Primary Topic
This episode examines the deficiencies of the medical system through the personal experiences of the hosts, highlighting systemic inefficiencies and the importance of personal healthcare management.
Episode Summary
Main Takeaways
- Healthcare institutions often prioritize bureaucratic compliance over effective patient outcomes.
- Personal health crises highlight the critical need for self-managed healthcare and informed decision-making.
- Establishing a network of value-aligned medical professionals is essential for improving healthcare quality and accessibility.
- The episode underscores the importance of proactive personal health management and skepticism towards institutional healthcare.
- It advocates for a more community-driven approach to healthcare, reflecting broader societal shifts towards decentralization.
Episode Chapters
1: Introduction to the Topic
The hosts introduce the topic by sharing a personal story about their encounter with a rabid bat, setting the stage for a discussion on the failures of the medical system. Simone Collins: "It all started with a bat that we found crawling around in our yard."
2: Systemic Challenges
The hosts discuss their experiences with obtaining rabies vaccinations, using it as a springboard to critique the medical system's inefficiencies. Malcolm Collins: "Long story short, to not make the story boring to our audience, we eventually learn that legally, whoever owns them won't let them prescribe rabies vaccines or order them."
3: Personal Healthcare Management
Discussion on the importance of personal management of healthcare and the creation of their own protocols and networks. Simone Collins: "And it just feels really good now to just plan on not trusting anyone and monitoring our own stuff and making sure."
Actionable Advice
- Self-Management: Take active management of your family's health by maintaining detailed health records and understanding medical requirements.
- Community Networking: Engage with like-minded families and medical professionals to create support networks for better health outcomes.
- Proactive Health Checks: Regularly conduct comprehensive health assessments to stay ahead of potential health issues.
- Educate Yourself: Continuously educate yourself about health care options and the latest medical research.
- Healthcare Advocacy: Advocate for changes in the healthcare system that prioritize patient outcomes over bureaucratic processes.
About This Episode
In this eye-opening episode, Malcolm and Simone share their harrowing experiences with the failures of the modern medical system. From being denied prophylactic rabies vaccines for their children to not being informed about elevated lead levels in their daughter's blood, the couple realizes that the focus of the current healthcare system is on bureaucratic compliance and liability rather than patient outcomes. They discuss the importance of taking personal ownership of their family's health by proactively monitoring blood work, conducting regular scans, and staying informed about cutting-edge research. Malcolm and Simone also explore the idea of creating a network of like-minded physicians and families to support each other as the infrastructure of society begins to break down. Throughout the conversation, they touch on topics such as the Sinclair method for treating alcoholism, the failings of nationalized healthcare systems, and the impressive efficiency of South Korea's medical industry.
People
Simone Collins, Malcolm Collins
Companies
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Books
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Guest Name(s):
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Content Warnings:
None
Transcript
Simone Collins
Any normal parent would pull that up, look at it, and be like, 4.4 me. I don't know what three means, but. I'm not getting any alerts. I'm not being told by anyone, it must be fine. So it must be fine.
We weren't really paying attention or taking ownership of it ourselves. Instead, we were like, oh, if no one's telling me anything's wrong, I guess nothing's wrong. Which was apparently a really bad approach. I don't know why we didn't assume that this was also happening with the medical system. But the focus of this system is not on patient outcomes.
It is on bureaucratic compliance and ass covering and justification of bureaucratic structures. What I want to do here is take this opportunity for not just for our family, but for the network of families that makes up our community. This is something you can join if you're like, my family would benefit from this. But what we also need to make this realistically implementable for us is like minded medical professionals who are interested in. Providing concierge a new type of telehealth.
Malcolm Collins
Basically, where they're much more like a thesis advisor. By that, what I mean is the patient can't just decide on anything themselves. They need to then take all of their research to the doctors, say, here's this study. Here's this study here, this study. And I think as a result, given these symptoms or given this, I should be prescribed x, which again creates reasons for value aligned families to group together and support each other as the bureaucratic infrastructure of our society is beginning to break down.
Because it is. It's not just the school systems, it's not just the infrastructure that's falling apart. Civilization is essentially falling apart around us. Would you like to know more? Hello, Simone.
