The first part of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the whole thing, become a paid subscriber here.
Family doctor and science communicator Brad McKay joins us for a wide-ranging conversation about alternative medicine, chronic fatigue, Peter Attia, wellness IV drips, how placebos can actually cause harm, and more. Behind the paywall, we talk about the weight-inclusive approach, my book ANTI-DIET, our differing views on GLP-1 drugs, pharmaceutical-industry influence and the need for healthy skepticism, and more.
Dr Brad McKay MBBS, FRACGP, MPH (he/him) is an experienced family doctor and dedicated health and science communicator. His commitment to evidence-based medicine, critical thinking, and combating misinformation inspired him to create his book, Fake Medicine: Exposing the wellness crazes, cons, and quacks costing us our health. Learn more about his work at drbradmckay.com.au.
Resources and References
Contains affiliate links to Bookshop.org, where I earn a small commission for any purchases made.
Christy’s second book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Subscribe on Substack for extended interviews and more
Brad’s book, Fake Medicine
Brad’s website
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
Transcript
Disclaimer: The below transcription is primarily rendered by AI, so errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: So, Brad, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to talk with you.
Brad McKay: Thank you for having me. Good morning from Australia.
Christy Harrison: Yes, early, early morning. Thank you for joining us so early. I wanted to start off by talking about your background with wellness culture. I know you had some experiences with that in the past, especially as a kid. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Brad McKay: A bit of a weird introduction to the wellness culture. When I was a young kid, so we're talking teenage years, I started getting a real horrible pain in my back, so right down low in my sacrum and went to the doctor, as you should be doing as a teenager. My parents took me along and yeah, my doctors just told me that I had low back pain. It was really common when you're in your fifties, forgetting that I was 15 and that everything would be fine. I just need to see a physio.
So I started diligently going along to a physio and they would do some massage therapy and put a heat pack on my back and I would be in agony by the end of the session. And so because I wasn't getting better, my GP sent me to see an osteopath instead. And so he would get a big stick and then whack my back, find the most painful point and then smack it. And I would be like the most intense pain that you could ever imagine in your entire life. It was just horrendous. I'd be shuddering. It was. It was so bad.
And so I kind of just followed mainstream medicine and followed the advice of my GP, did all of the right things, being a good boy, and really didn't get very far and did this for about two years. And it was just awful. Absolutely awful. And so in the end, I was still beside myself, went back and saw the GP and said, look, this isn't great. I'm not sure what I need to do next. And he just said, oh, just keep on doing what I've told you to do.
And so one day there was actually a locum osteopath who came into the room and never seen him before, and he did a quick assessment of me, and before he hit me with a stick, he just sort of said, oh, yeah, maybe you should get a bone scan. And so I went back to the GP, got a form to get a bone scan done, which is injecting your veins with some radioactive dye, waiting an hour or so, and then you have a scan to sort of see where this dye accumulates.
When the dye accumulated, it accumulated in my sacrum and pointed to a big tumour that was growing there. By that time, the tumour was about the size of a walnut growing in my sacral nerves, pressing on all of the nerves and giving me intense agony. A heat pack was just making the tumour swell up to press on nerves, which is why that was hurting. And, of course, hitting a tumor with a stick probably isn't going to get you much better. Certainly wasn't getting rid of the tumour, but was also causing extravagant pain.
So that was sort of like very dipping my toe into the wellness area. So having all sorts of kooky treatments down on my painful back, but then that was also compounded. So I was also brought up in a religious family as well. And so my family were very keen for modern medicine to help. But just in case, if things could be easier and cheaper, if I didn't need surgery, let's just go and pray about it. I remember being taken to a Catholic prayer meeting. My family's not even Catholic. I don't know what they were doing, but they took me to a Catholic prayer meeting, pushed me up to the front and had somebody pray for me.
And, yeah, when I said to this older male Catholic minister that I had a tumor, he wanted to put his hands on me to pray. And then when I told him that was in my butt, he wasn't really keen to do that in public, and so he put his hands on my head, which, if you're going to get God's power, I don't know if it's going to go through that much tissue, but that's fine. And then he prayed for me and I was very hopeful. Went home at the end of the day and just was very, very thankful for God for getting rid of this tumor and then would put my hand down to press on the lump that was there and it was still painful. So I still knew that despite the prayer, nothing had happened. And so a lot of my thoughts about God and about faith and religion and all of these people going to prayer meetings was a little bit jaded, and I became a little bit skeptical through that experience.
