We have a new addition to our advocacy, a podcast with video and audio options for our book club the Pedantic Zebra! This winter we read ‘Mind the Science: Saving your Mental Health from the Wellness Industry’ by full-time practising psychologist Dr Jonathan N Stea.
In our discussion, we focus on how misinformation and pseudoscience affect those with chronic illness, the complex relationship between science, the public and the pandemic and yes we talk about the Lightning Process. Poignant subjects for our National Day of Reflection, the 5th anniversary of Lockdown and Long Covid Awareness month.
A gentle reminder that our #Postcards4LC campaign is still running all of March. If you have the capacity to support and take part we’ve included all the details HERE.
You are welcome to join us for our Spring book Unheard: The Medical Practice of Silencing by Dr Rageshri Dhairyawan
Happy listening!
You can join the Pedantic Zebra book club on GoodReads
Follow along on our social media with the hashtag #pedanticzebra
To find out more about ‘Mind the Science’ and Dr Stea you can visit his website
Podcast also on Spotify
Transcript
0:00
Long Covid Advocacy
Welcome to the Pedantic Zebra Book Club podcast, a quarterly intersectional book club exploring chronic illness, disability, medical history and crip culture, hosted by Long Covid Advocacy. Everyone is welcome to our listen read-along sessions at 8pm UK time on Friday night. You can follow along on Goodreads and social media using the Pedantic Zebra hashtag.
0:30
Rupert Higham
Hello everyone and welcome to the first ever Pedantic Zebra Book Club live streamed and it's hosted by Long Covid Advocacy. I'm Rupert Higham and today we'll be talking to our first guest Dr Jonathan Stea who's Adjunct Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Calgary and a full-time practicing psychologist.
And we'll be discussing his book today, Mind the Science, Saving Your Mental Health from the Wellness Industry. And our focus will particularly be on his analysis of pseudoscience and how that impacts those experiencing chronic illness. You can find all the useful links in the YouTube description and in the outro video at the end of this podcast.
But if you find our work and our discussion helpful today, then please do give us a follow, like and subscribe. So without further ado, I shall invite Dr. Jonathan to join us. Hello. Great to see you, Jonathan. Thanks so much for joining us and being our first ever guest.
1:36
Jonathan Stea
It's my honor. You know, I'm so grateful to be here and so happy that people, that you and Long Covid Advocacy would choose my book as part of your book club and it's a real honor.
1:48
Rupert Higham
Thanks for saying so. I think the honor's ours. We were speaking just before and I was speaking with my colleagues here at Long Covid Advocacy, how we appreciated the the passion and intent behind this book, the strength of its message and the real sense of admission in fighting against the
predatory behavior of some aspects of the wellness industry and the need to stand up for recognized clinically based medicine in the face of that sort of seductive charms of that world. And at the same time, with our audience in mind, we'll have lots of listeners today whose experience of regular authorised medicine
has been rocky and are perhaps more at risk or more drawn towards alternatives because of some of those experiences. And we'd like to take the chance to explore the ways in which that happens and what we can learn and take away from your experience. in this field as a response. So I have some questions here.
They've been somewhat carefully crafted. So if you see me reading rather than being utterly spontaneous, I hope everyone will forgive me, but I'd like to get them right. So let me start, if I can, just at the beginning with chapter one, which gives some examples of the scale at which misinformation is now being shared
and consumed in a social media age. Can you give our listeners a sense of this? And can you share perhaps your three top tips for identifying when you're being misinformed?
3:31
Jonathan Stea
I love that question. It's very, well, it's on board. The misinformation problem is absolutely huge right now. It actually has a term, the World Health Organization dubbed it an infodemic, which basically means there's so much information in our information landscape that we don't even know what to do with it.
Our brains have a very difficult time parsing what is real, what is fake, what's misinformation, what's true, what's not, what's credible and what's not. And so it's very, very difficult. As we know in my book, I try to have that misinformation topic kind of be a bit more focused in the mental health space.
And yeah, it's super rampant. I think social media has exacerbated the problem. We have a research literature to kind of back up that idea. You know, for example, I can just allude to one study that, you know, found that it analyzed the top videos about ADHD on TikTok.