We are coming into this episode. I will start with mentioning an ask for anyone who fits this criteria and doesn't make it to the end of the episode. But we are looking for values aligned individuals with MD. So value aligned doctors, and we're likely going to create a list for different states for our listeners to directly contact them. But obviously we would really love one either outside Pennsylvania, but preferably within Pennsylvania due to some prescribing laws.
But the reason we need to make this ask is that we have completely lost faith in the, I guess I'd call it bureaucratic medical institutions in the United States and largely in the world, because I lost faith in the NHS when I was living in the UK. And I was like, at least in the US, because it was profit driven, et cetera and now I have realized that I should have been putting as much stock in these institutions, having my children's best interest at heart as I had put in the school system, having my children's best interests at heart, and that these institutions, in their own way, have become as corrupted and as useless as the public school system and are becoming increasingly more so as time goes on. To the extent where if your kids are going to just an average doctor down the road, I would say that I would not trust that they are safe. So do you want to go into the events that let us hear simone? Sure.
Simone Collins
Yes. It all started with a bat that we found crawling around in our yard. Octavian ran up to Malcolm and said that our dog, the professor, was barking at something scary. And Malcolm, being the ever attentive dad, did not dismiss this and went outside to check on the kids and saw our dog barking at what seemed like the ground. But it turned out that when he looked closer, there was a bat crawling along it.
And so we put the bat in a giant goldfish box and put a sign on it that said, live, potentially rabid bat called the government, found the government testing location. Malcolm drove forever to drop off this live bat, which a government bureaucrat was pretty dismissive about. I know. They were like, oh, okay, I'll put it with the mail. And I was like, don't put that with the rest of the mail.
Malcolm Collins
There is a live rabid. And I told them when I dropped it off, this is a live, potentially rabid Batman. And there was a wrote on the, on the box. Yeah, no, the lady was like, oh, okay. And then she said it was the rest of the packages.
And I was like, excuse me, ma'am. I said, that is a live, potentially rabid bat. And then she seemed to have this moment of recognition where she goes, oh, then she picks it up and takes it to a back room. But. And we thought nothing of it when we dropped it off because what are the odds?
Simone Collins
And we actually, we know the odds that this was going to be a rabid bat. The odds were about 1% or even less than that, that this would be a rabid bat. So we thought, okay, great. Better safe than sorry. And then wait.
And the 24 hours period passes of exposure. So, by the way, if you ever are exposed to rabid animal, it is very important that you, especially if you've been bitten or you've been in a scenario in which potentially spit or brain matter from the bat has gotten into your mouth or an open wound within 24 hours, you have to get a rabies vaccine, or the odds of you contracting rabies and then dying from it, because if you actually contract rabies, it is 100% fatal. It is a brain virus. You are going to die. Is.
You have to go. So we were a little nervous about the 24 hours period passing before knowing that this bat was tested. Government's taken a while, but we're like, yeah, government bureaucracies. What are you going to do? And then finally, at the end of the day on Friday, we received this message that the bat was rabid.
The bat was rabid. It was a rabid bat. And we asked. Now, we grilled our children, and our eldest son, who's old enough to report on these things, insisted that nobody touched. The bat except it was the middle son who can.
Malcolm Collins
Who can talk competently. And I went out there immediately. I do not think that there was. The odds of exposure are incredibly low. But now we know we have rabies in our yard.
So we're like, okay, it's good that there was no exposure. The dog notified us. God bless the professor. Dogs are amazing. Yes.
So bless the professor. It was right next to their playground. Right at the base of their slide. Like, literally, if one of them had gone down their slide of their little play fort, they would have butt first right on top of the bat. We're like, okay, so we know there's rabid animals in our yard.
Now we should get. Because there's the big rabies shot that you can get, which is the post exposure shot. And that seemed like overheating the information we have. But the course of action here would be, okay, don't get the post exposure vaccine, but get the prophylactic vaccine. So the prophylactic rabies vaccine is for if you are going to be encountering animals with rabies or if there's, like, rabies in your area, that provides some boost, but it's not as severe as the post exposure vaccine.
Go through our ordeal, attempting to get the prophylactic rabies vaccine. Yeah, keep on. This isn't the only story. They're the rabies story. And then there's another story that happened immediately afterwards that was even more obscene.
Simone Collins
So we call our kids pediatric practice, which is one of those. It's many doctors, many nurses. There's no one doctor. It's not this tiny family practice. We do that because we think that ideally, we thought they functioned better, had better resources, and they tell us, okay, we'll send this message on to a doctor.