So the short story of that is that I had surgery. Modern medicine works really well. I had a surgeon who was a pediatric surgeon, and he did a fantastic job and took it out, and that was when I started medicine. So, yeah, I had the operation. It was about six days in hospital around that time. I'd just been accepted into medicine at the age of 16, about to turn 17, and, yeah, it was a really weird introduction into the medical profession.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. How did that change how you viewed the profession?
Brad McKay: It was interesting starting medical school, because I'd been a patient for such a long time and been really frustrated with medicine as well. And then I was spending a lot of time with all of these amazing people who were the prefects of this school, and they were, like, the head of rowing or they were playing rugby, and really, really healthy people who had never had a problem in their life. And here I am going, well, I just spent two years in pain and going around from doctor to doctor and had a massive operation. And, yeah, certainly I do know what it's like to be a patient. And so I think my empathy for patients and my ability to feel their frustration was very high from a very early age. And I think that gave me good insight and probably made me a little bit slower when I was taking a history, which was really disappointing. But, yeah, helped me to understand things from both perspectives as I was going through medicine.
Christy Harrison: You've also written about going through a form of gay conversion therapy through the church, and I'm curious how that played into your perspective on religion and also on medicine, because you wrote in the book that there was some kind of connection between the two.
Brad McKay: Yeah. So while I was going through my teenage years, of course, all of your hormones are going crazy and being brought up in the church as well. It was really weird when I started being more attracted to boys and guys. Cause they're going, oh, my God, what is wrong with me? I don't know anybody who's gay, and I don't know what this thing is. And I have no idea what to do with it. Nobody to talk to. And it was just a real embarrassment because growing up in the nineties, it was all pretty awful being gay. And there was one gay guy at school. I thought he was gay. He is, in the end. He was just being beaten up all the time and being hit with a metal ruler every time he walked past somebody. It was something horrible to be.
And so I hid that for a long time. And then as I got older and found that this feeling wasn't going away despite praying for it, I started to open up to my family over time, and they were horrified that I could be gay and were very keen for me to have more prayer to solve this, because it worked so well the first time. Encouraged me to go along to gay conversion therapy, and I ended up meeting up with this weird part of the Christian community, which has since disbanded around Australia, because they found it was so unhealthy for everybody.
I joined a sex addicts group, which was just really weird because I'm like, I'm really not having enough sex to be part of this group. But it would get together every few weeks, and they would all talk about how they were attracted to guys, and then it would just be this big, weird prayer session to ask God to not make everybody attracted to guys. And nothing changed. Nobody got better. Everyone had the same sexuality at the end of the day. Again, I just became really disappointed with God and just going well, God's not fixing me as such.
And so over time, the main healthy thing for me was to really accept my sexuality, not try to get married to a woman. And I've been with my partner now for about ten years. My male partner. Oh, my God. My family's still horrified, still scandalous, but I'm very happy, and I'm living the life that I'm wanting to live, and this is certainly distance from the church now. And my understanding of faith and religion has very much changed over this period of time.
Christy Harrison: I can imagine. Yeah, that's such a harrowing thing to go through, but it's great that you were able to finally kind of shake that off and live the life you wanted to live.
Brad McKay: A bit more freeing.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, for sure. How did your journey into medicine sort of play into all this?
Brad McKay: So, with medicine, I was very diligent and tried to do my best in medical school. Again, it's a very interesting journey. And similar story to how you've interviewed other people on the podcast as well, with developing a chronic disease over time, while I was doing medicine. So when I was getting to about 18/19, I just started becoming really tired. And this is a very familiar story to a lot of other people. I remember going to the hospital, I'd be interviewing patients and working on the wards, and then I would just feel so fatigued. Absolutely awful. And I would be trying make my way to the car without falling over. It was that bad. Trying to walk down the stairs and not fall down the stairs to get back to the car park.
And then I would literally get to the car, sit in the driver's seat, and then fall asleep within seconds, and then wake up maybe half an hour later or an hour later and then drive home. And this was at 5 o'clock in the afternoon. It wasn't really, really late. And so it was very difficult because I would be trying to read a riveting textbook, and I would be falling asleep on the page and wake up with drool blurring the words in the textbook. It was really, really quite extreme.
