In this episode of MedCast, Dr. Stephen Rockower talks with clinical psychologist Dr. Jonathan Stea about misinformation in the medical and mental health space. For much of his career, Dr. Stea has been helping treat patients with concurrent addiction and psychiatric disorders. Over the last 5-7 years, Dr. Stea has been engaging in science communication to debunk misinformation in pseudoscience through writing, interviews, social media, and other platforms. Join Dr. Rockower for a fascinating conversation about helping everyday people protect themselves from the pseudoscience permeating our communication channels.
Dr. Stephen Rockower (00:05):
Welcome to MedCast, the podcast from Med Chi, the Maryland State Medical Society. Each episode we will be doing a deep dive into medicine and taking an insider's view on issues facing Maryland's physicians, patients, and healthcare more broadly. I'm your host, Dr. Stephen Rockower. Today my guest is Dr. Jonathan Stea, a psychologist in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He's an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Calgary. He has written and spoken extensively on misinformation in the medical and mental health space. Thank you for joining us, Dr. Stea.
Dr. Jonathan Stea (00:45):
Thank you so much for having me. It's my pleasure to be here.
Dr. Stephen Rockower (00:48):
Well, let's start by talking a little bit about yourself and what your background and what motivated you to get into the wellness industry and talking all about these things.
Dr. Jonathan Stea (01:02):
For sure. So my day job has been, and currently is for over a decade actually working full-time as a clinician, as a clinical psychologist on what we call a concurrent disorders outpatient team. So what that means is I work in a hospital setting and our interdisciplinary team helps treat people with concurrent addiction and psychiatric disorders, and we're considered tertiary care, so people that experience moderate to severe concurrent addiction and psychiatric disorders. And I work with other psychologists and psychiatrists and addiction medicine physicians and social workers and nurses, et cetera. And so what we do is individual therapy, group therapy, case management, pharmacotherapy, et cetera. And I've been doing that for a while for over 10 years. And on the side of my desk really is sort of a passion project I've taken to science communication in part because I've seen a lot of pseudoscience or wellness grift kind of impact patient care.
(02:08):
But also because according to the Canadian Code of Ethics for psychologists, one of our codes of ethics is called Responsibility to Society. And one way in which to interpret that code is to think of it as psychologists have an ethical obligation to promote and practice evidence-based care and evidence-based practice. And the converse of that is really to help society navigate information. And so our role is also to debunk misinformation in pseudoscience. And so I really took that to heart maybe about five years ago or so, maybe five to seven years ago by trying to engage in science communication via many different mediums. So writing scientific publications or op-eds or blogs and doing podcasts like these and interviews. And after doing that for about five years or so, and along the way learning a ton on my own and really taking to social media as a platform to help debunk misinformation, I really got a lot of questions, burning questions from the public people that asked me things like, Jonathan, is this guy a quack?
(03:19):
Is this article legitimate? Is this treatment pseudoscience? And I really did my best to help people answer those questions for themselves. And after about five years or so of doing it, I really wanted to localize everything I learned about that process and really localize all of that knowledge into a book. And so that was sort of an impetus of writing one of the books or my book that I wrote called Mind the Science to really help arm people to help them protect against the kind of wellness script and pseudoscience that we are now seeing absolutely everywhere.
Dr. Stephen Rockower (03:55):
Yeah, it really is a wonderful book. I just finished reading it and we'll get into some of the quotes that I found on this that I really liked a little later in our talk. But let's define some terms at the beginning. What do you mean by pseudoscience and how does that compare to real science?
Dr. Jonathan Stea (04:18):
That's a great question because, and it's a foundational one. Pseudoscience is really actually a nebulous term. It's hard to define. Philosophers of science have been grappling with this idea forever. Since science was developed in the history and philosophy of science, it's actually known as the demarcation problem. So it asks, where do we demarcate or draw the line between science and pseudoscience? And again, it's not an easy endeavor because there is no single clear criterion that tells one from the other. And what I've found useful to help define pseudoscience and my work kind of piggybacks off the work of Scott Lilienfeld and his colleagues. And he was really a modern giant in the field of clinical psychological science. And the way that they defined pseudoscience was best identified as a cluster of warning signs or a cluster of red flags say. So that means that when we're trying to identify pseudoscience, it really becomes a probabilistic endeavor. Meaning the more warning signs that we see in the more warning signs that we hear, the more likely it is that we've unearthed something that is pseudoscientific. And there's a number of these sort of red flags in my book. I outline nine of them, but there's many,
Dr. Stephen Rockower (05:39):
Could you give us a few of these red flags?