Because we could only call them on Saturday. The office was closed when we first learned of this and that we wouldn't be able to get an answer from them until Monday, and then they would look into it on Monday, which is bad, because when you're trying to get vaccines for your kids who've been potentially exposed and also just prophylactically protect them, you want to do it as soon as possible. So that was already pretty bad. Then on Monday, we call again. And this was their emergency line, by the way.
Yeah, this was their emergency line. Okay, continue. Yes. And then, so we. Sorry.
Then on Monday, we call them multiple times saying, hey, our kids were exposed. This is really urgent. This is a big deal. We really want to get those vaccines ordered. If you have to get them in, obviously, you don't have them in stock.
Malcolm Collins
Long story short, to not make the story boring to our audience, we eventually learn that legally, whoever owns them won't let them prescribe rabies vaccines or order them. Yeah. Under no circumstances are they to give people rabies vaccines. And what they just told us repeatedly, every single time, was, go to an emergency room. We call the emergency room, and the emergency room says, oh, we don't give prophylactic rabies vaccines.
Simone Collins
So already they're basically telling us we have to lie to them if we go if we want to get vaccines, have the vaccines if we want them, but we have to pay an emergency room fee. The last time we did this, because we were actually exposed to a bat that was in our house while we were asleep. So we don't know if we were bitten or spit on or something. We had to go in and get them. We paid over $10,000 in emergency room fees.
Malcolm Collins
And then the question is, if it had been a real bat exposure and some family was trying to do the right thing, talk to their doctors first, they would have dismissed them for a week before giving them the answer that they have just decided legally they don't want to give out these vaccines. Yeah. That is enough time that somebody would be past the period of which a post exposure vaccine would help them and they would die. Yeah. Oh, we called urgent care clinics.
Simone Collins
We called every possible channel we thought we could call. They would maybe have them. But it gets worse than that. It gets worse than that. So then less than a week later, our little girl goes in for her 18 months and she gets a lead test.
Malcolm Collins
And I tell her if there is any lead in her system. And I was very direct about this. We actually have evidence that I was direct about this that we'll get to in an instant, but give me a call if there is any lead in her system at all. Okay. We don't get a call, of course, because they don't care.
They genuinely do not care about the well being of our kids. But Simone was able to proactively look up what the results of the tests were, and it was 4.5. Now, the number at which we would get a call would be five. That's where they legally have to call us. However, 4.5 is more than twice the.
Simone Collins
National average, which is around 1.6. Yeah. At that age, this is when you're talking about long term iq effects, and we need to do something about it. And we have developed our own plan to. To work this out, and our kid will be fine.
Malcolm Collins
But they wouldn't have told us. They would not have told us, and. And they were going to not tell us. This is horrifying, but it just shows that they're not legally required to. They're not going to do it because they are not looking out for your kids long term best interest.
And then I told someone, I was like, there must be something new in the house, because they would have told us with our other kids, because we went and we found the old medical records. They even had a doctor's note. Dad is very concerned about lead. He wants us to tell him if any comes up in the test. Yeah.
Simone Collins
Like, literally, it said in clinical notes from previous appointments. When our kids got led testing, dad requested a call with results not even if they were above the threshold, just any. So I assumed that they were not the no lead at all. We go back and we look at the old results. Three, twice the national average.
Malcolm Collins
So now we're at this state where it's four years, and when, you know, something like lead and the effects of lead and iq, this now we've got to basically be like, oh, we won't give your kids the type of stuff associated with getting let out of their system, et cetera, unless they're over certain numbers. We're just like, you know what? We can no longer trust the medical system anymore. And also, because you would probably ask, if you are looking at the results of your appointments, why didn't you identify the three? Like, when it was at three?
Yeah, why didn't we identify this? So the way they sent the results didn't send markers, it didn't send national averages. It was literally nothing. It was. Yeah, it was just.
Simone Collins
It was just three and it was just. Yeah. And it also. It included a little tooltip icon in the online system that they have clicked through to it. And it basically said a disclaimer, but it didn't actually provide information on ranges, what the national averages are.
Malcolm Collins
You put that into you, then search for national averages. You went through AI, everything like that, and you're like, oh, shit. Like, this is actually a problem. But any normal parent would pull that up, look at it, and be like, 4.4. Me, I don't know what three means.
