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Dr. Josef (00:00.614)
Yeah, so, I mean, it’s 5.50 in the morning, yeah, so it’s, it’s bright and early. You got me up early. Yeah.

Ahmad (00:07.681)
Dude, I love you. Well, you look great. Your hair’s amazing. You know, I got no hair. Look at that. Your hair’s amazing. I’m wearing a hat because it’s bloody cold here. I’m sitting next to my heater in my little studio in the garden. But you’re out in Utah, aren’t you?

Dr. Josef (00:27.038)
Yeah, yeah, Southern Utah, so kind of by Las Vegas, St. George area. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Zion. I think you, I think I asked you, I think you went through there. Yeah.

Ahmad (00:35.977)
Yeah, I’ve been there twice. I love it. I love Zion National Park. I love the hiking and the trails. I love Bryce Canyon. I spent some time in Utah, Salt Lake City, doing a fellowship with a professor in foot and ankle surgery and that was fun. Yeah, it’s a nice part of the world. It’s nice. But you’re an Aussie.

Dr. Josef (00:40.108)
Yeah.

Dr. Josef (00:53.678)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Josef (00:59.634)
Yeah, yeah, I’m from I’m from Sydney and ended up here for specialty training. So I came to the US to pursue psychiatry residency and then I met my wife here we had a kid the rest is history I wasn’t going anywhere.

Ahmad (01:15.305)
It’s the same story. I met my wife and then boom, you got stuck. And yeah, I spent six months in Sydney doing a fellowship in foot and ankle surgery there as well, so Sydney is an interesting place for sure.

Dr. Josef (01:20.888)
Yeah.

Dr. Josef (01:34.922)
Yeah, sounds like you’ve been all over the place.

Ahmad (01:37.777)
I have, I’m old. But you’ve got, listen, you’re the host of your own podcast and you’re quite prolific. I think in this year alone, you’ve what, published 83 or something like that episodes, is that right?

Dr. Josef (01:40.406)
Yeah. Heh. Yeah.

Dr. Josef (01:48.674)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Josef (01:55.138)
I’m not even counting, it’s probably somewhere around there, yeah.

Ahmad (01:59.353)
It’s amazing. And I got on to you because one of my previous guests was like, you need to speak to Joseph. Joseph is amazing. He’s a consultant psychiatrist. He’s an MD and he doesn’t like drugs. And I was like, what? This is amazing. So tell me, how did you get into this? Deprescribing and getting people off meds.

Dr. Josef (02:26.326)
Oh, yeah. So I guess. Yeah. So here’s, here’s the story. Like I, and you’ll hear this is like a cliche from like so many psychiatrists and therapists and people like that. I mean, you all, you all end up in mental health because you’re kind of fucked up in some way and you’re looking for your own help. And at least for me growing up, you know, I was, I was reading a lot. I was into philosophy and I was into psychology and then I don’t know, it was just

kind of books and coaches was where I turned when I couldn’t figure things out. And so I got a lot out of that. I honestly did. And when I ended up kind of getting dragged to turn, I won’t say that I ended up going to medical school. And I thought that going into psychiatry eventually, I’m like, you know, here’s something interesting, like

You know, I love like personal development. I also really enjoy philosophy, thinking about, you know, meaning of life type questions. This could be a cool specialty where I could combine those things. Naturally interested in it, been doing it for a long time, seeing the benefits. That’s great. You know, how good is that? And so I go into psychiatry. But after medical school, I go to the US and I’m not saying Australia is a lot

better than the US or anything like that in terms of these problems with psychiatry. But the US is a bigger market, there’s more money here. And so I think it tends to accentuate some of the issues I’m about to talk about. And so when I get to the US, I quickly discover that it’s none of those things that I really thought it was going to be. I figured I might come in and I’d be working in these great systems that had really developed

psychological care, social work, things like that. Because, I mean, my impression at the time and also in my gut was that a lot of the problems that led to people becoming depressed and anxious and having problems were really hardship problems. And I’m not trying to say there’s no issues when someone kind of comes out of the womb and it’s like, hey, it’s clear they have problems or someone becomes…

Dr. Josef (04:44.47)
you know, develops a schizophrenic episode and it looks very classic in its presentation and yeah, that’s probably going to need medications on and off. Those things do exist, but here’s where I think I differ. I think the majority of problems, overwhelmingly, I think like 95% of problems, that’s a conservative number for me, are due to life stresses almost entirely. And so that might be something that differentiates me from other psychiatrists in terms of that.

Ahmad (05:05.284)
Mm.

Dr. Josef (05:13.29)
gut feeling of, you’re in the emergency room, things walking through the door. I think it’s 95% life hardship problems. And so what I saw when I went to the US was essentially that the systems I worked in were really underdeveloped in terms of supporting people with life hardship. There were not great social supports, not great psychological supports, but what we did have was we had drugs and we had lots of them and they were easy to prescribe.

And so that’s what we did. And it became this kind of cookbook style medicine, which probably isn’t that difficult for a lot of people to relate to because it’s really kind of crept into a lot of the usual visits that we have now, this fast in and out med check transactional type of medicine. And so, oh, you’re depressed, you know, let’s start you on this, you’ve got, you know, and, oh, it’s not working, we’ll just up the dose.

Ahmad (06:02.102)
Mmm.