Dr. Jonathan Stea (05:42):
Absolutely. I can give, let's say, yeah. So there's about nine that I listed in my book. I give you about three. So
(05:50):
One I would say this is an important one is say the elevation of anecdotal evidence. So what I mean by that is pseudoscience promoters will elevate anecdotal evidence, and we will see this, for example, on alternative medicine websites or even the websites of psychologists where they have testimonials. So if anyone sees testimonials splattered all over a webpage, that's a red flag. So what I mean by testimonials, someone will say, X treatment works for depression because Bob said it, or Karen said it, or whatever it might be. And astute students of science know that anecdotal evidence or testimonials, there are great starting point for research, but they confer really low quality evidence. We need stronger, more rigorous scientific studies to figure out whether a treatment works such as randomized controlled trials. So pseudoscience promoters often use testimonials to market their pseudoscientific wear, so to speak. And incidentally, the use of testimonials is actually considered unethical for psychologists. But you will still find, unfortunately, psychologists using that. And it is just that ethical idea doesn't even exist in the alternative medicine community. So that's one.
Dr. Stephen Rockower (07:08):
I've always noted that the plural of anecdote is not data.
Dr. Jonathan Stea (07:15):
I love that. And I wrote an article about that in Psychology Today where we ran off that quip. And I try to take it a step further and say that the plural of anecdote is misinformation just because we will see that anecdotes, we'll see that even we see that in the MAHA movement right now. Will someone say that they took a vaccine and then their kid developed autism shortly after, therefore vaccines cause autism. And we know that's not the case.
Dr. Stephen Rockower (07:45):
The, we know that's not the case evidence that's not caused by acetaminophen, either.
Dr. Jonathan Stea (07:50):
Exactly. And anecdotal evidence is used to promote those claims. So that is a hallmark of pseudoscience. Another one, I'd say probably the biggest one, or at least one of the most important ones that I would say is something called claims divorced from the broader scientific literature. So I'll unpack what that means. So claims divorced from the broader scientific literature. What that means is when we have a claim such as homeopathy works or energy healing works as two examples of treatments in the wellness industry, the claims that those treatments work are divorced from the broader scientific literature because homeopathy is scientifically implausible. So is energy healing. These treatments literally cannot work because if they did work, they would really undermine our entire, the laws of physics and all of our physics departments and fundamental principles in say, pharmacology, because homeopathy actually posits that something becomes more effective as the active ingredient is diluted out of existence to the point that it's not even that active ingredient isn't even in a remedy.
(09:03):
It's essentially water or just a sugar pill. But from a homeopathic perspective, when we dilute a substance, it becomes stronger. And the water that we were diluting this substance in somehow memorizes or remembers the molecule. So obviously that's absurd because physics doesn't work like that. Pharmacology doesn't work like that, but you can find homeopathic products in local pharmacies. Same thing with energy healing, where it posits that we have human energy fields that exist around us that can be manipulated and balanced without touch, and that will somehow unblock our energy blockages. And again, if that were true, that would violate our understanding of human anatomy. So things like that where we see claims that are completely divorced from the mountains of medical and biological knowledge that have accumulated over time, that's a hallmark of pseudoscience. And this may be another quick one that I see all the time, particularly on social media, is the use of sciencey sounding language to promote claims.
(10:10):
A good friend of mine and colleague Timothy Caulfield out of the University of Alberta has been writing about misinformation for decades, and he kind of coined this warning sign is Science p exploitation because it's sort of exploits science or at least sciencey sounding language. So what I mean by that is you can find a random treatment online, say in an alternative medicine website that might be called quantum neurological reset therapy. And the way that this treatment protocol works is by initiating a quantum shift in the nervous system by activating the cellular membranes in our brains, which will then release the trauma and then treat our post-traumatic stress disorder. Of course, that's just gobbledy goop, it's nonsense, right? Quantum cellular devices, all of this stuff is just, it's a guise to prey upon, unfortunately, poor science literacy skills to sell people. I often say that when you find an alternative medicine practitioner telling you that they can use quantum physics to treat your mental disorder or whatever it might be, a health condition, you can be near certain that that therapy is a scam. Because the legendary physicist, Richard Fiman once said, if you think you understand quantum mechanics, then you don't. And that's because quantum mechanics is a deeply counterintuitive, fascinating area of physics, the obscurity of which lends itself perfectly into the hands of wellness grifters to market their pseudoscientific approaches.