But I'm not getting any alerts. I'm not being told by anyone, it must be fine. So it must be fine. And now we are at this point where I'm like, okay, we had already been moving to this system this year was in our house, which is to move to Ezra scans, which we've talked about before. These are for about $1,500.
You can get a full body scan. They've got centers in major cities across the US, and they are incredibly detailed in terms of finding stuff. Yeah, basically, they don't own machines. They don't own the machines, but they basically are able to book a slot for you with various practices. That's why they're able to do this in many locations.
Simone Collins
And then their team goes inch by inch through your body and analyzes them, providing preventative health care, especially when it comes to cancer. Our plan is to basically get those. We also emailed Emmy Gall, who's the founder of Ezra. And because he's one of those quantified, self, really conscientious health people. And we're like, okay, what blood tests do you order?
Because we know what, like, Peter Attia orders. We know all these other things, but we want to know what you order and how you keep track of it. Because he's that kind of person who's just going to know. And so he gave us. And we can put this actually in the comments or the description of this video, this blog post that he shared on all the blood tests that he orders.
And also he has a spreadsheet template, which we now have copied and will be using where you can keep track of your results over time so that you are personally tracking and charting your health. Because of HIPAA laws in the United States, at least, it's really difficult for you even to gain access to your medical test results and for them to be portable anywhere. So you don't have one comprehensive place to look at all of your medical information. You have to create that for yourself. So our plan was personally, for us, for you and me, Malcolm, that we're going to do an Ezra scan every other year, because they're crazy expensive, but we should probably do it because cancer.
And to do comprehensive blood panels that we ourselves, using AI, analyze, because no one else is going to do it. We just have to get a doctor to order it and try to get as much of our insurance to cover it as possible, which is not going to be a lot because we have a high deductible plan because we're not wealthy people. That's where we were. But we didn't do it with our kids because we're like, well, our pediatric practice, they care about kids. No one's going to care about the best interested kids.
Malcolm Collins
Now, I have learned they literally care nothing about your kids. Here's what we learned. And this is ridiculous because it's the same thing that we knew about the education system. It's the same thing we knew about the governmental system. I don't know why we didn't assume that this was also happening with the medical system.
Simone Collins
But the focus of this system is not on patient outcomes. It is on bureaucratic compliance and ass covering and justification of bureaucratic structures, which is what you talk about in the pregnancy's guide to governance all the time. But, yeah, patient outcomes, not at all the focus. I love the way you worded it, which is the medical system is not built around outcomes, is built around liability and bureaucracy. And that is what's driving decisions within the industry right now.
Malcolm Collins
And that is not your best interest. That's not in your kid's best interest. But also, let's talk about for me, right, you look at something like naltrexone, which is basically banned in the United States and is incredibly useful. Yeah, there's literally a cure for alcoholism. There's a cure for alcoholism, but doctors don't prescribe it because liability, the only liability is that naltrexone, by the way, is just, it's a little hard on your liver.
Simone Collins
And obviously, if someone's an alcoholic, their liver has already gone through. Well, it's actually partially. AA has really lobbied to prevent it from becoming in common. We could do a whole separate video on that. Other solutions to alcoholism, because then people become a quote, unquote, a dry drunk, which means they didn't solve the real issues that led to alcoholism, which for them is a lack of their religion, which means it's a religion.
Malcolm Collins
Right? If there's a medical solution to alcoholism, which the original founder of AA said he was founding this as a stopgap until a medical solution became available. And now they're the solution that works in 83% of people who try it. The Sinclair method. It allows you to, if you want to, keep drinking when you want to, just not be addicted anymore.
And, Simone, you see me night and day before this. I used to drink at least 45 beers a day or more for years of my life. Decades of my life. And people are like, come on, you couldn't possibly. I love it when people are like, you couldn't possibly be drinking that much.
And I'm like, you don't know my family history. You graduated with good grades from the Stanford NBA. Constantly hammered. Yes. You weren't.
Simone Collins
You were never actually hammered or drunk. I think the fact was, you drank beer like a man 200 years ago, drank beer, which is to say that you drank beer flavored water, aka coarse light, and you drank it constantly, as though it were water, just like people used to, just like your ancestors used to. And so you never really were drunk, because also, your tolerance was insanely high. And I never. The only time I saw you drunk was when my mom did that whole wedding thing and had us given that.