Dr. Josef (06:11.946)
or we’ll swap you to a new med. And I guess what I was seeing was that we, as a profession, kind of given up really wanting to help people in a more comprehensive way, a way I honestly thought they deserved to be helped. And in the, you know, going in the spirit of efficiency, we just started giving them meds and I can go into why that’s a big problem. But that was it, that’s where this came from. It was just something in my gut that felt

Ahmad (06:25.59)
Yeah.

Dr. Josef (06:42.094)
off about it and I’ve been running with it for like, you know, a long time now.

Ahmad (06:48.749)
Good for you, man, that you saw the light. Now I’ve spoken to some other psychiatrists. There’s one in particular, Dr. Rachel Brown here in the UK. She has a carnivore shrink on Instagram. And she thinks actually there’s a lot of mental illness occurring because of diet and poor gut health. Now I know you said lifestyle hardships. What about lifestyle choices? How much of that, like what people are eating and drinking and all this ultra processed food?

Dr. Josef (06:51.906)
Yeah.

Ahmad (07:18.125)
wrecking the gut biome. Do you think of that or do you think that’s related or you factor that into anything?

Dr. Josef (07:28.146)
I mean, I believe in that stuff a lot and I’m constantly recommending people try elimination diets with the carnivore being the most significant elimination diet because you may pull away gluten and dairy and stick with the other things but after you keep on pulling things away, you essentially get left with the carnivore diet. So what do I think about that? I think that…

it can play a big role. I think that when someone has co-occurring autoimmune problems or co-occurring gut problems, it’s a massive red flag for me that they need to at least be doing that if they have depression and anxiety. I mean, it’s screaming at you in the face that these things could be linked. And I also think that gut problems and dietary

Ahmad (08:13.269)
Mm.

Dr. Josef (08:24.95)
I’m going to say it like almost like gateway drugs or gateway problems because if you’re on the wrong diet and you’re feeling anxious or you’re feeling depressed or jittery or having a difficulty focusing and that’s in the background, sometimes I think that can kind of grease the wheels where you’re just like, you know what, maybe there’s something wrong with me because I just never feel quite right. And when the media is kind of blasting you in the face with, oh, hey, you know, depression, it’s so underdiagnosed and so undertreated.

Ahmad (08:46.161)
Mmm.

Dr. Josef (08:54.866)
And then like, okay, maybe it’s this thing called major depressive disorder. And they don’t really give the context of, you know, the causes of it. And you just go and see your doctor and get on the med. But it’s, yeah, I think it can play a big role. Yeah.

Ahmad (09:09.05)
It’s even worse than that. Maybe you don’t feel like you’re a man or maybe you don’t feel like a woman because you’re in your wrong body. And maybe you need to take some pills and have surgery and we’ll fix that for you. I mean, it’s getting to a point where it’s getting kind of scary, I think. And there’s a lot of confusion in young people and young adults. And I don’t know, I think a lot of it’s driven by the diet.

Dr. Josef (09:33.099)
It’s-

Dr. Josef (09:36.65)
Yeah, well diet and I mean, you brought something else up, you know, we talk about gender confusion and all of that. And I mean, some of these things are I worry about the media implications of it. Because when you have media companies really picking up these political things, I mean, it’s no small thing to transition your gender or to take hormone blockers. I see a lot of these people and you know, the hormone.

the things that change your hormones, that cause all these mood problems, there’s this, sometimes they make people suicidal. And the parallel that I like to make between, well, that I think of between all of the gender identity crisis going on and mental health is that I think people hear about it all the time. I think that it’s kind of ubiquitous in the media. And I think if that’s all you hear, that

maybe you’re in the wrong body, or you know, maybe you have this, you know, this brain disease called depression, it starts to, in a way, it can start to change how we interpret the things happening to us. Because, you know, why are you unhappy? And you’re in school, you know, there could be a multitude of reasons. But if it’s politics, or the media are running with certain topics, then you’re just like, or maybe it’s this, you know, and I think a lot of the times it isn’t.

Ahmad (10:34.227)
Mmm.

Dr. Josef (11:02.083)
I think a lot of the reasons that people aren’t happy can be fairly universal things if you dig into them.

Ahmad (11:11.413)
I agree. I’ve always thought, I’m not sure about giving drugs and medication for these psychiatric conditions like depression. I’ve always thought, what does that actually do? I’ve always been skeptical, even going from med school and my training. I think that one of the reasons why I like surgery was, in particular, orthopedic surgery, it’s either broken or it’s not. And if it’s broken, you put some plates and screws and fix it. And the…

I was never one for medication. I never really saw the application of it in a lot of conditions. I mean, obviously for some things you need drugs. I get that. But I just felt a lot of things didn’t make sense. I always went for med school saying, why do, why does this happen? Why’d you get psoriasis? Why’d you get rheumatoid arthritis? And no one ever had an answer. Why’d you get depression? Why do you have anxiety? And no one just, you know, you’re born like that. It’s your genes. No one knows. Idiopathic. And it’s kind of like, it always got me really frustrated. And

I don’t know about your med school training, but it was very much of, you know, here’s anatomy, here’s physiology, here’s pathology, here’s the drug. And that was it. And that left me always just asking questions. Like this doesn’t make sense to me. Um, and I got, I don’t know about you, but you know, I’m 48 now. So I’ve witnessed over the years when I’m taking a history, people coming to me with maybe, you know, one or two medications in their, you know, drug list to now like eight or 10.