And again, like, I ended up seeing a doctor and having some blood tests, and they sort of said, well, yeah, you're not iron deficient, and you're not vitamin B-12 deficient, and you're eating well, and you're exercising regularly or trying to through the fatigue. The only thing that we can really see is that it looks like you've had glandular fever. We don't know how long ago it was.
Lots of questions, like, am I feeling fatigued from having glandular fever or Epstein Barr virus? Am I fatigued from some other reason? Am I depressed? Like, I ended up going on antidepressants because I was just going, well, maybe that's making me feel tired. Is it the tiredness causing the depression or the depression causing the tiredness? They helped a little bit, but not that much. And wasn't until about ten years later, so going from 18 to 28/29 years of age, that I finally found an answer why I was feeling tired. And so this is after going through mainstream medicine, going through all sorts of weird and wonderful wellness things, and finally, I'm getting a diagnosis of narcolepsy.
Christy Harrison: Oh, wow.
Brad McKay: Yay! I get a chronic disease! Yay! So I've seen all of this stuff that's out there for chronic fatigue syndrome, and I've followed a lot of the information, and I've seen a lot of the specialists, and I've been equally frustrated. There's a lot of other people going through other issues that involve chronic fatigue. Yeah, my fatigue was a sleep disorder where my body just doesn't produce enough orexin hormone. And so it makes me want to go to sleep at different times of the day. I'm on about seven to eight different tablets that I need to time over the day to keep me awake and to keep me focused and to stop me from falling asleep, which isn't really great when you're talking with patients.
And so I'm able to manage that now that I know what's causing the problem. And, yeah, all of the exercise in the world wouldn't help. Changing my diet and eating more vegetables really isn't going to give me any more orexin. That's why I'm very much determined to help people to think about the problem and not just rely on what influencers might be telling them to do. Green vegetables, great, awesome. But what is causing your fatigue? And if you're not finding the answers, then keep looking and try to find things. And I certainly encourage people to investigate more in mainstream medicine and to get different opinions from doctors rather than somebody who might be promising the world but delivering nothing.
Christy Harrison: Did you go through a lot of wellness practitioners and then mainstream doctors as well before you finally hit on this diagnosis?
Brad McKay: Yeah, I think chronic fatigue is this really weird world. So I think we've gone through a long period in history where people with chronic fatigue were told, oh, well, you just need graduated exercise over time and pace trial came out, said, oh, well, if you're just pacing yourself, then that's your road to wellness. But then we found over time that some of the information in the pace trial had been contorted and that graduated exercise wasn't really helpful and for some people it actually caused harm. And so it's not now seen to be a solution, but having sort of specific times to eat over the day and pacing your food and pacing your exercise doesn't really help people very often with fatigue syndrome and certainly wasn't helping narcolepsy.
My sisters, they are lovely and beautiful and well meaning. Over time, they would either ask me to go to certain prayer meetings to have help with that, which I wasn't very keen for. Weird, wonderful things like infrared therapy and colour therapy and ozone snorting. There were all sorts of weird and strange things that my sisters would encourage me to do, and some of them, in desperation, I'd go and sit in an infrared room with my sister for a while and feel warm, but not feel more awake.
I've sort of dabbled in that, but often I would be offered a particular wellness therapy and just thinking about it with my medical background, I'd be like, that is just rubbish. What the hell is this about? And I think that means that I'm really coming at it from a privileged position, from the education that I've had, and I'm able to differentiate that, hopefully relatively quickly. But a lot of people don't have that. And I really feel for people trying to make their way through the Internet and through advertising and through algorithms and through influences. It is really difficult. And often there is a grain of truth in what people are selling. When it really comes down to it, the benefits are over exaggerated and the principles are really so stretched to the limit. And in the end, don't end up coming up with the results.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. Or based on very early stage research done in animals or cell cultures.
Brad McKay: I love research that's done in a petri dish that has not been tested in humans yet! But everyone gets on board and starts taking XYZ drug or pill or food, and that over time, even if it's five or ten years, we discover that it doesn't work. But, yeah, that Petri dish might be very happy, but humans are not.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. And it's so wild, the runaway diffusion that happens with that, where people will just jump on board, influencers, and sometimes even doctors, too, or scientists, or people who should know better. I've written about Andrew Huberman, Mark Hyman, these people who have scientific education, there's dozens of them, these functional medicine people, integrative medicine people, or just researchers who are using their scientific background, their PhDs, their doctor, in front of their name to influence people and make them listen. And I think just are leading so many people astray.