And it found that over half of those videos were misleading. Those videos were viewed over a million times, which is just a mind boggling thing. Similarly, I think I mentioned this in the book, we recently published a study I was invited onto a research team,
which was a real honor to participate in a very similar study where we looked at the top 1,000 videos on TikTok with the hashtag mental health. And we found that a third of those videos were misleading the offered advice and misinformation or advice and information. And those videos were viewed over a billion times.
So that just kind of speaks to the pervasiveness of and sort of the depth of misinformation. Now, your other question was about the top tips, I suppose, for how to rein in this stuff or at least navigate that misinformation space. I wish I had a good shorthand, concise way of saying it.
I think what I might instead say is kind of back to my book. You know, I did in the back section of my book, there's the mind, the takeaways section. And I tried to use that section kind of as a cheat sheet for people to try to navigate misinformation space.
So I'd say my top three is really to try to get to know the pseudoscientific warning signs. There's about nine of them. And so when people can start to learn and even... Maybe not memorize, but kind of have that sheet kind of near them and evaluate claims with those warning signs in mind.
I think that better prepares people. And similarly, I did have another two lists. So I'd say that's my other two tips with respect to alternative medicine tropes. and anti-psychiatry tropes. And what I mean by that is, you know, I really tried to make the case in the book that alternative medicine is not just a
set of unsupported treatments, or it's not just a set of pseudoscientific treatments. It's really an entire ideology and a narrative, and it has these tropes and fallacies and propaganda tactics to cajole audiences and to dupe patients. And I think that when we can get familiar with those tropes,
then that's one way in which we can try to protect ourselves from that misinformation.
6:52
Rupert Higham
Thank you. I found it really striking that on page 10, that advert that you pulled up from around 1905 for what was it? Clark Stanley's snake oil liniment. So striking from 120 years ago. It didn't even contain snake oil. It wasn't even in there.
no and but it was also the fact and one of your key warning signs wasn't it was the fact that when when treatments make a claim to claim lots of different things and often quite unrelated things that's a huge warning sign and your book's full of
those other and so that index at the back is full of lots of other or cheat sheet lots of other warning signs that can be really useful in that regard thanks so much At the start of the book as well, you talk about your own experiences of your mother's chronic illness and pain,
and you express sympathy with those who might have grown suspicious or even hostile towards mainstream medicine as a result of their encounters and their experiences. And I think that will have struck a chord with many of our listeners. So how far do you think medicine has come and how much further does it still have
to come in providing humane, trustworthy, effective care for those with chronic health conditions, and especially women?
8:14
Jonathan Stea
That's a great question, too. You know, obviously medicine has come far away from, say, 200 years ago, and yet there is so much we don't know. There's so much we don't understand about health conditions generally and the science of psychopathology and kind of the nature of chronic disease and chronic illness. So, yeah, I...
You know, I told the story of my mother in the book because I witnessed it firsthand. She has a disorder called complex regional pain syndrome, which is that in and of itself is a disorder that's debated in the academic literature because it's just very that symptoms are hard to explain medically.
But again, I saw symptoms with my own eyes. Her legs would swell up. They'd leak lymphatic fluid. She had excruciating pain to the extent that wind or water would just, it'd be like pouring gasoline on her body. It was really bad. And so we spent years in my youth,
she was in and out of hospital constantly and just trying to find how to help her, how to remedy her symptoms. And it was very, very hard and a very long trek. And she's still kind of managing that. So I totally get it.
And I really wanted to try to make it clear in my book that it's not about blaming and shaming people who experience health conditions for seeking alternatives, because who wouldn't do that? I totally empathize with I get it with that experience. I've lived it personally. I experience it clinically every day. I'm unable to help all of my
patients who experience the devastation of severe addiction and mental illness, because I work in a hospital setting where I help folks with that. So yeah, medicine does have a long way to go. At the same time, I tried to make the message that, you know,
the wellness industry is not the knight in shining armor that it claims to be, and it doesn't have the solutions for that. you know, mainstream medicine might not either, but it's not like the wellness industry does. And I think that a lot of their advertising and marketing claims that they do.
And that's what my beef with the wellness industry is, so to speak. But yeah, mainstream medicine is inherently limited and flawed and there's gaps in our knowledge. And you asked about women and that's the case too with women, especially historically, women have been left out of, you know, that's a well-documented finding in the literature that women
haven't been as studied well, say, as men, and that could limit the generalizability and validity of particular scientific findings.