Dr. Josef (12:31.79)
Thank you.

Ahmad (12:37.693)
and maybe one in 20 people saying they’ve got, they’re on an antidepressant to like one in three or one in four. And it’s like this explosion, like seriously, like is everyone not depressed? And why is that the case? Surely we should be looking into why people feel like this and addressing that rather than just say, here’s another pill. And I wasn’t really aware until quite recently the significant side effects of some of these medications. Like I didn’t know about PSSD.

I didn’t know about the fact that, you know, some antidepressants could actually make you suicidal, which kind of makes, kind of bizarre. But you know, I had, you know, you’ve had Kim Wichank and I’ve had her on now as well, talking about how her husband passed away. It’s absolutely shocking. What made you aware that there were problems with these drugs and actually, you know what, the fittest, healthiest version of you is not being on drugs. Why did you not just go down the prescribing route like everyone else?

Dr. Josef (13:32.567)
Yeah, yeah. I mean it’s a question I kind of ask myself because I mean…

Yeah, it was evident to me when I was in my training that I was someone that was having more of these questions or at least I was the one being vocal about it. I mean, at a certain point, I think it’s personality and I mean, I’m like a confrontational person by nature. I and so things, I don’t shy away shy away from things and arguments. And I definitely got kind of my ass handed to me several times in residency for not kind of going on with things and

think that can sometimes be baked into the person. So, you know, I’ll set that context. So maybe there’s people that think about it. In fact, I do think some people think about it, because sometimes people I used to train with, who I didn’t really know reach out to me and they say that they really enjoy my social media and they enjoy my perspective. And I mean, they would have never said anything at the time. And so to pick up the thread, you know,

how did I start looking into all of these side effects like PSSD? It kind of goes off what I was saying earlier. When you get to the point and you start to realize, you know, we’re not really supporting people in the way they really deserve to be supported, you know, with the resources and such. And we’re just giving them medications. You start to ask yourself like, so is there a problem with that? Because that feels wrong in my heart that if I’m not helping people with the root of what’s going on, then.

there’s got to be a downside. And so I started looking for risks. And when I went down that path, I realized, shit, there’s actually like a lot of risks with these things. And I mean, the well known ones are all the metabolic problems and the weight gain, which is just devastating for the women. A lot of women have a lot of problems with the weight gain. And then there’s also sexual and then there was that sexual dysfunction while they’re on it. And as I dug further, I realized

Dr. Josef (15:36.35)
Okay, there’s a lot of things outside of these immediate effects that happen on the drugs, which we’re not noticing. And probably the two main ones were protracted withdrawal and PSSD. And they had been completely missed by the medical community, but hugely talked about online. And they were essentially just ruining people’s lives. I mean, people were killing themselves or getting physician assisted suicide to end their lives.

Ahmad (16:05.228)
Oh wow.

Dr. Josef (16:06.05)
and completely being ignored. And when I started discovering protracted withdrawal injuries and PSSD, I was just like, this is madness what we’re doing in the US. The US is worse than the UK, by the way. You guys don’t do, I think, at least not, you don’t on paper say antidepressants are first line treatments for depression and anxiety, but in the US they are. And so, you know, we’re putting people with mild depression and anxiety on drugs, which can essentially demolish their

and completely ruin their sex life. And we’re not telling them about this. And so when that happened for me, I was just like, there is no way I’m giving people antidepressants unless it’s the most severe case and we’ve tried everything else. You know, in that case, I think you take the risk, but otherwise, you know, I would stay away from that.

Ahmad (16:56.061)
How can they be doing this without telling patients of the risk? Isn’t that part of informed consent? I don’t understand. They just say, here, take this pill.

Dr. Josef (17:07.934)
Yeah, so they should be doing it now. I mean, at least in the UK. So the I mean,

My story is like a long one. I mean, there’s a lot of things in my past I could go into like, you know, I spent time working for the FDA and in pharmaceutical companies and drug safety roles, we can talk about the mechanics of that and, you know, and why they miss things, you know, but the essentially for a long time, they’re not they’re not in the labels. Do it. Just just rip it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Tell me. Okay. So why I think so. So I guess

Ahmad (17:36.237)
Do it, do it. Just, just, just do it, yeah. Tell me. And then you, and then, and then, and then you need to, and then you need to go back into protracted withdrawal. Hands up, confession. I don’t know, I don’t know anything about that. I actually never even heard of this diagnosis, protracted withdrawal. So make sure to come back to that one.

Dr. Josef (17:52.268)
Yeah.

Dr. Josef (17:55.886)
So.

Dr. Josef (18:00.974)
Okay, well let’s go into it. So here’s the question, I’m going to rephrase it. Why are serious problems with drugs missed by FDA, pharma companies, and patients are left to their own devices to advocate them? So, having worked, okay, so maybe a narrative is better. When I discovered all these things in residency, I was really disenchanted.

I was reading about them. I was just like, this is awful. How come no one’s talking about it? I actually wanted to quit. And instead of doing that, I started doing drug safety research and I said, well, you know, I’m going to change things. I’m going to go and do fellowships and drug development, work for Johnson & Johnson’s subsidiary Janssen. And then I went to the FDA as a drug regulator over there and I got to sort of see the mechanics on the inside. And I’ll cover the FDA quickly.