Brad McKay: That's partly why I didn't want to write a self help book as well. There are so many people who are out there that are saying, oh, well, if you just follow my five healthy rules of eating, then this is your way to success. Everybody's unique, everybody's different. One thing may work for you and not work for me. It's actually really hard to write a book like that and be truthful about it because the human race is so, so different and varied.
I wrote my book Fake Medicine, which is more about teaching people how to think. So it's how to differentiate things. And if you do have a health problem, how do you pick out what's going to be good for you, and how do you pick out the charlatans, and how do you think your way around your health problem, and how do you increase your ability to critically think about a topic. I still like it to be a self help book, but a very different flavor from somebody who's telling you just to not eat sugar.
Christy Harrison: Right. I think that's a good kind of self help for this information age, too, where we're exposed to so many things and encountering so many charlatans or so many influencers with things they want to sell you. It is helpful in that sense.
Brad McKay: TikTok's great, isn't it? That's one of your favorite places to go.
Christy Harrison: Always. Always. I mean, if I want to see something totally off the wall, get some inspiration for my next debunking Q and A, I will definitely go there.
Brad McKay: There's always something new.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, always, always. You're a GP, right? You practice in a medical clinic. So I'm curious what you see people coming in with. What are they asking you about? What do they see on TikTok or Google or whatever that's coming up in your sessions with patients?
Brad McKay: Yeah. So I work as a family doctor. I see everybody from the cradle to the grave, as we say. And, yeah, I specialize a lot with sexual health and even with HIV medicine as well. So I'm an HIV clinician too. So, I suppose historically, HIV has just been a bit of a weird world. When we didn't have solutions, when we didn't have medications, then people were having all sorts of weird and wonderful vitamins and taking 20 vitamin tablets a day and having all sorts of infusions, and there was a desperation that was there. There's a bit of a legacy with that often, not too many of my patients these days, but a lot of people were on every single vitamin supplement that they could find because they were desperate to stay alive.
And it's really been modern medicine that has come through with the goods, with highly effective medication that can keep people's viral load under control and let them live just as long as anybody else in the population. It's been phenomenal change with the population and with that change, with people realizing that modern medicine is actually working, I certainly find that my patients who are regularly taking their medication and following the medical pathway that I've put in front of them, they do a lot better than people who stop and start their medication or try out alternative therapies.
A lot of them, unfortunately, have died because they haven't followed modern medicine. And nothing else really works apart from the drugs that we have to combat HIV. So that's sort of one extreme, I suppose. A lot of the people that I see these days are very keen for longevity. So that's a big topic. I think they will see often people online. There's been a lot of talk with a lot of my patients about Peter Attia's book and his vast array of podcasts on various platforms and all of the blood tests that he wants my patients to spend thousands of dollars to get for not particularly much benefit at the end of the day.
So there are all sorts of weird, nuanced conversations that I have to have with people these days. And it's sort of like juggling natural remedies versus medicine and trying to find what's best for each individual person that I'm seeing.
Christy Harrison: So interesting. There's so much there I want to dig into. I'm also really curious about Peter Attia, what you tell your patients about him and what you find, because I think a lot of people are like, well, hes a doctor, and hes actually pretty nuanced. And that is true. He has championed certain diets. He was very low carb for a long time, and then he sort of went back on that and publicly changed course, which I think is admirable in some ways, and not a lot of people are willing to do that. And I think he speaks in more nuanced ways than a lot of wellness advocates.
And yet everything that he's recommending is a lot of it, at least what I've seen, is based on very early stage research. A lot of it is in many cases unnecessary and potentially even harmful. Doing invasive tests or doing all kinds of self monitoring can make people really obsessive and change people's relationships with food and their bodies in unhelpful ways. So I'm just curious, from your perspective, what you think about his work and if anyone listening, because I know I do have some people in the audience who listen to him. What would you say to help people be critical thinkers and skeptical of what they might here on his podcasts?
Brad McKay: I suppose I approach it from a different perspective from most people because I kind of see it down the line. So my patients will be very invested in what he's saying, and then they change their behavior. And I'm not actually reading what Peter's saying, but I'm following what my patients have been doing as a consequence of that. And so I remember a lot of my patients were taking metformin because they're like, oh, Peter Attia's like taking metformin. And so this is a diabetes medication that helps to stabilize blood sugars. And from what I understand, he started taking it because he was like, oh, this is great. It's going to keep my blood sugar stable. And then over time, he was telling everybody that they should be on it, that this is really helpful for longevity.