10:50
Rupert Higham
If we think about with women in mind, both within by physical medicine, but also within psychiatry as well. The notion of hysteria has wound its way through the understanding and treatment of women and taken many forms since approaching, some might argue, even with uses like functional medicine today in an attempt to redistribute the blame, as it were,
back on to give physical symptoms, perhaps even a spurious cause or a presumed cause in their mental health.
11:40
Jonathan Stea
Absolutely. Yeah, we definitely have a long way to go with respect to having a more, I would say, inclusive science of our health conditions and improving our theories and models of health conditions and their treatments. Unfortunately, I don't want to throw a lot of pessimism into this, but what I'm seeing, I know you're in the UK,
I'm in Canada. But what's happening in the US right now impacts everyone globally with respect to all of the cuts that they've been doing to medical research and science, and particularly the DEI kind of research, diversity kinds of research. And that's going to make the situation even worse.
12:24
Rupert Higham
Thank you. We've got some questions, especially like on RFK. I think some of our listeners have written in that we might get the chance to come to. In the second chapter of your book, you have a really useful emphasis on how people can become more literate in science and in mental health.
And you have lots of great advice on how to navigate that somewhat daunting terrain if you're not capable of fully analyzing a full suite of medical papers, which I'm certainly not. then, you know, what's the next best thing? And that's a really useful section. But I also want to ask you,
so I invite you to tell us a little more about that, but I want to ask you sort of a follow-up as well, which is I think something that several of our, many of our listeners may have experienced. When they come to medical appointments with some knowledge, because their conditions are poorly understood.
So they've really tried to do some research and learn more. And then when expressing that knowledge, they've encountered hostility or even pushback or even raised red flags for those who have said that they are perhaps unwilling or hostile to treatment. uh so have you had that sort of have you experienced those sorts of behaviors from
from practitioners and um how would you advise our listeners to engage with that
13:56
Jonathan Stea
sort of difficulty well i yes i think that's a huge problem it's a tragedy because as we sort of mentioned when when current bonafide mental health profession or just health professions in general, when they invalidate patients who come to their sessions and their appointments and are hostile to them or are rude or question them,
that's a terrible thing. It makes health outcomes worse. It drives people more into the hands of the wellness industry and pseudoscientific grifters, so to speak. And it's not ethical or competent care in my view. It's an unfortunate reality. And it's quite honest, it's not rare, which is a tragedy. And at the same time,
it's not competent or ethical because good evidence-based practice requires cultivating a therapeutic relationship, which I did kind of mention in my book. And some professions have the opportunity to do that more than others, say the mental health professions. But the therapeutic relationship is extremely important and any clinician worth their salt is going to hear out,
listen to patients, validate their concerns, see them and do their very best to co-explore and navigate their health conditions. and refer out if needed, or just try to co-explore how to troubleshoot that. And the antithesis of that is hostility and invalidation. And we know even from the research literature that that's harmful and it worsens health outcomes.
So your other question was, well, how do we navigate that from a patient perspective? You know, I wish I had the answer to that. And it would sort of depend on the particular situation, I suppose. For some people who are comfortable bringing it up with their practitioners or clinicians, I would suggest that.
I would sort of trying to be assertive, which I know can be very stressful and anxiety provoking, but to try to name what they're experiencing, bring it to the attention of the practitioner to see if they're willing to change. And if they're not, find another practitioner.
I mean, that's a very general statement, but that's what I would say.
16:15
Rupert Higham
Thank you. You know, it's a challenge. And we were talking a little bit before we started the recording about balancing that need for kind of being clear in stating where the knowledge lies and where the evidence lies on the one hand, but also recognising what medicine doesn't yet fully know and acknowledging that
whilst holding off the misinformation and disinformation that can come from the wellness industry. And so that is a challenge, isn't it? To assert what we know to be right, but not to over claim and to negate people's experiences.
16:56
Jonathan Stea
Absolutely. And I think, again, good clinicians, ethical ones, competent ones will be very clear, number one, with respect to navigating patient's health issues, but they'll also be very clear with respect to the informed consent process and the risks and benefits of treatments and the transparency with respect to the evidence base.