Malcolm Collins
Oh, she tricked me into a pagan wedding ceremony. Yeah. And then you just switched to the hard stuff, and you're like, I'm gonna just. You drank yourself to oblivion. I didn't, like, get angry or anything.
It wasn't like I got in. No, you were just like, I need to know. That's. No. So there are different types of drinking.
Simone Collins
There's european drinking. There's ancestor drinking, which is what you did. And then there's frontier medicine, where you're like, I need to knock myself out. Frontier medicine to get through a pagan ceremony without offending your parents. Yeah, but anyway.
Malcolm Collins
Anyways, the reason I bring up the naltrexone thing is I have learned, like, where I have saved myself from dying, and that almost certainly saved me from dying, was outside of the medical profession, something that's not even talked about within the medical profession. And it took you a long time to find that, because there were many times where you tried a lot of other types of interventions, and they just never really worked. And you always did tons of research. Took forever. And then recently, with that ongoing back pain, and you couldn't identify what it was.
And the doctor should have known that epidurals can sometimes create these. And you found it on an AI? Oh, yeah. After my c section, I was for a month, for three solid weeks, in crippling back pain. Like, just turning over in bed caused so much pain that I would involuntarily yell, let alone moving, taking care of an infant, being with our family, and at first I thought it was just hormonal changes, and then I discovered it was almost certainly a complication from the spinal epidural that I got, which is just.
Simone Collins
It's not like anyone did their job poorly, but I had emailed the practice about this. I'm like, wow, like, I can't. I can't move without being in extreme pain. What's going on? They never called me back.
They never emailed me back. They never responded, and they told me that was the way that they wanted to be communicated with. So the point being is, what are we doing to fix this for our kids, for us? But I don't want to go into all of the maybe more experimental medical stuff that we may be doing as a family, because I don't want people, like, coming after us or anything like that. But what I'm going to be putting together is a document that goes over all of the most cutting edge research out there for different chemicals, different nootropics, how they might affect kids developmentally, things that we can do about the lead, and things that start neural development again after.
Malcolm Collins
I've already found some great options here, and it's still a low amount of lead, but it's way more than we would want. Like, it's going to have an effect if we don't address it. And now we recently had a guy come test every part of the house for lead. Everything, including the chicken, eggs, everything. So we're going to have a full understanding of where this is coming from.
Now, good news. It turned out we had all our kids tested in the original multiple results were false positives, and that their actual lead levels were much lower, in line with the average american lead level. However, this is how we sort of view within our theological system the agents of Providence or God or the future police or whatever word you want to use within our system works, is that they find a way to notify us in a way that we just can't ignore, that we need to change some aspect of our behavior. And if I don't change my behavior, if I don't go through with developing this new system and all of the other people, it may end up impacting the events still end up happening in this timeline. So we are now moving to a system of, Simone said, doing the scans proactively, looking at the cutting edge research that's not being implemented into practice yet, developing basically a mixture.
I'm already beginning to put this together that will probably bake into some bars for our kids or something like that, or put in afterwards, because it's overheated. It can destroy the active ingredients in a lot of compounds, but we'll come up with some delivery mechanism for our kids. I will make a lot of the information on our research public so other people can use these same things. In addition to the Collins Institute, which right now, by the way, if you're interested, I need people who can go through it and tell me their feedback, because we're that close to launch right now. Um, so let me know anyone who's interested in that.
Sorry, I should clarify right here. The Collins Institute is our alternative to the public education system that we have been developing and are close to launching. And also, we will be making this sort of medical stuff available. But what we also need to make this realistically implementable for us is like minded medical professionals who are interested in providing concierge a new type of telehealth, basically, where the. A lot more of the, what the patient is doing is being researched by the patient and then basically being brought and argued to the doctor.
Basically, the doctor in this system takes on a different role than a doctor historically. They're much more like a thesis advisor. By that, what I mean is the patient can't just decide on anything themselves. They need to then take all of their research to the doctors, say, here's this study, here's this study, here's this study. And I think as a result, given these symptoms or given this, I should be prescribed x instead of here's what's wrong with me, can you prescribe me x?