Dr. Stephen Rockower (11:49):
You mentioned in your book Brandolini's Law.
Dr. Jonathan Stea (11:53):
Yes. That is otherwise known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, which is an internet adage. So it basically means, lemme try to get it right. The law goes, the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude greater than that needed to produce it.
Dr. Stephen Rockower (12:13):
Absolutely.
Dr. Jonathan Stea (12:14):
And what that means is trying to debunk a claim, say like vaccines cause autism, the amount of effort. I mean, we have mountains of studies that debunk that claim. And if you find someone online that says, Hey, vaccines cause autism, or I saw this one the other day, burning oregano oil can or inhaling vaporized oregano oil will cure asthma. The amount of energy needed to refute that kind of claim is just, it's a lot. And so that's where that internet adage basically says that for debunkers and people that are, and science communicators that are trying to do this kind of work, it just takes a lot of energy and that's why we need a community to do it.
Dr. Stephen Rockower (12:59):
A lie gets around the world before the truth gets spent on.
Dr. Jonathan Stea (13:03):
I love that. And I recently found a study that actually supported that empirically. It looked at the algorithms of Twitter for a specific timeframe, and they tracked false information and empirically through these online networks, and they actually showed that the false information, essentially the lies traveled further, farther and deeper than truthful information in the algorithm.
Dr. Stephen Rockower (13:31):
That was Winston Churchill.
Dr. Jonathan Stea (13:33):
Fascinating.
Dr. Stephen Rockower (13:33):
That was Winston Churchill, but I'm sure he got it from somewhere else.
Dr. Jonathan Stea (13:38):
Well, it's fascinating and we have the empirical support to back it up.
Dr. Stephen Rockower (13:43):
So why do people fall for pseudoscience and misinformation?
Dr. Jonathan Stea (13:47):
It's complicated. It is a really multifaceted problem. And to help me understand why this happens, I like to think of it as happening at multiple levels of analysis. So we can first look at the individual level. So there's cognitive reasons that people fall for pseudoscience and misinformation. So we know this work kind of derives from the work of Daniel Kahneman, who was a Nobel Prize winner. We have different kind of thinking systems, and so people that rely more on the intuitive, effortless kind of gut reaction processing of information, we know from the misinformation literature that people that rely on that kind of thinking style are more likely to fall from misinformation. And so we can protect against it by engaging in that other kind of thinking system, which is that more analytical, deliberate, deeper kind of processing basically meaning stop, think before you share. So that's only one variable.
(14:53):
All of these variables don't occur in isolation. They occur in this broader context. We also know from the psychology literature, we have something called motivated reasoning, which is basically the idea that we aren't robots when we process information. We don't process information objectively. We filter the information that we see through our own biases, our own belief systems, our own perceptions, and we are essentially motivated to reason based on our beliefs and the beliefs that we hold, and that can greatly influence the information that we believe. You can almost imagine someone reading the same news story say, or the same piece of information, and it may be interpreted very differently based on if you're a hardcore Democrat or a hardcore Republican, or if you're in Canada hardcore liberal or hardcore conservative, et cetera. So that's just another kind of piece that we have to take into account.
(15:55):
So basically what that means, the lesson in that is that we need to basically adopt a kind of intellectual humility and check our own biases when we're trying to understand information. That's just the cognitive stuff. There's also personality related variables. So some people score higher on particular personality traits that make them more susceptible to falling for misinformation. So one of those traits is called openness to experience, which is basically just a kind of openness to new ideas and out there kind of ideas, which inherently is not good or bad, it's just these are personality traits that we all have. And it just so happens that people who score higher on that are more likely to be susceptible to these kinds of outlandish ideas. It doesn't mean that that's destiny, they can protect against it, but that's one personality variable. Another personality variable, which has a robust support in the literature is narcissism or a lack of intellectual humility.
(16:52):
We find that people who score higher on narcissism are more likely to endorse conspiracy theories. So all of that's kind of happening at the individual level. Then we have the social level, meaning that if we're all kind of online, which most of us are, we're all targeted by misinformation and propaganda. Peter Hotez has done a lot of work in this area, and essentially meaning that the kind of information that we see that becomes popular on social media and in popular media is the kind of oversimplified emotion laden over generalized hype. And our brains kind of process that easier. And we are basically victims of the algorithm, so to speak, or victims of what goes viral. And then of course, we're actually targeted by more, I would say bad actors. So either your Instagram influencer selling a product or service or more well organized propaganda campaigns like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Health Defense, who is well funded and spends countless money promoting. So we're literally targeted with this stuff. And then we're all susceptible to something called the illusory truth effect, which basically means the more times that we see and hear misinformation, the more likely we are to believe it because our brains just aren't very good at differentiating familiarity from the truth. So all of these kinds of
Dr. Stephen Rockower (18:25):
That was Joseph Goebbels.
