You can also watch the full episode on Rumble and Odysee and Bitchute!

Meet Your Host: Dr. Andrew Kaufman

“Eventually, it really made it untenable for me to continue to practice in that profession.”

What if everything you've ever learned about health and medicine is not only wrong, but most likely the opposite of what's actually true? Welcome to the True Health Report. This is the place you can turn to for a critical appraisal of health topics—both mainstream and alternative—to help you figure out what is what and what’s really going to benefit your health. 

My name is Dr. Andrew Kaufman and I have developed this podcast with the goal of educating you about the truth of what makes you ill and what makes you healthy. In this episode, you’ll hear why I was drawn to medicine, what ultimately forced me out of mainstream medicine, and what I plan to do now.

Without good health, you will not be able to achieve the other things that you really want to and value in life. This requires you to become your own health authority. And this podcast includes the information you need to do just that.

Listen now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify too!

Topics covered in this podcast episode:

• Who is Dr. Andrew Kaufman
• Where Dr. Andy was trained and practiced medicine
• Inconsistencies Dr. Andy throughout his healthcare career 
• The unique skillset Dr. Andy possesses 
• When Dr. Andy had a turning point in his thinking about mainstream medicine
• Which other doctors have greatly impacted Dr. Andy’s practice
• What ultimately forced Dr. Andy out of mainstream medicine
• The mission of and what you can expect from this podcast

Throughout this podcast, I’ll be debunking myths, critically appraising many different approaches to health, and sharing my discoveries and empowering you to uncover what truly works.

I encourage you to watch these episodes, subscribe to my YouTube channel, and check out other free resources on my website.

Resources

A Mind of Your Own by Kelly Brogan MD.

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The unedited podcast transcript for this episode of the True Health Report follows

What if everything you've ever learned about health and medicine is not only wrong, but most likely the opposite of what's actually true?

Welcome to the true health report. This is my new podcast where I will provide a critical appraisal of health topics, both mainstream and alternative, to help you figure out what is what and what is really going to benefit your health. My name is Dr Andrew Kaufman and I have developed this podcast with the goal of educating you about the truth of what makes you ill and what makes you healthy. So who is Dr Andrew Kaufman, let me tell you a little bit about myself.

I went to MIT to study biology, and while there, I got involved in many different types of research, both bench research, in the laboratories on campus, as well as in the biotechnology industry, both at Biogen and Genzyme, and I worked in different capacities there, in research and development, in quality control and manufacturing, and saw multiple sides of the biotech pharmaceutical industry all the way from the primary academic research through to the finished product marketed to patients through the healthcare system. And through that experience, I both uncovered what really constitutes science, as well as the kind of lack of organizing principle that you might expect to be in those institutions, but really it's much more chaotic, and many shortcuts are taken, and many of the individuals who are conducting various procedures in the laboratory don't really have a full understanding of what's going on. They're really more like technicians that are conducting activities, so like pipetting things, measuring things, performing assays, but not really understanding the theoretical basis of exactly what they're doing. But my education at MIT provided a lot of value, because it was an engineering school, and it was focused on problem solving and getting things to work. So this helped me develop a way of thinking where I am always thinking about one the bigger system, what is the goal? What's the function? And applying that to the micro level where I'm actually working and saying, Does this work? Does it fit in this big picture? And I continued to use that type of thinking throughout my career, and it led me a lot of different and important places. Now, after graduation, I actually went to work in the public health sector, reporting AIDS cases for the New York Health Department, and this was a different but complementary education for me, and what I really did was I traveled around to hospitals and medical clinics throughout the New York City metropolitan area and reviewed medical records to identify and report AIDS cases, which is a reportable condition to the CDC. And in the course of this, I learned all about the AIDS qualifying conditions. I learned about all about the science of HIV. And even back then, I noticed some very interesting topics and inconsistencies. 

For example, I discovered that there were a subset of so called HIV positive patients who were called long term non Progressors. In other words, they had an HIV test that was positive, which, according to the mainstream, signifies that they have this virus growing in their body, however, years and years and years passed, and they never got sick. They never developed AIDS. And this was a huge mystery, of course, in the field of AIDS research, no one understood it. Of course, they wanted to say, oh, maybe there is a Different virus that is less, you know, aggressive or something like that. 