Simone Collins
So there's to be clear, this isn't just experimental stuff. We also, I created a spreadsheet where we are keeping track of basic blood work results. Height, weight, blood pressure. Last time we had an eye exam like last time, we've done all the important things because we realized that also we weren't, because we assumed that the medical system would let us know if something seemed off. We weren't really paying attention or taking ownership of it ourselves.
Instead, we were like, oh, if no one's telling me anything's wrong, I guess nothing's wrong, which was apparently a really bad approach. And it just feels really good now to just plan on not trusting anyone and monitoring our own stuff and making sure. Here are the vaccines we all are going to need here. Here are our latest tests. Here's what we're monitoring for each person that seems a little bit out of range, or they could be a warning sign, and here's what we're going to do about it.
Theoretically, I could also, once I've refined this massive spreadsheet format where there's, like, sheets for everyone in the family. And like a master, like, check in sheet and a master sheet of here's what resource to use for what. Because there are many affordable virtual or urgent care options. There are many affordable alternate options that are not necessarily covered by healthcare that you can use for testing. I can share that too with people.
Malcolm Collins
And so what I want to do here is take this opportunity for not just for our family, but for the network of families that makes up our community. This is something you can join if you're like, my family would benefit from this, let us know. And we are going to try to put together a network that connects like minded physicians with families in our communities that want to take a lot more personal ownership over their own family's health and be much more aggressive nutritionally and everything like that speaking. And here, what I mean is we are not the type of everything needs to be perfect for our kids sort of family, right? Like breast milk, for example.
Right? Simone pumped for a bit with this kid, but we're probably not going to be doing that again for the next one. It just slows things down too much. And people are like, oh, this has an effect. We are not about optimizing everything when there are costs to that optimization, that is when she becomes fertile again, etcetera.
But we are about optimizing for everything when it is a trivial cost to us or our kids or something like that. And there are just so many low hanging fruits out there that I was finding as I was digging into the research here. So I should say that we're not trying to create a network for, like, over involved hypochondriacs. That's not the idea here. But it's a network of people who would be using medicine and medication as if the medical industry hadn't frozen ten years ago in terms of its advancement, which is what happened.
And again, I should have known all this. When I look at, I've been looking at more like trans affirming care stuff and stuff like that now. And it's like if the medical industry was saying people should have been raising alarm bells about this a long time ago. Yeah. One reason I really like putting this together for our community and making these connections for our community is twofold.
One, is not only does it help make our community safer and help get us access to more sovereignty, more family sovereignty. Two, if we are acting as intermediaries within this, there's not going to be some master list of physicians that public that people can target. It allows us to make connections directly, which is also much better. And three, it allows for an additional source of income for some people within our community. But I guess even four, potentially, is it provides the opportunity for something that could turn into something more formalized as things go down the road, which, again, creates reasons for value aligned families to group together and support each other as the bureaucratic infrastructure of our society is beginning to break down.
Because it is. It's not just the school systems, it's not just the infrastructure that's falling apart. Civilization is essentially falling apart around us. And only through creating bubbles where we continue to push science forwards, where we continue to push medicine forwards, can we have any faction of humanity hope to continue to thrive at the species. Part of me wonders how other communities that have chosen to essentially go off the grid are handling this.
Simone Collins
For example, we know lots of people and journalists have covered how the Amish handle medical insurance. You know, that they pool resources, they all pay towards something, and then the community covers when there's some kind of treatment that's prohibitively expensive, like getting cancer treatment. What I don't know is how they manage their ongoing health, how they decide to get vaccines, how they monitor or don't, their various levels of hormones and their growth and their weight and their height. And should they be intervening? Or what do you do when a kid has a rash?
I'd be interested in learning that maybe someday we can trot off to land Lancaster. Lancaster. However you want to say it, and then see what they do. Talk with some families. I'm very curious, but, yeah, I like that idea.
I like the idea of promoting any concierge doctor in who follows his podcast, who's up for working with values aligned people. And I'm just horrified. These are well meaning people. That's the problem, is that we're not saying that the people within the medical establishment are malicious in any way. Every doctor that I personally worked with, my pregnancy and delivery and c section, absolutely fantastic, including, like, the doctor who did my spinal, they did not do anything wrong.
I just had a complication from it. The office that didn't respond to my concerns and requests about crippling pain. They're working with dumb systems that don't work really well, and they're. What motivation did they have to respond? If they don't respond, then you go in for a visit and they make more money.