Dr. Josef (19:00.618)
There is.

I think it can sometimes hard for people to realize how powerful drug companies can be, but when you’re a drug company…

Dr. Josef (19:16.202)
your survival really depends on doctors having the most favorable impression of your drug, right? So there can be a huge amount of what doctors really don’t see as marketing but is out there and then doctors are exposed to it. And so what do doctors see? They see medical journals, they go to conferences, a lot of this stuff comes out of pharmaceutical companies and it’s really designed in a way to present the drug most favorably. And so

Dr. Josef (19:50.43)
We don’t, we, doctors kind of enter the practicing world with a bias where they’ve heard a lot of positive things about the drug and they don’t really hear negative things. And so these doctors, they end up sitting in roles at the FDA and going into pharmaceutical companies and they’ll have a lot of automatic thoughts, things like, well, you know, with things like depression, the automatic thought there is these are life-saving drugs, you know, minimum side effects, you know, really safe, really helping this under-treated.

condition of depression. I think you come into it with this bias. Let’s talk about these things like retracted withdrawal injury and PSSD. Why do they get missed? People start reporting them and they go to the pharmaceutical companies and the FDA. Because there’s been such an effort from these companies to sort of…

dismiss concerns because they have to, it’s a commercial incentive. These things kind of come out. And so when the suicide thing happened in the early 90s, it was like, you know, the suicide risk with antidepressants isn’t really real. In fact, this is actually people who are, you know, maybe Scientologists who are kind of blowing it out of proportion. They have a secret agenda. Their agenda is really to say, you know, you should believe in what our church teaches and that is that, you know, you should do auditing or self-development or whatever it is.

hell with the antidepressants. And so they craft this kind of narrative that people out there hate the drugs and that’s why they’re over exaggerating the problems. Or, you know, these are just people who just say you should pull yourself up by your bootstraps. They have outdated things. And so I think a lot of people automatically have those feelings when they hear risks about psychiatric drugs, especially physicians that, you know, people are attacking us and they’re out to get us. And so

you know, you’d be at the FDA and you’re a doctor just like all the other ones who have been trained next to you. And these are the things that you’ve heard a lot of the time in your training, you know, people, they’re coming for the drugs, you know, they hate them, they have this agenda, and you have to be very skeptical because, you know, people are trying to stigmatize these mental health conditions. And then you start to hear stuff that’s just unbelievable. Oh, PSSD, you know, people taking these drugs and completely losing their sexual functioning.

Dr. Josef (22:14.606)
And I also think with the FDA, you know, when they hear things like that, they go, this is unbelievable, this couldn’t even be something that’s real. And this is probably someone confusing that performance anxiety with, you know, something else or this is some kind of hysteria going on. And then they leave it alone because they go, because it’s also difficult for you to really identify these risks.

unless there’s a clear objective finding, you know, and for a lot of the time there isn’t and we’ll kind of go into that. But there is some now for PSSD. And so they kind of write it off and they get all these reports coming in. And I think it’s very easy just to dismiss it as just being, I don’t know, just noise or just some, you know, something coming in that’s being confused.

Ahmad (23:02.777)
Could it be?

Could it be, so it sounds like they’re ideologically captured. They’re ideologically, you know, believing these things are amazing and they cannot be anything but safe. So that’s one element. Isn’t there some kind of element of financial and career capture where they’re thinking, you know what, if we question these, we’re going to lose our positions here, you know, we’ve got the hand that feeds us, we’re not going to bite that off and criticize it. So.

Isn’t there that element as well? As well as the ideological capture?

Dr. Josef (23:41.57)
Yeah, gosh, the FDA is kind of complicated. Yes. So the kind of the there’s a few things going on, I think, in the structure of places like the FDA. So the first thing I mentioned is FDA is kind of I think it’s like 50%, maybe even more funded by the pharmaceutical industry. And so what happens? Yeah.

Ahmad (24:00.777)
Yeah, I think it’s 70 to 80%. It’s quite a lot.

Dr. Josef (24:07.378)
And so with that comes a lot of stipulations. They say, well, if we’re going to fund most of your operations, you need to approve our protocols in a certain time period. When they come in, you need to approve our drugs when we give you the full dossier of phase three studies. And so all of the resources in the FDA, at least from when I was there, was towards those activities that came under, I think it was PEDUFA is what it’s called. And so there’s actually just not a lot of time to look into post-marketing safety concerns because you’re always doing drug approval stuff.

because it’s stipulated in the funding. And so there’s that part of it. But another part of it is there’s a careerism as well. So a lot of people in the FDA go to pharmaceutical companies. That’s what I did. You know, I stayed at the FDA for a little bit and then went and joined pharma. My salary tripled when I went over there. It’s kind of crazy how much money you can make in the pharmaceutical industry. And so a part of it is probably not.

you know, not wanting to be seen as someone who’s difficult to work with, because when everyone is kind of focusing on those goals of, Hey, we’re just going to approve these things because those are our metrics and that’s what we need for our funding. And, you know, there’s no real systems in place to investigate these horrid post marketing things. Like why do it, right? If, if, if no one really cares, if that’s not really like the metrics, unless there’s some big kind of media scandal, I think you can just coast.

you can be seen as easy to work with. And then eventually you kind of get, you just kind of wander into a pharmaceutical company and with a high six figure salary.