Dr. Jonathan Stea (18:27):
Yes, yes.
Dr. Stephen Rockower (18:29):
One of the things that I'd like to talk about is alternative medicine and why people turn to alternative medicine as opposed to normal physicians and psychologists and people who have studied medicine and are experts in their fields.
Dr. Jonathan Stea (18:52):
Yes, I'd love to talk about that, Stephen, because it's super important. The first thing I think I'd say is that when I'm, is the term, when I say alternative medicine, and what we mean by alternative medicine is that it's not merely a set of unsupported treatments or a set of pseudoscientific treatments. The case that I've tried to make in my book is that it's much more than that. Alternative medicine is actually an ideology. It has its own narrative. It has its own tropes, which are repeated themes or ideas and its own fallacies to kind of cajole audiences. And it basically relies on a narrative that essentially demonizes or is very polarizing and divisive in terms of demonizing modern medicine. It needs to create that polar opposite in order to, again, to sell its grift. So with that kind of backdrop, I would say that there's many reasons, again, why people fall for alternative medicine.
(19:55):
And I do want to say that it's not about, obviously, it's not about blame or shame. Everyone falls number one sometime for pseudoscience and misinformation and alternative medicine. And there's good reasons for that. And part of that is because not all of our treatments work for everyone. Even some of our best evidence-based treatments that we have in the area of mental health and beyond won't work for everybody. And again, it would be absurd to blame or shame anyone. And as a practicing clinical psychologist myself who's unable to help all of my patients, I deeply get it, and I empathize at the same time. That doesn't mean that the treatments offered or the approaches offered by alternative medicine are safe or effective or that they should be tolerated. So yeah, I mean, one obvious reason that people turn to alternative medicine is that not all of our work for everyone, and it's very normal and natural for people to try to find cures for what ails them. But also if we just ask people why they turn to alternative medicine, they'll tell us. They'll say things like the modern medicine doesn't treat them as a whole person, or big pharma is solely profit driven, or they want to avoid side effects of medications, et cetera. Many of these are justifiable and understandable reasons I think, and
Dr. Stephen Rockower (21:21):
Yet they buy the vitamins from the grifters.
Dr. Jonathan Stea (21:27):
They do. And I think the reason for that is, again, kind of back to this ideology, it's because in modern medicine, in mainstream medicine, we have to acknowledge that we have gaps in our healthcare systems and we have gaps in our knowledge. The problem is that those gaps should signal a call for us to fill them with better science, better patient care, better healthcare systems. It doesn't justify filling those gaps with, as you say, the wellness grift and pseudoscience, which is essentially financial and emotional exploitation of people. But that's what the alternative medicine narrative does. It says, look, modern medicine and mainstream medicine have these gaps. They can't help everyone. We have the solution and we can do it better. That's the problem. But there's no evidence to back what they're saying. And they're often marketing against pseudoscientific treatments that often haven't been evaluated for safety or effectiveness, and in many cases can be harmful.
Dr. Stephen Rockower (22:28):
Right? Many times, or actually all the time, they have a little disclaimer at the bottom of their ads. This does not treat or prevent any illness or disease, but they do that in very teeny eight point type. At the bottom of the ads
Dr. Jonathan Stea (22:46):
They do. And the wellness industry itself is, it's valued over, it's over $5.6 trillion now globally, which is more than big pharma, which many people don't know
Dr. Stephen Rockower (22:58):
Really, that I didn't know.
Dr. Jonathan Stea (23:00):
Yes, it's that big. And I would say, I mean, it does include, when we talk about the wellness industry as an industry, it does include legitimate sources of health, so things like club memberships and exercise classes, but it does include the alternative medicine industry itself, which has these coaching alternative medicine products and services, again, that are, it's essentially a wonderland free from scientific scrutiny, again, largely unregulated for safety and effectiveness at least. I mean, for all of the conflicts of interest and perils of big pharma, at least they try to regulate for safety and effectiveness. The wellness industry does no such thing,
Dr. Stephen Rockower (23:44):
Right? So how do we protect ourselves from misinformation or more importantly from disinformation?