The argument I tried to make in the book is that the wellness industry and alternative medicine practitioners, as a general statement, largely don't do that if they are peddling unequivocal pseudoscientific treatments because they're not actually respecting patient autonomy if you're not honest and forthright about the risks and benefits of treatments, say, that are unequivocally pseudoscientific.
So if someone's saying, Let's take an example of conversion therapy, which tries to change someone's sexual orientation or gender identity. This has been banned in Canada, and it's an unequivocal pseudoscientific treatment. If you have a practitioner telling you that it's actually a helpful thing, that's not respecting that patient's autonomy because you're fooling them and you're deceiving them.
And so I would like to take that argument and generalize it to other pseudoscientific treatments, which I can recognize there's a huge gray zone, but there's also a large... zone where there are crystal clear examples where this happens all of the time and
18:14
Rupert Higham
it's unethical in my view thank you thank you so um in the book you mention ideas around positive health and wellness and you suggest that many alternative therapies kind of promise this as something that can be attained above and beyond just being healthy that there
And one way in which I think you explore that is by looking at terrain theory and germ theory, for example. Is it a myth that you can make yourself extra prepared or better prepared or make yourself immune from disease through the attainment of positive health?
19:00
Jonathan Stea
That's a good question. And yeah, I think the wellness industry does is we see all kinds of exaggerated or hype up claims. Look at the longevity literature or wellness space where people are, we got guys there, they're literally saying you can defeat mortality. Like you could live forever and then take these various supplements or dietary
plans and it will prevent the aging process, which is just an absurd kind of idea. But what the, you know, What we don't want to lose in that idea is that part of mental health and part of good physical health is obviously what I try to term in the book self-care, taking care of our biology,
kind of our meat suits, which is a crude term that I learned from a fellow psychologist who I used to work with. And taking care of our psychosocial needs, which is another aspect of self-care. And when we do these things, like cultivate healthy relationships and eat well and exercise and get adequate sleep,
we do better prepare our bodies more generally to experience positive health and mental health. That's not to say that there's a magical elixir dietary plan that could do that or a special supplement that can do that. It's more of just very, very basic self-care activities, which rightly fall under the purview of evidence-based medicine.
I've been running a self-care group as part of group therapy in my clinic for over 10 years every day as part of the treatment for addiction and mental health concerns. Sometimes it's not the only solution. It's foundational. But a treatment plan requires more than that as well.
20:38
Rupert Higham
I mean, no, I won't go down that digression. I'm going to stick to my list of questions. Because I think, especially for people in the chronic health community, the pandemic has been such a rupture and that it sticks in the claw of many when people talk about it is over, especially in this community.
Your books presents kind of an overall narrative of medicine, having come from shaky foundations towards increasingly robust and objective science. And you mentioned the pandemic as a critical point in identifying the gap between science and pseudoscience. But I wonder, I mean, hasn't the official medical response to the pandemic been dangerously wayward in several aspects,
such as through claiming initially that children were immune from infection and that closing schools wasn't necessary, that they wouldn't be carriers, for example, and on the continuing failure in many circles to identify and act on COVID being airborne in transmission? um i think quite a lot of people who may have had shaky experiences of of chronic
their chronic conditions may have had their faith you know shaken by the pandemic um it by in those traditional medical responses and the authoritative responses and maybe that again make can make them more susceptible um to um those you know siren
22:15
Jonathan Stea
voices yeah i i think i think it's layered there's a it's layered, right? It's a complicated issue. I think what COVID-19 or what the pandemic did was it sort of, first of all, it gave the general public a front row seat to science and how science influences policy, because depending on who you are,
not many people kind of, you know, got to see science and all of its naked imperfections and, you know, the development of vaccines and, and yeah, learning about the nature of COVID and, that happened in real time and the world was watching. Um, and you're right for a lot of people, um, when that influenced policy decisions that,
um, that turned out later to be wrong or unhelpful, that fueled more distrust in kind of that process. And, and yeah, I totally agree with you. I think for others, it might've actually, um, made them appreciate kind of the tentativeness and the difficulty of the scientific process as well,
and trying to see how policy changes can also be an iterative fluid process that would change over time. I think the other layer here is that on top of all of that happening, kind of errors and learning about science as we go, we also had entire anti-science movements fueling the fire, so to speak,
and magnifying that mistrust for their own exploitation and benefits. I think that's in part what helped the rise of the anti-vaccine movement. It's been around for a very, very long time, but it's very mainstream now, in part because of that mistrust and in part because of the propaganda that's been around it.