And then he ended up, I think he was monitoring his blood tests before he was exercising and found that one of the tests wasn't very favorable. And so he went off metformin. And so then my patients were saying, oh, I've stopped metformin now because Peter stopped that. And it's just like a really weird culty thing. Let's follow what the cult leader does and not really look at our own blood tests. And there's a lot of trust that's there. And he does have a lot of respectability from being a doctor and from having an education, but then to also lead a public to encourage people to take a medication that he's taking, and then to encourage the public not to take a medication because he's decided not to take it. You're going on this weird health journey of experimenting, experimentation through somebody else, and I think that's a bit weird.
Christy Harrison: It feels a lot like what influencers do. It feels like uncredentialed people who only have their personal experience to back them up. That's what they do, right? They're like, hey, do this. I did this. It's just so strange to have someone with that level of scientific understanding, ostensibly, and having gone through medical school.
Brad McKay: Blundering their way through life and getting everybody else to blunder their way through life as well. In medicine, whenever I'm talking in the media, I will always say, "Well, yes, like, x, y, z. This is what is happening at the moment, and this is what we're thinking about this particular drug. But of course, it's really important to go and see your GP, and everyone's unique, an individual, and you should be following the advice of your practitioner." This is what I always come down to and heading people back towards their family doctor is super important.
And again, it's a very, very interesting position when you have somebody in a position of power talking about these things and also with hundreds of thousands of followers, because they can also say, well, this is what I do. But, yeah, of course, see your position. What has more power? Is it the charismatic speaker who's saying that they're taking a drug like metformin? Or is the end disclaimer saying, oh, yeah, you should talk to your doctor about it?
Christy Harrison: That charisma carries so much weight I'm interested in for you as a GP, because you are getting this stuff downstream, as you said, where someone will have gotten sort of hooked by that charisma and those recommendations and started them, and then they come to you. What is the conversation like with people who are bought into that? Is it tough to get them to change course?
Brad McKay: Oh, it's awful. It's absolutely awful because most of the time I can just sort of say, okay, well, this is what we need to do, and these are the facts, and this is the direction that I'd like you to head in. And we get a medical plan. But if somebody's coming in, then it's really difficult because you've got to unlearn them and then learn them. So it takes twice as long, sometimes ten times as long, because you've got to pick out all of the weeds from the facts. And often there are like little grains of truth in what they're following. But the big picture doesn't really match up with what's going on with their health.
I find it quite difficult to have those conversations because I have to say, well, this part of it's right, but the other nine tenths of it is not right. And why is that not right? So it does create very long consultations sometimes, and it's very hard to also speak against somebody who's very popular based on your patient's blood tests that are in front of you or the latest evidence that's showing that their podcast that they did two years ago was wrong. So it is very difficult and hard to navigate that with a lot of patients.
Christy Harrison: You mentioned, too, this idea of encouraging people to trust their GPs, but also the idea that people are sometimes desperate for help and they don't necessarily get it within the conventional system. I think many people are attracted to wellness and alternative medicine because they feel disillusioned with the conventional system. They don't feel like they've gotten answers. They've gotten the runaround, or maybe they've encountered non empathetic GPs in the past or other healthcare providers.
From your perspective, because you are a conventional medical doctor and a science communicator, and you also have this history of your own journey with health and wellness issues, how do you navigate that with patients for anyone in the audience who's in that boat? Because, again, I know I have people listening have been very disillusioned with the conventional healthcare system and have chronic illnesses like chronic fatigue or other things that are poorly understood, take a long time to diagnose, often misdiagnose, and they feel wary of going back to conventional healthcare. So what would you say to someone in that position?
Brad McKay: I would basically encourage people to find a doctor that they get along with. I think that's super important. I think people get very disillusioned because they see the same person and they try to do what's required through mainstream medicine. They go back to the same doctor. If your doctor's not listening to you, if they don't understand you, if your personalities don't match, all of these things can get in the way of actually providing you with healthcare. So I do encourage people to find somebody that they do like, even if you have to do a telehealth consultation with somebody on the other side of the country.
If it's somebody who's the expert in their field, who's following evidence based medicine and is also personable, but then you're really hitting the sweet spot. But there's no point in really seeing somebody who's promising everything but isn't based in evidence based medicine because they really don't know what they're doing. They may tell you with confidence that you're going to be better, but if it's not really based on science, you're really blundering through the wilderness.