Malcolm Collins
Like the incentive system that's put into place with a lot of these drives behavior patterns. There is no reason to fix a problem like that like people not responding to patient requests from the perspective of the bosses or the management, when the outcome of that is more money, like with a lot of this, I think that what people get wrong is they think about these big conspiracies like cancer medications are being withheld or discoveries because institutions can make more money. That's actually a lot harder to do because you have competing medical institutions, and one of them had it, they would use it to undercut their competitors. But when you're talking about something like a hospital, no, there isn't really the same competitive pressure for them to get back to you versus getting back to other people, because there's typically only one or two other hospitals in an area that they're competing with, and they're usually not competing on service. They're usually.
The other crazy thing was when you started calling hospitals to try to find out how much a rabies vaccine would cost, and the answer was, basically, we can't tell you. Yeah. What other thing in our society works that way on a random hidden expense. And so it's better for us going forwards to just proactively manage this stuff ourselves and have a network that enables that. And we know that we have an international audience of this podcast and that there are different nations with very different healthcare systems.
Simone Collins
But when you have a nationalized healthcare system, you're often dealing with just as bad incentives or possibly even worse, like you pointed out, with the NHS. Then there, of course, there are some countries that are great, like South Korea, where you get these comprehensive medical school. South Korea is amazing. Oh, I got to talk about a medical experience in South Korea. So I've lived in a lot of countries in the UK, the NHS, anyone?
Malcolm Collins
My experience with the NHS, even as bad as all this expensive stuff of is in the US that has me scared for my kids and everything like that. I still pray to God every day I live here and not under the NHS. The NHS, basically, if you get like a flu or something like that, and then you try to book an appointment, the appointment is always three weeks out. So you're always better by the time you get to the appointment. If you have something serious, like, I remember once I had something serious and urgent and I called and they were like, don't get all emotional with me, I can't deal with this right now.
And they hung up when I was at university and somebody was like dying on the floor in front of me. They're like, sir, you need to calm down. I just don't need to deal with this. At 03:00 a.m. in the morning hang up.
Like, what? But there's no consequences to this within the NHS. In Korea, though, they have this system where it's really inexpensive, like, in the us things. Everything's way too expensive because of the way our insurance system works. And you just banned the whole us insurance system and made everything out of pocket, it would work much better.
But that's what works in a lot of the developing world. And so we often get medical shot in the developing world when we're in Peru or whatever, but in Korea, it's, like, in the developing world, but it's also, like, totally industrialized. So, like, when you were doing, like, a test, you would sit down in one booth and somebody would ask you, like, a series of questions, and then you'd get moved to a variable set of other boosts where they would do. There was, like, the blood draw line. It was just like.
Like you were walking in line. It was a fairly fast line. And you get the blood draw, and they move you through, like, everything was just, like, lines and institutionalized, and it was insane. And then when you would get mildly sick and you'd go to an appointment, they'd give you, like, these breathers and stuff that had, like, anesthetics in them that were meant to make you feel better immediately, as well as prompt, inexplicably expensive service. It was absolutely insane.
And then there's childbirth in Korea, where. Afterwards, women get these resorts, essentially, like a spa retreat with your baby, where they feed you healthy food and you get massages and, yeah, you basically get to chill and then take care of everything so that you can recover. Anyway, I love you today, Simone, and I really hope that we're able to put this together and that we get enough physicians. And we're very fortunate that this happened post Covid, because. Post Covid, like, in.
In PA, the regulations around people prescribing stuff out of state are significantly loosened. That's still true in a lot of areas. And if you win this race, this can be something that you work on to make it much easier for a system like this to operate without any sort of legal concern. Yeah, I would like that. Yeah.
Simone Collins
And of course, none of this should be taken as medical advice, just disclaimer, because just like everyone else, we just have to cover our ass and worry about liability. But, yeah, I just. If any, if anyone is, it has made it to the end. Please, one at one, if you could subscribe and, like, this video, because it will help the video, but also, like, actually think about your personal health. Think about anyone in your family and their personal health.
And maybe consider making a spreadsheet where you just start to internally take ownership of an intract. Because if you think that a doctor is keeping track of that and making sure that you're okay and then informing you stuff that might be going wrong, you're probably wrong. And we learned that the hard way. So love you guys. And love you, Malcolm, the very most of all.
Bye.