So now we're getting very old anti-vaccine tropes that are now mainstream, such as the idea that vaccines cause Autism or RFK Jr. saying things like HIV doesn't cause AIDS. I mean, these are ridiculous ideas that I think were born out of the mistrust from the COVID-19 pandemic, but also exacerbated tenfold by anti-vaccine propaganda vehicles,
which is the anti-vaccine movement.
24:28
Rupert Higham
And so many aspects of that we could talk about. But, you know, one of them is this individualisation of health potentially as well. You know, one of the real challenges of the pandemic was the idea that this was something collective and where our actions,
we had to consider them at least equally from the perspective of caring for others as for caring for ourselves. But that doesn't accord well at all with the philosophy of the wellness industry, for example. the idea that one has to look out for others. But picking up on what you're saying as well,
perhaps there's a sense in which when they're having to explore and explain and enact policy live in the face of a novel condition there's a background pressure from those disinformation voices looking to step in if policy makers don't sound certain enough if they say that they don't know yet what the
25:29
Jonathan Stea
right thing is to do absolutely i think that they're able to you know Disinformers can magnify those errors and amplify it. That's what propaganda is essentially. It takes a kernel of truth, which is sort of learning from the scientific process and magnifying it and saying that mainstream medicine got this wrong, therefore they got everything wrong.
And not only that, but we have the solution. You don't need vaccines. You need a vaccine detox product that we can sell you and you need ivermectin or whatever it might be. to again kind of push their narrative so when there's any kind of mistrust that has been well earned in mainstream medicine anti-science movements take that
opportunity to blow that wide open to promote their own counter narrative to the detriment of patient care and public health, because what they're promoting is even it's 10 times worse. It's unsupported treatments and in many instances, pseudoscientific treatments that are not evaluated properly for safety and effectiveness.
26:38
Rupert Higham
Thank you. Thank you. I think I've got time just to ask this one. It's a bit more specific than some of the others I've asked, but I think it will be of real interest to some of our listeners. You mentioned, I think in one of the appendices, the lightning process.
which you listed as a pseudoscience and as a sort of modern offshoot of neuro-linguistic programming. I think that will be of interest to many listeners who've either actually experienced that process themselves or have had it recommended to them. And it's an often recommended treatment in the UK, not necessarily formally through official channels, but not exactly
not only by out there practitioners as well. So can you tell us a little bit more about what you understand by the Lightning process?
27:35
Jonathan Stea
Well, like you mentioned, my understanding of it is that it is a modern offsuit of neuro-linguistic programming, which incidentally has nothing to do with neuropsychology or linguistics or computer programming, which I found sadly funny, I guess, in a morbid kind of way. But no, I mean, we can laugh at the absurdity of these things, but you're right.
I mean, the very serious idea is that, you know, if you look at the scientific literature, the tenets and the assumptions and the theoretical underpinnings of neuro-linguistic programming and the lightning process are thought to be pseudoscientific. They're just, they're divorced from the broader scientific literature and they're just kind of untenable in that way.
And so that's why I did lump it in the unequivocal pseudoscientific category. You also mentioned that it's been recommended at times, not just by wellness gurus say, but by actual bonafide institutions and healthcare practitioners. And And yeah, I think that's a tragedy. It's a horrible thing. And it's not an uncommon thing because like I, you know,
I tried to mention, I think pseudoscience claims, pseudoscientific treatments infiltrate not just the wellness industry, but our health care systems as well. And I think trying to shine a light on this and draw attention to it can kind of hopefully catalyze people to do something about it and to enact change.
29:05
Rupert Higham
Thank you. And so there's a sense in which perhaps nature abhors a vacuum, especially when you have relatively novel conditions or you have chronic conditions for which well evidenced and reliable cures don't yet exist. Perhaps there's a pressure within a reputable medicine as well. There seems to be a reluctance to say, sorry, we don't know yet.
We haven't got the answers for you. There's some things that might work, but we're not that sure yet. Do you think there might be a collective reluctance to admit what we don't yet know in medicine?
