to 8 months. They’re moving the goalposts when they do that.

The childish reasoning that it’s so good and you don’t want to deprive the placebo people of it sounds on a kindergarten level.

Vaccines are a little bit different because you have a group, and you’re talking about something that some people aren’t going to get. It’s different from one group having high blood pressure and they’re in the control group, and another group having high blood pressure and they’re getting the medication. In that group, it’s hard to deny this group the medication if this is showing overwhelmingly positive results. There can be cases where that could be justified.

I see. It’s not as ridiculous as it seemed.

In some cases, it would be an appropriate thing to do.

Tell us more about what’s in the book.

I alluded to it earlier that patients aren’t getting all the information they need. I spent part of the book talking about what I call the half-truth and how it’s very pervasive. Some of it we already discussed with the manipulation of the statistics. I also spent a whole chapter talking about big pharma funds, the medical education residency programs, academic centers, the journals, and physician organizations. They’re spreading their money far and wide into the medical infrastructure.

There’s a chapter on the cozy relationship between the FDA and the pharmaceutical companies. Something like ten out of the last FDA directors have taken, once they leave the FDA, they take pretty cushy jobs with the pharmaceutical industry. I talk about why medicines are made the way they are. They’re designed to get patents. They’re not designed necessarily to replicate normal human physiology.

If you look at the several classifications of medications we have, they tend to be blockers and inhibitors. They’re blocking a biochemical process that you and I were born to have. That might be safe in the long run, but what are the long-term consequences of that? One exception would be these GLP-1 weight loss drugs. They’re agonists. They help magnify or improve function. That’s one of the reasons they’re effective. I question the overall value of medicine. Does it do any good?

In the book, I point out that if you took away healthcare, longevity would only change by about 10%. Most of the reason for increased lifespan has to do with things such as clean water and sanitation, antibiotics for infections, and those types of things. There may be some benefit from the vaccines, but probably not as much as we’re led to believe. Little has to do with any medical advancements, quite honestly. I spent some time talking about the Blue Zones. There are pockets where people live to over 100. What’s interesting is these people don’t know anything about medical science, and they’re living to be 100. They’re living life, which we sometimes forget to do.

Secrets Of The Blue Zones: Longevity Beyond Medical Intervention

A little comment about the Blue Zones. The Blue Zone discussion tries to figure out mostly stuff around food. Food is the number one thing. What are they eating? Let’s see what they eat. Let’s follow their food pattern. Then, movement. They’re active. They’re in the field. They’re working. Do you remember what we talked about before about being in the natural light? In the Blue Zones, it seems that they live like we used to live many years ago. They’re outdoors a lot. When they go indoors, usually, they don’t go on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok for hours. That alone is not even mentioned.

They have real social connections. Going back to the sunlight, during the Spanish flu in 1919 and 1920, the patients who fared best were those treated outdoors and in the sunlight. It has to do with vitamin D. Vitamin D is maybe the most important supplement you could take. It’s a hormone. Most of the patients who had COVID and were hospitalized had Vitamin D deficiency.

At the beginning of the 20th century, there used to be sanatoriums and hospitals that had big porches where they let the patients spend time in the sunlight. In fact, you are put in a room where you can’t even open the window because it’s dangerous. What if you fall through the window or jump?

We did the opposite. We locked people up in their homes during the outbreak. We still had half the population working. I wasn’t sure how that was going to stop the virus. We were still spreading it, even with half the population working.

There was also a bit of a mismatch between people who lived in single-family homes. They had a yard. They could be out in the yard. They could walk in the yard. There were people who lived in the city in an apartment in a high-rise, and they didn’t.

That’s a good point. I didn’t think about those types of differences between. Those who didn’t go outside were more or less cooped up in an apartment building. Did they find any difference in terms of outcomes with COVID?

I don’t think anybody measured it. The directive was to lock inside. Nobody wanted to challenge it. Again, I’m not an expert.

What I appreciate about people like you is that it’s helpful when outsiders come in and look at a problem because you tend to come in with fresh eyes. You don’t have blinders on, and you haven’t been indoctrinated or taught a certain thing. You ask common-sense questions. That’s frequently missing. I like outsiders coming in and shedding some light on things.

To me, if there is a big flu going around and I have access to a beach, intuitively, and this is nothing scientific, walking on the beach in the daylight seems like it would be a very good thing to do, somehow.