But really, the obvious truth with staring them in the face is that the illnesses that people had that were called AIDS really had nothing at all to do with HIV, and I uncovered several other inconsistencies over the course of my career. The next place I went was to physician assistant training school to actually become a professional clinical person so that I could actually work with patients. And after PA school, I graduated top in my class and was put on as a faculty member of the Medical University of South Carolina. So even though I was a PA I was a faculty member at a medical school and was teaching doctors and medical students, quite interestingly. And during this experience, I was working with cancer, specifically in hematology, and that means some very aggressive cancers, like acute leukemia that had almost 100% mortality rate. 

And during this time, of course, I was involved in the traditional therapies like chemotherapy and bone marrow transplantation, which are given to patients with leukemia. And none of those patients did well. They almost all died, and many of them, you know, just became sicker with the treatment. However, there was one very rare form of leukemia known as promyelocytic leukemia, or amlm Three. And whenever we encountered one of these patients, which was maybe about once a year, we gave them something different. We gave them a form of vitamin A, and those patients, all of them, got better.

Now, this was really exciting at the time, because I got to see patients actually get better, but I didn't make the connection until much later on, that what was the fundamental difference here is that they're being treated with nutrition rather than pharmaceuticals, and they were getting better, and this is a lesson that stuck with me in the long term. Now, when I was a PA, I stood out among the others and a bunch of doctors who I had worked with for a couple of years cornered me one day and they told me that I had to apply to medical school. So they walked me to the admissions office, introduced me to the admissions director, and they were very encouraging, and the next year, I started medical school.

Now, ultimately, I specialized in psychiatry, and then sub specialized in forensic psychiatry, and this really drew my interest, because it was a way of analyzing a lot of information and evidence and making an opinion, but an opinion that is not a scientific opinion, so one that has to be debated. And I really enjoyed the thought provoking nature of debate, being able to use logic. So this was very appealing, and it really helped me further develop my critical analysis skills to identify important patterns, but also to be able to rule out information that was not really relevant or related. Because when I was doing these types of evaluations, and these were things for purposes, as is this individual fit to return to their law enforcement job after a suicide attempt or after a problem with depression or an addiction issue. They were also related to criminal issues, as someone not guilty by reason of insanity, for example. And when I was doing these evaluations, I was given huge volumes of information, sometimes 1000s of pages of documents, medical records, school records, reports from witnesses and other informants and other types of documentation, including, of course, criminal and police records. And I had to sift through these mountains of information, and you know, 99% of it was completely irrelevant, but that 1% had the key details, and so it gave me these detective type of sleuthing skills to find the needle in the haystack and relate the facts together.

Other to draw up a very reasonable and logical opinion.

Now, while I was doing this, I was very academically oriented, so I became involved in research and published several papers and studies. I also mentored students and taught research, and in doing that, I was a little unusual, but because my engineering school type background and my affinity for math, I actually did my own statistics and ran my own data. I even programmed in the statistical software when necessary, and I think this is a critical and missing piece from much of the medical research, where you have doctors who design a clinical experiment but then hand it off to a statistician to actually analyze the data, and there's a disconnect where the doctor doesn't really understand what types of statistical models are being applied to their data and how to interpret those and know if they're appropriate and if they actually answer the questions adequately that need to be answered. And there are many, many tricks using statistics that can exaggerate or mislead the reader from the real conclusions. And often these are used, for example, to make a therapeutic agent, like a drug look a lot better than it is. So it was really important for me to become aware of these biases and tricks in order to debunk the many things that I have come to be known for.

So I reached a turning point in my thinking about mainstream medicine, and this occurred in my psychiatric residency training at Duke during my first year there. And actually it's during the first two years, all of the trainees are required to attend a special Journal Club, and they are assigned papers to perform what's what they call a critical appraisal, and this is to actually thoroughly scrutinize this paper, and most of these were clinical studies in psychiatry that we were reviewing in order to say, you know, is this a real finding, or are there biases or problems with the study design that teach us that we cannot trust the results of these findings? And we actually found that many of the published papers had some major, major problems. But one day during this journal club, we looked at this paper, which was authored by a statistician from Harvard who, through a Freedom of Information request, got all of the unpublished study data on antidepressants that was submitted to the FDA to get approval for these modern antidepressant drugs. And then he took all of the data, the published studies and unpublished studies that he obtained this way, combined them into one meta analysis or one large statistical analysis and found that there was really no difference between antidepressants and placebos. Published this study, and we reviewed it in this journal club, and everyone in the class at the end of the discussion all agreed that there was no evidence that antidepressants provided a real therapeutic benefit, but then a half hour later, after our lunch break, we were expected to return to the clinics and prescribe antidepressants. Now this really kind of shocked me once I realized that intellectually, we could all reason that these drugs are not of any value. But then our model was threatened, because what else would we do if we don't prescribe these drugs? So we went back and continued to prescribe the drugs and pretend like this study didn't exist.