29:49
Jonathan Stea
I don't think there should be. That's not to say that there isn't. I think it's both. I think there's multiple truths here. Again, I think that competent, ethical clinicians who actually practice real evidence-based medicine, which is a delicate dance between the evidence-based clinical judgment and patient values and preferences,
will understand and be transparent with respect to where the science is, which is necessarily incomplete in all areas of health. And so good clinicians will be transparent with that. I take very good care to try to make sure that when I'm talking with my patients, I am
very forthright and honest about what we know and what we don't know with respect to what they're experiencing and diagnostic constructs and exploring the hell out of that stuff with patients so that they can feel that they're understood and and that we're kind of on the same page.
That said, I think there's a ton of people as well, like you said, that don't do that. And they take an authoritarian, you know, power, they're exploiting power dynamics, and they're hostile and aggressive. And again, I think that's terrible, because that's what drives people away from mainstream medicine.
And so I tried to make one of the biggest messages in my book clear that the gaps that we have in in our understanding of medicine and in our treatments, call us or signal a call to fill those gaps with ethical, equitable and competent science and patient care. It doesn't justify filling those gaps with exploitation and pseudoscience
masquerading under the banner of wellness and alternative medicine.
31:29
Rupert Higham
That's a really clear message, Jonathan. Thank you. I'm going to move there, if I can, to some questions from our audience on the book club who've submitted this previously. And there's a couple here. Both Kirsty and Jamie wrote about the new health secretary in the US, Robert Kennedy Junior, who is an anti-vaxxer. He's a promoter of pseudoscience.
What additional challenges do you see as posing the rigorous healthcare industry over this next period, this next administration.
32:11
Jonathan Stea
Again, I don't want to be pessimistic. I am pessimistic. I think it's devastating that he was nominated into his position. And I think, like I mentioned, he's allowed the anti-vaccine movement to go mainstream with all of their ideas, and he has a wealth of power.
and he can he can influence all sorts of things from funding and and access and availability of evidence-based treatments and public health interventions and measures and so i think it's it's a horrible thing i don't have the answers at the social and the policy level in part i wrote my book because i work as a clinical
psychologist at the level of the individual and so i'm trying to with my book help people arm themselves at that level of the individual to help protect themselves And God, I wish I knew the answers at the policy level, especially with what's happening in the US.
33:09
Rupert Higham
Yeah, and that's where you need to pair up, don't you? The psychological, the sociological aspects of these things and try and team up in getting that coherent message about how you deal with those individually and collectively. Thank you for that. I've got another question here from Kirstie.
So she's learned a lot from your book on what to look out for. And she felt that it's also challenged her as someone who has practiced some alternative therapies in the past and has experienced some relief from doing those, especially from the perspective of someone and having a condition which she feels has been abandoned by science and,
you know, left to their own devices. What would you say, she says, to someone like me who has no choice but to continue to explore what you would call pseudoscience as a way of finding some relief in the face of that abandonment? God, that's a tough one, Jonathan, but I can see where it's coming from.
I'd really love to hear what you can offer to that.
34:16
Jonathan Stea
Totally. And I completely empathize with that position. And like I said, it's not rare. And so what I tried to cultivate in my book was a healthy skepticism of these ideas and these treatments. And I just want people to be more aware of what they're getting into and more aware and just educated about what to do, again,
with respect to the risks and harms of treatment so that they can make more informed decisions. science-informed choices with respect to their health. That's the true respecting of patient autonomy. I empathize with it because like I said I have a personal history with that with my mother and clinically I see that as well.
Not all of our evidence-based treatments work for recognized conditions like depression and anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder and whatever it might be. So I get the again it's not about shaming or blaming anyone for seeking alternatives and That may happen to me when I fall ill one day too.
I just want people to be much more skeptical and alert and wary of pseudoscientific marketing and wellness practices that seek to exploit people emotionally and financially.
35:29
Rupert Higham
Thank you. Thank you. I've got a question here from Claire. And this touches back on a point that we discussed earlier. Again, it might be a challenge. Let's see how we do. Do you have any good suggestions on sources or writers or research on health supremacism? And this links to forms of ableism, I think.
You talk in your book about cultural sensitivity and how you support an Indigenous person with smudging ritual to support their mental health by honouring their traditions and the the psychological and social support offered to them and spiritual support offered to them by those practices. Many complementary therapists will have no idea that their worldview contains significant ableist,
prejudiced and health supremacist views. How can we, with sensitivity, approach these to help them become allies and not adversaries?