It’s healthy. You’re outdoors. It’s relaxing. You could get to clear your mind and think about things, too.

Staying In The Box: Why Doctors Resist The Shifting Cholesterol Narrative

Plus, all the benefits of the general frequencies of the spectrum of the light and how it affects your mitochondria. You can go deep into that. How does it reconcile that medical opinions are shifting? There was this thing about high cholesterol being a very bad thing. A giant industry was built around it, which makes a lot of money. Many people are starting to say, “The brain is made mostly of cholesterol. We need cholesterol for our hormones.” It’s starting to change the narrative. Doctors who went to school in the 1980s, such as yourself, were taught. They know cholesterol. How does it jive with the new knowledge?

Patients seem to be more aware of what you said, but doctors are still trained that if you have high cholesterol, you need to be on a statin drug. There are incentives in place to make that happen. If you’re an employed physician, they control you a little bit. If you’re not meeting the clinical practice guidelines, you get punished for doing that.

The patient awareness is much better than it was. That all started in 1987. I was an intern when the National Cholesterol Education Program came out. Where I trained, we had a big hospital meeting where all the physicians had to attend. The message was, “We’re going to stamp out heart disease once and for all with statins.” The first statin had been released in November or December of ‘86, Mevacor. I remember leaving the room with two older physicians talking. One said, “This is BS. I have patients with cholesterol at 300, and they do fine. I have patients with 150. They have heart attacks.” The other physician said, “This sounds like a pharmaceutical-driven diagnosis.”

That’s an interesting distinction.

That generation didn’t buy into it. My generation was probably 50/50. At each subsequent generation, it becomes more and more, “It’s part of what you do. That’s what you do. That’s what you’re trained to do. You’re trained in this box. You must stay in the box.”

There was a thing that happened in the state of California, where the governor signed a bill that if a medical professional gave advice to a patient that did not align with the public health recommendation, they could lose their license. It was quietly retracted and canceled. That included things like, “You should take more vitamin C, maybe Vitamin D,” and then, “You’re losing your license here.” That was scary stuff. Why would they do something like that?

My answer would be that the profession has been hijacked by corporate entities. I assume they probably have some control over the physician leadership, whether it be the state medical boards or the board of directors of medical subspecialties and physicians’ organizations. There’s a lot of pressure out there. I don’t like getting old, but I’m glad I am where I am in my career.

I think that the profession is going down a bad direction and into a downward spiral. Physicians are no longer able to keep and do what they think is best in the patient’s interest. It’s a partnership. We’ve gotten away from this partnership. I like to find out, “What do you want as a patient? How can I help you get there?” That’s the way it was when I first came out, but it’s not that way anymore. It’s very much, “I’m the physician. You’re going to do what I tell you. I’m going to do what they’re telling me and my hospital and what my boards are telling me to do.”

The Loss Of Partnership: Patient Trust Vs. Physician Control

That is, you are not supposed to know the patient.

Correct.

I’ll come at it from the other side. I’ll be a devil’s advocate. People need security. People want to have a figure of authority. A doctor like you went to medical school for many years, did a residency, has a lot of training, signed the pledge to not do any harm, and other stuff like this. You are a trusted figure. You are a knowledgeable figure. You are a leader.

I want to feel like I have a leader or I have a general GP whom I can trust and share with. You don’t have time. You are busy with your job. You can be an expert on the body. You give the doctor a lot of power, but you also hope that the doctor will be there for you. One of the things that I also notice is that doctors don’t have a lot of time to spend with you anymore.

Correct. You mentioned the word trust. I dive into that in one chapter. You’re not going to listen to someone you don’t trust. You’re going to listen to someone you trust. Therefore, the best half-truths or misinformation will come from people you do trust, if that makes any sense. Physicians are well-intended, but if they’re taught a certain way, they’re going to tell that to you. You may benefit from it, but you may not be benefiting as much as you should.

If physicians are trained, it’s like, “You have the best education. Stay in a box. This is all you need to know. All this stuff out here is not relevant to your time. It’s not worth your time. Don’t pursue it.” Patients have become a little wiser to that. We have other professionals out there, like chiropractors and naturopaths. With the internet, more and more of this stuff is available for patients. Patients are becoming better educated. There’s a lot of pressure. When physicians are employed, they’re under their control, basically.