Ahmad (25:47.709)
Yep, I would say that’s not just a problem with the FDA. That’s a problem with a lot of places all around the world, regulatory bodies, politicians, corporations, everybody. It’s almost inbuilt in a system where you just look the other way, keep your head down, worry about your job and your promotion. And you know what? Things ain’t right. Well, it’s someone else’s problem. They can fix it. But you just…

Dr. Josef (25:47.916)
Yeah.

Yep.

Ahmad (26:17.273)
Carry on, same same.

Dr. Josef (26:20.718)
I think a lot of people will relate to that. Anyone who’s worked in a corporation, I think has had that same, they probably had that same experience where they’re just like, you know, it’s not my problem. And it’s sad because that’s the way it works. And let me talk a little bit about the pharmaceutical industry from when I was a safety physician over there. I think, yeah, one thing that’s kind of interesting is, and I’m gonna say this.

Ahmad (26:40.153)
Shoot.

Dr. Josef (26:46.934)
Drug side effects that are identified during the initial randomized controlled trials, they’re usually pretty good. And so, you know, the company will write them up, it’s well documented, it will go to the regulatory agency, it’ll be in the label. And so we actually pick up a lot of problems, not all of them, a lot of problems that happen that are common and that happen when people are in the drugs. We are pretty terrible at long-term side effects. And so…

After the drug is on the market and those short-term side effects are in the label, pharmaceutical companies, they really don’t need to talk about the risks of the drug anymore because it’s like they put it in the label. And so drug companies, just like any other company that wants to make money, they have marketing departments. And so they start to generate the conference material and the medical journals and…

And essentially at this point, this is where the kind of the influencing starts to happen. You don’t have to talk about the risks anymore. You could essentially publish 100 pieces about the drug that is kind of positive or you know, hey, this doctor used it in this alternative indication. And that was very interesting kind of alluding to maybe you should try it here. And so over time, that commercial force because, you know, what incentive is there to talk about the risks of the drug? There’s there’s none.

especially when it’s a crowded marketplace and there may be a million other statins. You don’t wanna be the one that’s associated with, oh, this one has a little bit of a higher risk of this. And so, yeah, and so they don’t do it. And so they steer as far away from talking about the risks as possible. And I remember being in the drug company, I was looking after a drug and I think it had some, you know, there was, well, I don’t wanna kind of give it away too much. There was a problem.

Ahmad (28:10.498)
Hmm.

Ahmad (28:19.65)
Yeah.

Dr. Josef (28:39.294)
and it was a serious one. And it was recognized. We’d picked up on it, we’d put it in the label, but it was something that would definitely cause people to think twice about taking it. And my division, we really wanted to publish a paper about this, this is a complicated problem, we wanna help clinicians with the reasoning process, we wanna let them know what interventions we’ve used in our clinical trial to help them. And so, you know, when doctors see this in the real world, they know what to do. And it was shot down.

Ahmad (28:49.281)
Mmm.

Dr. Josef (29:08.95)
And it was shut down by one of the heads who essentially just said, you know what guys, we really don’t want to make a bigger deal out of this than it is. It’s already in the label and let’s not blow it out of proportion. And I think that’s what happens in a lot of these companies because they don’t need to. They say, you know, it’s in the label. We’ve met our regulatory standard. Why would we generate these articles where a doctor is going to walk away and say, well,

Ahmad (29:24.329)
Holy moly.

Dr. Josef (29:39.29)
actually, this drug actually seems kind of complicated. This is complicated thing that happens and you need to know quite a few things. They don’t want people to see that. They want to know this drug works for that. The side effects are manageable. Because that’s going to create this kind of favorable easy impression where I’m just going to write this thing and it’s all good. And I think that kind of happens all over the place. And

Ahmad (29:43.618)
Mmm.

Ahmad (30:08.298)
Yeah.

Dr. Josef (30:09.214)
And yeah, so that’s what happens in the drug companies. And we started this talk, yeah. I mean, but here’s the thing, it sounds awful, right? You know, it’s just like, and it, but the thing about it is this is just commerce. This is what happens when you have companies that have an agenda to sell things. I think people kind of got, sometimes they get duped in a way, they’re just like, you know, these drug companies are, you know.

Ahmad (30:12.697)
I, I

Dr. Josef (30:38.914)
They’re really wanting to help and don’t get me wrong, there’s some things that they do to help people and when the drugs are used in the right way, they can be life saving but their objective is to get that drug used by as many people as possible and to hell with the people who don’t need it and who are hurt by it because that’s what they need to be successful and profitable.

Ahmad (30:56.729)
Hmm

Ahmad (31:02.869)
100%. I mean, look, I’m not a communist, mate. I’m definitely not a communist. I think, you know, if you make something or you, or you provide a service, you could, you should get paid for it. And the better the product, the better the service, the more you should be rewarded for it. Damn right. Okay. That’s how I think. Um, but the problem is that balance, isn’t it? Now there seems to be this rapacious greed, this, you know, just, I hope you’ve had a COVID test. That was a joke.

Dr. Josef (31:07.678)
Yeah.