36:31
Jonathan Stea
Gosh, that's a tough question. First, I guess it's a great question. It's tough for me because I don't have the answers. I don't really necessarily have a good source for that. I'm sure they're out there. I think I could get the name of the book wrong, but American Detox might be one of the books I alluded to.
Gosh, the name of the author escapes me, but I found it really helpful in kind of navigating those sort of cultural competency issues in writing. And the second part of the question was about how do we help alternative medicine practitioners come to recognize that?
37:11
Rupert Higham
Yeah, especially where they hold views that they might not recognize as being ableist. And the term here is like health supremacist.
37:24
Jonathan Stea
Yeah, another good question. I mean, bonafide health professions. I can't speak to the alternative medicine community, but if I were to speak to professions like social workers and psychologists and physicians and psychiatrists, etc., built into our codes of ethics and our legal standards of practice is what's called continuing competency.
And so every year we're required to take workshops and to further our education. And so I would say that clinicians that seek out those kinds of topics to learn more about those topics would be one way in which to do it. I just can't off the top of my head point you to what those are.
38:07
Rupert Higham
No, no, that's absolutely fine. Of course, if you ever... I'm not making any requests, but if there's anything you did want to send us through at a later date to put on our socials, we'd be happy to do that. But please don't feel obliged. Jonathan, we're getting towards the end of our time.
So really, I just want to step back from the questions and allow you to... address perhaps what I haven't asked and if there's anything, some key messages from the book that we haven't covered yet that you would really like our audience to hear.
38:47
Jonathan Stea
Thank you for that opportunity. I mean, I think I would just try to reiterate maybe and kind of pull a theme from kind of our discussion because especially like I understand that a lot of the audience here are people who experience chronic health conditions. And so I just want to reiterate that, you know, I totally get that.
And it's the same, it's the same audience that I wrote my book for in a sense, people who experienced mental health concerns are also kind of experiencing chronic difficult conditions. Patients that I treat here at a concurrent disorders clinic for people who experienced severe addiction and mental health,
People have been in and out of our doors for clinics for decades sometimes. And so I really just try to encourage people to persevere in that very in our very faulty and limited health care systems that we have. And at the same time, not falling away.
victim to predatory practices and to pseudoscientific grift because I do want to hold space for the idea that obviously there's distrust in mainstream medicine and I don't want people to think I'm downplaying that at all because I did try to make it clear in several aspects of my book and at the same time trying to acknowledge
again that the savior of that is not the wellness industry I think it makes it far worse And so I think that the message is for mainstream medicine to get their act together more, so to speak, and to help protect people at the individual level to not fall prey to those anti-science movements and that alternative medicine narrative,
which ultimately I don't believe has patient care in mind. That's not what's going to help them and to kind of save them. And so that would be my message.
40:33
Rupert Higham
Yeah, thanks so much. And I think Again, we were having a discussion for the start of the broadcast, weren't we, about this notion of allyship or increasing alliances, you know, that you don't have to disagree. We don't have to agree with someone on everything to work with them in a common cause.
And I think if I think a little bit about why, you know, Long Covid Advocacy was set up, it was to try and amplify and refine the experiences and the voices of people with chronic illness, some of whom find it very difficult to express those at all,
and try to reach out with amenable medical practitioners for their understandings, their experiences, and their needs to be better understood so that they could work together and form an alliance against the predators at the gate, as it were, who are promising miracles. And it's lovely to have this opportunity
reach out and engage with someone like yourself who's open to those and sympathetic towards those difficult experiences and willing to admit that we don't yet have all the answers and ready to continue that conversation.
41:46
Jonathan Stea
Very well said, absolutely. And thank you, Rupert. That was a really important chat and a fun chat for me, and hopefully it was fruitful for some people.
41:55
Rupert Higham
That's such a pleasure, Jonathan. So I think, yeah, there we will sign off to... what I hope has been an enjoyable first episode of our podcast. And Dr. Jonathan, thank you so much for your time. And it's been a genuine pleasure to have you.
42:15
Jonathan Stea
Thank you as well. Thank you.
42:19
Long Covid Advocacy
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