It’s interesting that you said that if there were no medicine at all, then the mortality would only be maybe 10% higher. We do need doctors, physicians, and surgeons for acute problems. Things happen all the time.

You make a good point. That 10% doesn’t address the quality of care issue. That’s dealing with lifespan. There’s no doubt that what we do enhances the quality of care. I’ve heard Robert F. Kennedy talk about when his uncle JFK was present, maybe 10% of people had a chronic disease. Now, it’s 70%. People would die from their heart attack back in 1960. Those people are living longer, and they’re able to maintain a certain quality of life. We do acute care extremely well in this country. It’s the chronic care, and it’s the chronic care that is lifestyle-driven, that we get poor results. If it’s lifestyle-related, we don’t address it.

The Cost Of Health: Nutrient Depletion In Agriculture And The Expense Of Eating Well

To be fair and to defend those poor physicians, including you, I would say the way the agricultural system has been working in this country is not kind to the nutrient content of the field or of the land. The produce that we grow, the fruit, even the animals that eat it, are not as rich in nutrients as they were many years ago.

Correct.

You could say, “You can supplement,” but many years ago, we didn’t need to supplement. We got everything from the food. People are running on a treadmill that’s going up, and they’re falling back. If we try to eat organic, good, and clean, the nutrient content may not be what it should be or what we need, so we get sicker. It all dovetails into each other.

Correct. You make a good point. Eating healthy is very expensive. Also, this 24/7 access to food is not healthy. Our ancestors didn’t have that back in the caveman days. There are a lot of factors that certainly go into it, but eating is probably the most important thing you can do. Exercise is extremely poor. Sleeping is very important as well. A lot of our food is doctored up, for sure.

It occurs to me also that the word local is starting to be used more and more. That’s very true. Having talked to people who talked about our type of mitochondria, where we live geographically and the color of our skin adapting to that, and the type of mitochondrial function we have adapting to where we are, everybody seems to say, “If you eat your local food at the time it grows, you are likely to do well.” The problem is, if it’s the middle of winter in Minnesota, and you’re eating a pineapple that was flown in from Hawaii, apparently, that is not so great.

Correct. That’s probably where some supplementation would be beneficial. Getting food from other countries that may mimic, because their season is different than your growing season, may be a good alternative. They always say that if you’re going to get honey, get it from your local bees because your immune system is going to respond to that better than if you got it from another state.

In the book, I do talk about the Amish population. Where I live, we’re pretty close to that. In 1900, when the lifespan was 47, it was 70 for the Amish back then. Since they’re eating food naturally and they’re not living in crowded city conditions, like New York or Chicago,they’re not dealing with bad waste and tainted water. Their lifestyle hasn’t changed. Their lifestyle still stayed consistent. They grow their own food, too.

It seems to me that the local issue could be at least partially solved by going to what they call farmers’ markets. It’s interesting what you said about the honey, too, because there has been a big wave here of buying Manuka honey from New Zealand. They rank it based on potency. The high-potency ones can cost hundreds of dollars for a little jar, but they come from halfway across the world.

There are problems with medicine, but at the same time, people with supplements are trying to make money, too. Everybody’s got a profit motive behind it, so you have to be a little bit careful about what you put in your body, regardless of whether it’s natural or a drug.

Tell us the full name of your book.

The full name is Bamboozled, Duped, and Hoodwinked: Keys to Escaping the Tricks, Deceptions, and the Half-Truths of the Medical Industry. You could get it on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

That’s a title that doesn’t pull any punches.

The original title was going to be 90% of Medicine is Half BS, but I knew that wasn’t going to fly. Somewhere on social media, I saw the word bamboozled. I go, “I like that. I then tried to find two other words that were similar. I thought the duped and hoodwinked flowed pretty well together.

People can find your book with your name, Dr. Joe Jacko.

I go by Joe, but for the book I went by Joseph. They probably have to put Joseph in the search engine to find it. It’s a long book. It’s 500 pages, but it has about 380-some references in it.

Final Takeaways: Dr. Jacko’s Top Tips For Navigating The Healthcare System

There’s a lot of bomboozlement going on. It’s a long book. If you had to give our audience a couple of tips, what would they be?