Ahmad (31:31.185)
And there’s just this crazy amount of like greed in the system where they just want to make more and more money and to hell with ethics and morals and doing the right thing. And I think that’s what’s worrying. I mean, going back to drugs and safety, I think one word about with these regulatory bodies, America or Britain, Europe, whatever, is that their job should be to act as this

Dr. Josef (31:33.142)
Ha ha.

Ahmad (31:57.549)
you know, safeguard mechanism between the patients and the population and these drug companies and make sure we’re safe from their potential, you know, harm that they’re going to inflict on us and that their drugs are safe. And, you know, yes, they might do these short term studies and they prove, look, this is a safety profile and these are the risks. One, we now know that these trials can be very fraudulent in their own. They’re only one small data set.

There’s a bias involved and side effects aren’t just short term, they’re short term, they’re midterm and they’re long term. And we don’t seem to have a way of really catching these complications and monitoring them and acting on them. And that’s a worrying incentive. I mean, yeah, you’re right. If most people knew the side effects, they would think twice about taking them. And I think the problem that we have now is not only the regulatory body just stamping approvals. We’ve even got

doctors now in the clinic consultation rooms, just saying to patients, yep, here, take a drug. And I don’t even think they’re giving proper informed consent, because they don’t know any better themselves. They just hear the latest thing by the drug rep or their guidelines or the meeting they went to and go, great, all right, I’ll prescribe this. So I think there’s multi-level failures. You know what I mean? I don’t know how to address that. Just, there’s so many things.

Dr. Josef (33:21.07)
I think that’s it. No, no. Yeah, I mean, that’s, that is what it is. It’s a multi-level failure because, you know, when you

Dr. Josef (33:33.875)
You have a system that is essentially set up to get drugs to people who might not need them. Then it’s not like a positive risk benefit for all of them. Maybe these antidepressants would be great for the most severe cases, but that’s not how we’re marketing them because that’s not profitable. And then you’d say, well, it’s the doctors though. Okay, we’ll market it like crazy because that’s what we do. We’re a company and we have a commercial agenda.

we’ll leave it to the learned intermediary, the physician, to make those decisions for the patient and make sure that they’re really getting it. What I see here in the US is the incentives we give to physicians is all wrong, especially in the commercial system because we compensate people based on encounters. The number of people you see per day.

rather than any kind of outcome. And so…

You know, that’s why we have the 15 minute med check over in the US in psychiatry that everyone just, you know, we sort of scoff at it, but everyone does it because you can make a lot more money doing a 15 minute med check. And when someone comes in with a 15 minute med check and you’re a psychiatrist, and they start talking about being sad, well, what do you want to do? You want to say, okay, well, tell me about it. Well, my dad died. I lost my job.

And you know, I’m feeling like there’s absolutely no hope for me to get my life back on track. And I’m just feeling really lost. Um, in a 15 minute visit, a person might break down in tears. You might have to usher them out into the wedding room, crying. People look at you and just go, what the hell just happened in there? And, but it also could just be really uncomfortable, like to get into those types of hopeless conversations with people where it’s, it, it’s depressing in a way, because there, there is a lot of

Ahmad (35:10.93)
Mmm.

Ahmad (35:20.501)
Bye.

Dr. Josef (35:33.046)
hopeless situations where you’re just like, man, I really wish I could plug you in with like a therapist and some support services and we could help you in this, but we know we can’t do that because it doesn’t really exist and the appointments are really far out. And so over time, you end up saying, well, I’m not going to take the conversation in that way. I’m going to take it in this way. Well, you know, are you having difficulty sleeping? Tell me about your appetite. Okay, you know, are you having any fatigue? Well,

Ahmad (35:52.281)
Mmm.

Dr. Josef (36:02.782)
You know, you actually have something called major depressive disorder as a medical condition. It’s nothing to be ashamed about. And we’ve got these safe and effective drugs and they’re called antidepressants. They’ll make you less depressed and maybe you want to take one of them. It’s a much more sterilized conversation that’s easy to have in 15 minutes. And it makes the doctor’s life a lot easier and then they can just kind of churn through. And this is especially true for family medicine doctors who are doing

Ahmad (36:17.493)
Yeah.

Dr. Josef (36:32.262)
most of the frontline care for people and how are you going to look after someone’s blood pressure and all of these different problems and then on top of that help them with the complicated problems that make people depressed you can’t. But we kind of, yeah so I mean we’ve set up a horrid system that really incentivizes these very transactional situations where people, they don’t even talk to them about the risks.

And this is going to be so obvious, I think, for anyone listening out there. It’s everyone’s seen it. You know, everyone has seen it with their own doctor. The way you get antibiotics and different things. I’ll just take it. It’s fine. Okay. See you in a couple of months. It’s, it’s, it’s awful. Yeah.

Ahmad (37:14.877)
Yeah, Joseph, you’ve nailed it. You’ve absolutely fricking nailed it. You know, I had consultations of half an hour, follow up and new, which was really crazy for an orthopedic consultant. Like all my colleagues up and down the corridors, like 10 minutes, some even five. Yep, your wound looks great, your extras are fine. All right, bye, see you in two months. I mean, that is literally like what the consultation’s like.