I have patients who don't get along with me, and that's fine, that's okay. I'm happy to acknowledge it. I encourage my patients, if we're not getting the results that they're wanting, then tell me. And I think you're wanting a doctor who's also happy to take criticism and happy to work with you. And if I'm not the right person for the job, then fine, we can find somebody else for you, or you can find somebody else for your health needs as well.
I think people just get very disgruntled with medicine when they come across a grumpy doctor who's really burnt out from work at the end of the day and they just want to get home to their family and pet their dog. And you're talking about all of the problems that are going on with your health and they're just very disinterested. Either it's the wrong person, it's the wrong time of the day, you probably need them when they're in the morning with some coffee. People are human. So just because somebody's grumpy and awful doesn't mean that all of mainstream medicine is terrible.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that's good advice. And I think shopping around is helpful for a lot of reasons. I mean, I think it's tough. I'm in the US where it's a for-profit healthcare system, where it's hard to get access financially to care. I've heard people in Australia and other countries with nationalized medicine say that that can be hard for other reasons in terms of waiting lists and access to specialists and stuff like that. If someone is navigating that, what can they do in the meantime? Or when access is limited in that way.
Brad McKay: Yeah. So from an Australian perspective, you're really wanting a family medicine practitioner who can advocate on your behalf, because it is a horrible system. So if you wanted to get things done through the public health system, then often you need to be waiting for three months, six months, twelve months or more. If you're wanting an operation, if you're wanting to get in to see a clinic, then sometimes the waiting lists are six to twelve months.
If there's more of an urgency, then sometimes your doctor, your GP, can advocate on your behalf and sort of like try to push you up the list rather than you just being a number. So there are ways of finding your way through. If we're talking about a system like the UK as well, it's also a bit weird because your people are in locations, so you have to go back to the one clinic or you have to see that one family practitioner and so you don't have often the ability to go outside that network. And so if you're seeing a GP who you're assigned to and you're not getting along, that's awful.
I have a lot of friends who are over there who save up their money and go and see a private doctor just because they're not getting the results that they're wanting from the GP that they're assigned to see. So this creates this whole other avenue through the private health system. Even in the UK where people should be able to access public care, often they don't get along with the doctor that they're meant to be going to. Often healthcare is a little bit cheaper in Australia and in the UK compared to America. So yeah there are pluses and minuses.
Christy Harrison: Yeah it's definitely not perfect anywhere, I don't think. And that opens the door for alternative practitioners. I tend to think of it like the conventional healthcare system is far from perfect and I also have many chronic conditions that I've had to shop around for different providers and find someone in the conventional system who actually specializes in what I have and can deal with it and knows how to diagnose it or whatever it is. And now I have a great healthcare team and Im happy. But 10/20 years ago I was tearing my hair out trying to find help for what was ailing me and the symptoms that had no name, that nobody could figure out what they were. Alternative medicine was very attractive to me at that time. So it was dieting and exercise and ultimately disordered eating, which I didn't see as disordered at the time to try to manage it.
Brad McKay: And I think this is one of the big things as well. If you don't have enough money and you're trying to access healthcare and it's far too expensive for you to get, then what else is there? You've got the Internet and you've got influencers. And so a lot of people are driven towards following what's online because that's all that they're getting. They don't have the ability, they don't have the privilege to actually have a chat with the doctor about it. They don't have the funds to actually have tests done.
And so what is free and available and online and in your pocket, on your shelf, it's your phone. And so this is really where people will get a lot of their health advice and where fads and different diets and different healthy wellness options will come into being because that's all that people have options for. And it's great to talk about, like seeing your doctor and to see a professional. Also, if you're privileged enough to be able to afford it or have the insurance that you're able to get it. Often people aren't in that situation.
Christy Harrison: That's right. It's so much easier. It's a more seamless experience. You're not having to wait to see a provider or pay to get access. It feels so much less onerous in that way. And also, I think in some ways, it feels like, what's the harm? Especially when it comes to things like diets or supplements or things like that, where they're seen as natural and what could possibly go wrong if it doesn't work? It's just gonna be a harmless placebo. What would you say to that?
Brad McKay: Sort of like waving a red flag at a bull for me. "What's the harm?" I suppose the harm is multiple levels.