I would say do your own research regardless of what your doctor tells you. I don’t mind when patients go to Google because it gives me an idea of what they’re concerned about and what they’re thinking. When I know that, I know how I can best approach them. If you’re predicting you’re going to have surgery, I would look for a second opinion. You have to go outside the medical system that gave you the 1st one, though, to get a true 2nd opinion.

You can get anything you want in medicine if you’re willing to pay for it out of pocket. You might have to go outside the insurance model for certain things and be willing to pay out of pocket, particularly with hormone replacement, things like peptides, or getting certain diagnostic tests. Many patients don’t realize that they can order their own lab work. They can order their own MRI scans. There are places that can do that. They’re not necessarily dependent on the doctor, but they may have to go to a doctor to try to figure out what it means.

Most doctors have stayed in that traditional mode. There’s probably 2% to 5% that have gone beyond that. I would look for a physician who has gone beyond that because they have all the traditional things, but they have additional things, whether it be acupuncture, natural remedies, regenerative medicine, peptides, or hormones. They have more tools. The average primary care doctor just has a prescription pad.

Maybe you can say a couple of words about peptides.

You can think of them as small proteins. They’re about 50 amino acids. They’re signaling molecules that tell the cell, “You need to do something. You need to produce whatever it is that cell does.” There are peptides for virtually everything. There are peptides for your brain, gut health, immune function, growth and development, and tissue repair. The problem is, it was a Wild Wild West there for a while. You can get them pretty easily, but it is becoming more challenging. The FDA has cracked down on what they will allow us to prescribe as physicians. Interestingly enough, if you search hard enough, you can get them on your own.

That’s very interesting. There are many of them, and you need to have somebody to guide you through the forest of choices.

Correct. The GLP-1s, the weight loss drugs, those are peptides. Insulin was probably the first peptide developed. Peptides are different from medications in the sense that many of the medications that I mentioned earlier block something. Peptides don’t do that. Peptides enhance, magnify, or facilitate normal function.

That’s very fascinating.

That’s a fascinating area.

I know this is not the first time we’ve all known about it. We need to bring somebody who specializes in this on the show. What can we do to get some more besides doing a Google search or using ChatGPT?

There’s a place called the Seeds Scientific Research & Performance Institute, or SSRP Institute. I go to their meetings. They have a lot of information out there. A lot of their meetings are attended by non-physicians. There’s a gentleman named Jay Campbell who’s a personal trainer. He has several books out there. He has a very nice website where you put in whatever peptide you’re interested in. You may see 4 or 5 articles on it. He even goes through the dosing. Some of these are cycled on and off. He goes through the various protocols and contraindications for that. There are places like that. It’s not well-discussed within the traditional medicine model, though, once you can prescribe a weight loss drug.

I want to thank you very much for taking the time. I know you’re a busy guy. We learned stuff, and we could learn more from your book. Maybe you’ll send us the information about the peptides. I appreciate it all.

I appreciate you very much. Thank you.

Important Links

• Dr. Joe Jacko
• JackoMD180 – Empowered Medicine
• Bamboozled, Duped, and Hoodwinked: Keys to Escaping the Tricks, Deceptions, and the Half-Truths of the Medical Industry
• A Dud at 70… A Stud at 80! And How to Do It
• Jay Campbell
• Seeds Scientific Research & Performance Institute

About Dr. Joe Jacko

Dr. Joe Jacko is a physician specializing in internal medicine, sports and regenerative medicine, preventive medicine, and longevity science. He is the author of Bamboozled, Duped, and Hoodwinked: Keys to Escaping the Tricks, Deceptions, and Half-Truths of the Medical Industry, a guide that empowers readers to navigate corruption and misinformation in healthcare. With expertise in sports injuries, hormone replacement therapy, peptide therapy and functional health strategies,

Dr. Jacko helps individuals achieve optimal health and vitality beyond the limits of conventional medicine. A published medical author and respected speaker, Dr. Jacko has contributed chapters to the Hughston Orthopaedic Clinic: Sports Medicine Book and lectures on hormonal health, aging, exercise, and nutrition. He earned his BA in Biology from Wittenberg University and his MD from The Ohio State University College of Medicine, followed by an Internal Medicine Residency at Mount Carmel Medical Center and a Sports Medicine Fellowship at the Hughston Orthopaedic Clinic.