Dr. Jonathan Stea (23:52):
Well, that's the million dollar question, Stephen. I mean, I wish I had the answer to that. I tried to use my book is one antidote to protect ourselves. And the way that I approach this is coming at it from the angle of a clinical psychologist. So the individual level, I work with people individually. And so what I wanted to do is help empower people and embolden people to take their mental health and their health more generally into their own hands by learning science literacy skills, mental health literacy skills, and essentially the language of pseudoscientific grift so that they know when it's spoken so that they know how to avoid it. But that's very much an individual approach. It's a caveat emptor buyer beware. And I think we really do need that. At the same time to be transparent. I just don't think that's enough. We also need solutions at the systemic or the social level and the policy levels. And for that, I won't feign expertise. I don't know. And to be quite frank, it scares the hell out of me because since publishing my book a year ago, I think it's got, the situation has become far worse because where, and I'm in Canada, but where you are in the us, I mean pseudoscience has gone mainstream and it's become incredibly politicized. And I don't know what the social and systemic solutions are to that.
Dr. Stephen Rockower (25:20):
One of the things that we're always trying to do is not only take this podcast to physicians and patients, but also to our local legislators here in Annapolis, which is our capital of our state, and teach them about the differences because they don't always know. They don't always understand the science or the things that we're dealing with patients who are doing things completely inappropriately, and they're the ones that are passing the laws and regulations that we think are not exactly appropriate from a scientific standpoint. So one of the things that we do is to try to teach them the difference between the misinformation that they're hearing and the disinformation in the advocacy space.
Dr. Jonathan Stea (26:17):
Absolutely. I think it's such important work, and unfortunately not to be pessimistic, but I really think it's an uphill battle. And again, kind of going to my work, I mentioned my friend and colleague Timothy Caulfield at the University of Alberta because he's been researching this kind of stuff for decades, and some of the findings that he's shown lately is that science really has become politicized to the extent that a scientific piece of information, it essentially represents an ideological flag. So what I mean by that is you can almost predict someone's view on vaccines to say, based on their political affiliation at this point in time, where it used to be the case a long time ago where you'd find more anti-vaccine sentiment, say on the left. But since the onset of the pandemic, the anti-vaccine movement has really gone to the far right. And that, again, has become an ideological flag. And that's what we're seeing with this whole MAHA movement where the anti-vaccine movement has moved into the White House.
Dr. Stephen Rockower (27:23):
Absolutely. And they've done studies of the people who had the worst outcomes from COVID were in the red counties that had voted for the various Republican candidates. It all goes together.
Dr. Jonathan Stea (27:39):
Yeah, it's terribly tragic.
Dr. Stephen Rockower (27:42):
So how does social media fit into all this and can anything be done about it?
Dr. Jonathan Stea (27:49):
Social media, again, not to put such a pessimistic lens on things, but I think social media has done a lot of harm in this area because I mentioned that study earlier when we talked about how far lies can travel. I mean, we have evidence that on social media lies or misinformation can travel further, farther and deeper the truth. We see that in many areas of health, and part of that is because, again, social media rewards or amplifies misinformation and disinformation, it doesn't reward the kind of tentative, nuanced, cold clinical science-based talk that scientists are used to and healthcare professionals are used to, and grifters know this, and anti-science movements know this, and they capitalize on our psychology essentially. Our brains think in shortcuts, and they figured out how to game social media, so to speak. It gets even worse than that. I mean, we have things like on X now.
(28:59):
We have troll farms, we have bots that actually help propagate this kind of stuff. It's actually quite well funded. Peter Hotez, again, has done work in this where a lot of it's coming out of Russia. So social media has done a lot of damage. That said, if we're trying to find a silver lining here, I'd say that at the same time we have seen a rise of, again, a lot of science communicators in a variety of different health professions. And I think that we need a whole army of people to go in the trenches, so to speak, helping educate people what misinformation looks like, what disinformation looks like, what accurate information looks like. And that has to come, I think, not only from individual private citizens, private science communicators, but I think we're at a time where we need larger scale organizations. In my world, that would be something like the American Psychological Association or the American Psychiatric Association. We need the medical associations, essentially. They need to step up as well.
Dr. Stephen Rockower (30:02):
As we know we're speaking on behalf of MedChi, the Medical and Chirurgical Association of Maryland. We started in 1799 to combat the charlatans selling snake oils at that time. And the American Medical Association, which was formed later than us, and they started in 1844, they've been doing the same thing all along. To be sure there are many physicians who are upset with the AMA with some of their acquiescence to the appointment of Robert Kennedy. But many of us are trying to change that.