Yep. You’ve got knee arthritis. I’ll do a knee replacement. Yep. I’ll schedule in when you want it. Boom. Off you go. Uh, you know, I was a orthopedic, vernacular surgeon. I shouldn’t say I was. You might want to ask me about that. All fair. Just before we started recording, you were like, what’s happening in your end. And, you know, you’re more than welcome to ask me that in a bit. Um, but when I was practicing, you know, I, I changed me in the last five years. I would start saying to people like, you know,

Tell me, okay, forget about your ankle pain, your Achilles pain. You know, what’s life like? Are you under any stress? Of course I’m under stress. Who’s not in stress? I was like, okay, well talk about it. Like what’s stress? And you know, things would start coming out. You know, oh, my son has got this problem. He’s being bullied and this. My husband’s got this heart condition. I’m being stressed at work, blah, blah. I’m not sleeping well. I’m eating crap food. I hate my weight.

Suddenly I’m not exercising, I’m not got time for this or that. And suddenly you’re like, well, no wonder, you know, your Achilles is hurting. Your stress levels are through the ceiling, you know, through the roof. You know, stress is a killer stress denatures tissue. Stress is heightens pain. You know, stress causes weight gain and insulin resistance. And, you know, I started joining all the dots and I found actually just spending time with patients and letting them speak. One, just getting things off their chest made them so much, feel so much better. One.

Like you were the first person to validate them and listen to them and just recognize what they’re going through. And that meant so much. And I realized just listening to someone can make someone feel better. Hey, who would have thought? And then when you start breaking down what the issues are and giving them little strategies, like just a little bit, not like little incremental gains. Like

Dr. Josef (39:25.442)
Mm-hmm.

Ahmad (39:35.157)
I don’t believe in changing everything in one go. You just show people, like, you could make a little change here and a little change here, and these little incremental changes will really help you in the short term and definitely in the long term. And what I found was I was actually helping this dumb orthopod, was helping people with depression and anxiety and stress and then diabetes and heart problems and God knows what else. And I was like, what the hell, man? What am I doing?

And my conversion rate, buddy, went from like 25, 30% where I would be operating in the patients. And I was proud of that because I was lower than my colleagues that were like 50%. I found that I was actually only operating in 5% of my patients. I was able to treat so much without an operation. And I think what you’re talking about is exactly what happens. Those conversations aren’t easy. It takes time. You know, I used to end up hugging my patients a lot, giving them tissue papers.

You know, it would be really, really crying, very upset, to almost cathartic, and then just feeling happy and hopeful at the end of the consultation. The patient was feeling really great, but it takes time. And sometimes spill over, I went into 40 minutes, 45 minutes, whatever. But I ran my clinic in such a way that I gave myself that slack in the system. And it’s weird, there’s other perverse…

incentives too. So the insurance companies are paying less and less for each consultation. So a surgeon is thinking, okay, whereas before I saw two patients in an hour for this amount of money five years ago, now I need to see four patients in an hour to keep earning the same amount. Maybe now I need to see six patients in an hour to earn the same amount. So and instead of saying to the insurance company, hey, you’re not paying me enough, they just go right, great. Okay, I’ll just, I’ll see the

Dr. Josef (41:05.86)
Mm-hmm.

Ahmad (41:28.825)
I’ll see more patients in less time. And that’s what I’ve witnessed here in the UK. I don’t know what it’s like in the States, but the premiums have just been dropping, dropping. It’s like a race to the bottom. It’s managed healthcare. And instead of doctors putting their feet down and saying, no, digging in their heels and saying, we’re not gonna accept this. This is diluting our care. Everyone’s just acquiesced. I’m like, yeah, okay, fine. Ten minute consultations.

And I don’t think you can practice safely or effectively in that timeframe. And that leads to what you’ve just described, go the easy path, here’s a pill. I mean, does that sound like similar to what’s going over there?

Dr. Josef (41:54.446)
Mm-hmm

Dr. Josef (42:05.462)
Sometimes it’s, yeah, it does. And I think about the orthopedic consultation where the person has some knee pain and maybe they have a very stressful life and it’s like, hey, maybe we should lose some weight and work on your stresses. But I think on the one hand, it’s like, oh, that’s kind of complicated to help this person figure that out with our resources. And then it’s also like,

Maybe, and I get really kind of sick and twisted about this stuff because I think I see it in psychiatry because we deal with a lot of people with emotional problems. Sometimes I think it’s just like, can you just shut up? Like, let’s just do this. Like, stop talking to me. I’ve got to see like three other people in this hour. And it’s just like, I just don’t want to hear what you have to say anymore. Just shut up. We’re gonna do the surgery. But in psychiatry, I think it’s just like, listen, you have a bipolar disorder.

it’s undertreated and we need to do it. And I think it kind of comes out in that way, but I think really what people are sometimes saying is just, stop talking to me about this. Why are you making things difficult for me? Let’s just, you’re in this box, you got this condition, just take this pill, lift it up and get out of here. I’ve got enough going on in my own life. So I think there’s this other side of it in there, which is just, it’s so dark. Yeah.

Ahmad (43:10.626)
Yeah.

Ahmad (43:19.705)
Bye!

Ahmad (43:23.437)
Right, it’s so true.

It’s so true. Dude, you’ve nailed it. You absolutely nailed it. And it’s like, where is this caring, empathic profession gone now? We’re meant to be listening. And I know this isn’t happening because all my patients come and tell me. They go, oh my God, I’ve never met a doctor like you. Oh my God. The last doctor just, he didn’t examine me. He just said, this is your problem, go away. And it’s very dismissive. Like you said, I’ve got my own shit going on.