Now this didn't sit well with me, and I resigned from that point forward that I would be extremely conservative with my use of psychiatric medications, especially anti depressants, but there are similar data for other types of psychiatric drugs as well. But eventually it really made it untenable for me to continue to practice in that profession, because really the main reason that any place is hiring a psychiatrist.

First is to prescribe those drugs. That's what they really need. As a psychiatric prescriber, they don't really need a doctor who can develop individualized plans for each patient to help them really get back on track.

Now I have to also mention the influence of several other doctors, and the first significant influence on me to change my practice was Dr Kelly Brogan and her book, of course, which I can't remember the name of right now, but I think you should easily be able to find it. It's an excellent book. And in the first half of that book, she went through all of the studies on psychiatric medications, showing that they did not prove any significant benefit. And in the second half, she taught basically an elimination diet and detox type protocol. And the first time I tried that, and I tried it with a friend who had anxiety, we both had results like we've never had from any pharmaceutical before. And at that point there was really no looking back. I had one foot already out the door.

So it was really during the pandemic that I fully exited the mainstream allopathic medical system. I had been speaking out publicly against the measures that were taken, such as lockdowns. I had been speaking about the truth with respect to germ theory and the people I was working for did not really appreciate this type of pursuit. They took the pandemic very seriously, and this came to a head when they tried to impose a mask on me. Wanted me to practice psychiatry on the facility while wearing a mask. And this is particularly problematic for psychiatry, because the interpersonal relationship, when you're speaking with someone and they're talking about their very serious, traumatic experiences, for example, their vulnerable relationships, very difficult things to talk about. If you're behind a mask, this is a major barrier. You could be laughing, sneering at them, and they wouldn't know you need to be able to communicate the empathic

expressions adequately and relate to someone without anything covering you or between you, no barriers. And of course, I refuse this on that ground and many other grounds. And this led to me being forced out of mainstream medicine, which was really a welcome relief for me, although I had to scramble to figure out a way to avoid going bankrupt. I was very successful by initially doing natural healing consults, because at this time, I had really already spent several years studying natural healing and trying very various things myself and with a few willing volunteers, and the results had just been excellent, so there were too many lies to go back to that system. Even though I had sacrificed so much and put so much effort towards it and invested myself, it was time to move on, and I'm so glad that I did because everything I do now, I have far more pride and a sense of accomplishment, because people who utilize this information and take it to heart are very successful in their health outcomes.

So this weekly podcast will be a mix of different topics that I will cover, and I am going to, of course, analyze and critically appraise many different approaches to health, including in the mainstream system, as well as in the alternative and natural health system, because, unfortunately, the business model of mainstream health has also been taken up by many in the alternative health space, and that business model can often work against our health, even if there are good intentions involved.

So I will be debunking many myths. I will be exploring many topics, and I will be providing a lot of actionable advice that you can take to improve your health in its totality, not just the physical aspects. So this is about sharing my discoveries and empowering you to uncover what truly works.

I want to say that you know our health, mine and yours is the most valuable asset. Without good health, you will not be able to achieve the other things that you really want to and value in life, and in order to really do that, you have to become your own health authority, which means that you can't rely on others. You can't give away your authority. You have to learn some things. You have to find sources that you trust so that you can take charge, and this is the way to truly realize good health. 

So I encourage you to watch these episodes. Subscribe to my channel, like it, check out my other free resources on my website at Andrew Kaufman, md.com, there are many, many educational offerings, free handouts, bonuses, mini books and other resources for your perusal. Well, I look forward to speaking with you on a regular basis, and I know that this information is going to hit the sweet spot to help you get back on track.