Dr. Jonathan Stea (30:54):
That is such, in my view, such important work almost necessary because we're going to have a lot of years of damage to undo and a lot of trust to be regained because it's hard enough for people who actually have science literacy or higher science literacy skills to navigate the information space. Again, we're all susceptible to falling for misinformation. But as a lay person with no health background and no science background, it's like it's no wonder who do they trust and how do they navigate this space? And it's hard, especially when this stuff, when the information health information out there becomes so tied to political identity and personal identity, we need our health associations to at least serve as a better guiding light. And I get that that's no easy feat. And I'm not saying I know how to do that. I just think it's needed.
Dr. Stephen Rockower (31:56):
Absolutely. It is no easy feat. One of the other problems is the antipsychiatry movement. How is that harmful and how does that fit into the pseudoscience literature?
Dr. Jonathan Stea (32:12):
The antipsychiatry movement? It can be traced back to around the 1960s. And at that time, it actually served a useful purpose. It was kind of a pushback against psychiatry's, various missteps so that there was inhumane asylum care, there was pathologizing of minority groups. There was this perceived arbitrariness over diagnosis. And so the antipsychiatry was a pushback to this. It was pioneered by a lot of disgruntled, self-identified, disgruntled psychiatrists like Thomas Szasz, RD Laing, David Cooper coined the term antipsychiatry in 1967. All that to say, then their efforts worked because by the time of the 1980s kind of rolled around, psychiatry started to get its act together, it started to close a lot of those asylums and move community, move healthcare into the hospitals and into the community. And the science of psychopathology became much more focused on what we call the bio-psychosocial model.
(33:22):
So not just a siloed focus on biology and pill dispensing, but more of a biological, psychological and social focus. So at that time, it was quite good. The problem is that the antipsychiatry movement didn't die. The movement outlived its cause, and now it just sort of transformed and lost its way. And now we see it pervasively in pop culture and on social media existing largely as a disorganized entity outside of mainstream medicine. So you'll find it in books and blogs and websites like Madden America that really dodge scientific critique. And we can see a lot of its tropes, or its essentially propaganda. We can see it online. So for example, when you get guys like Andrew Tate, who's a huge influencer, and I'll use his words, he says, depression only affects fat, lazy men. That's his words. Or you get guys like Elon Musk tweeting to hundreds and millions of people that SSRIs, which are antidepressants cause more harm than good.
(34:36):
Or even recently we have, again, RFK Junior and Donald Trump tweeting things about vaccines causing autism or the SSRIs, or the psychiatry, again, is a more harmful profession than it is helpful. Those are antipsychiatry ideas. And I'm not necessarily saying that these players, these people that I mentioned are major players in the movement, but what they're doing is they're parroting these tropes that have been around for a while, and it's very important to debunk them because we see these tropes occur online even in the form of mental illness denial, where I'm out there on social media telling people that schizophrenia exists and ADHD exists, and depression exists. And because a lot of people, the antipsychiatry movement would lead us to believe that they don't. And that stuff gets amplified and it causes a lot of damage, stigma, and treatment deterrent.
Dr. Stephen Rockower (35:34):
And this all fits into the wellness and lifestyle movement where there's a quote from your book, there's a huge difference between lifestyle counseling and selling a cure all based on lifestyle change. The former makes you a healthcare provider. The latter makes you a grifter. I like that.
Dr. Jonathan Stea (35:56):
Yes, thank you. I stole that from another colleague of mine, Michelle Cohen, who's a family physician, and she's written a lot about the wellness industry as well. And yeah, that's sort of the crux of it, is that both the antipsychiatry movement, the anti-vaccine movement, basically anti-science movements, serve as a foil to mainstream medicine. And they basically say, mainstream medicine doesn't know what they're doing. We do. We have the solution. Come do our dietary protocol or buy our supplements or take our pseudoscientific approaches. And again, that's the narrative,
Dr. Stephen Rockower (36:34):
Right? That's entirely the problem. Okay. Well, thank you so much to Dr. Jonathan Stea, who has been our guest on MedCast, the podcast from MedChi, the Maryland State Medical Society. Tune in next time as we continue our conversations with the leaders of medicine to discuss the issues facing physicians and our patients. For all of us here at MedChi, I'm Dr. Stephen Rockower. Thank you and goodbye.