You know what? I can’t be bothered listening to this. And it’s kind of sad. It’s very sad. Anyway, can I ask you something? You mentioned Church of Scientology and my ears picked up. So what’s your, so, okay, look, let me explain the background. So I started tweeting about various different things early on this year for which I’ve got myself into a whole heap of trouble.

Dr. Josef (44:05.257)
Yeah, go for it.

Dr. Josef (44:11.476)
Yeah.

Ahmad (44:26.017)
But at one point my followers went from like a thousand to like 50,000 and then this chap rang me and said, hey, I’m very wealthy and you know, what are you going to do with your Twitter following? You know, is there any way I can help you or work with you? And I was like, what is this, what’s going on here? And then it turned out, he said, I’m a member of the Church of Scientology. And you know, we’ve got this great way of treating

and psychological problems, and we’ve cured depression and anxiety and psychiatric illness. And it’s amazing. And mainstream media is attacking us for all the great work we’re doing. So yeah, that was kind of conversation. And then I asked him, you know, is the Church of Scientology a cult? And then he said, what is a cult? And I explained it to him. And then he said, no, it’s not. I went, okay. So, okay. So.

Knowing that little backstory, tell me, tell me about your experience. Now you’re gonna tell me you’re a member.

Dr. Josef (45:30.966)
With church and Scientology. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I’ve just completed auditing. No, no, it’s, yeah. So church and Scientology. There’s an interesting intersection between psychiatry and the church Scientology, you know, and I think people are kind of aware of like the Tom Cruise like rant I think was on the Today Show with Matt Lauer. It’s like it was like a meme from like 15 years ago where he’s just like

Ahmad (45:37.023)
Hahaha!

Dr. Josef (45:58.334)
he’s telling me because it’s bullshit. You know, these antidepressants are bullshit, these stimulants are bullshit. We’re not really helping people. And this guy got nailed by the media. It’s just like, Oh, Tom’s just this pull yourself up by your bootstraps kind of guy. He just he doesn’t get the complexity of these brain illnesses out there. And like, we’re all heading back to the dark ages. And honestly, I mean, let’s not be absolutists here. I mean, there’s some

cases but like I said at the start, I think it’s like 5% or less than 5% where you really need to be leaning on the drugs as the primary modality. I mean, the rest of it is completely right. You know, that we are not giving people the treatment that they deserve. Now, whether that’s a treatment that the Church of Scientology has, I mean, is up for debate. I know that their, you know, their, I guess their offer or their product, their member is something called auditing, which is like coaching, right?

Ahmad (46:35.287)
Yeah.

Dr. Josef (46:56.274)
and is what they offer better than traditional psychotherapy? Probably not for everyone is what I’m going to say. I don’t know if I would say go there and do their programs because it’s going to fix all your problems. I think you should go to a marketplace of diverse, different psychotherapeutic options and get help there. But I sometimes wonder with the Church of Scientology that I think probably there are people in there who are just like, yeah, this is wrong.

you know, that and like that we shouldn’t be putting all these people on medications and this issues. But there’s also a little bit of an agenda there because they also offer like what they offer is an alternative to that. And so and that’s okay. You know, I mean, you can have you can promote that but this the Church of Scientology has been so you know, they anytime someone brings up a problem with psychiatry.

They just say, oh, it’s a Scientologist, you know, they’re just, they’re out trying to promote their auditing and their church and their own agenda. And that’s kind of why they do it. But the thing that’ll make me very unpopular, I’m going to say it is that they’re actually pretty right about a lot of things with psychiatry. People don’t like to hear that because they want to just kind of write them off completely. But we are over-medicating people. We aren’t giving people the treatment that they deserve. I don’t think…

the cure is auditing from the church, but at least that other part I think is it’s pretty spot on.

Ahmad (48:26.701)
Yeah, no, I can’t disagree with that, buddy. Can’t disagree with that. So.

Dr. Josef (48:32.763)
And they can do some crazy things in the rest of their church and be mired in controversy and do cover-ups and all this kind of stuff. They can still have some right ideas about psychiatry. It’s not endorsing the whole, everything that they’ve ever done, but with psychiatry, I mean some of the things they say is spot-on.

Ahmad (48:43.927)
Yeah.

Ahmad (48:49.985)
Well, I mean, the thing is, you know, we just need to look back in medicine, you know, and medical history. I mean, we did some, we’ve done, we’ve done some dumb shit and we continue to do some dumb shit. You know, the more I’ve learned more now in the last year than I did at any point in my medical career, med school, you know, I’ve got, you know, I’m just beginning to understand about the, the venous section that used to take place, how they used to like purge people and humors and give mercury and arsenic and trepanning and lobotomies.

You just think, whoa, we doctors really came up with some fancy weird shit and that didn’t work and convinced ourselves. Yeah.

Dr. Josef (49:28.558)
Well, let me say this, let me like, yeah. Yeah, yeah, so we did all of that in psychiatry. Well, we, you know, lobotomies and, you know, comotherapy and locking people in ice bars and spinning them around in chairs and all this crazy shit. And now it’s just like, we’re in the 21st century and we have these drugs and they help the chemical imbalance and like, we’ve really changed things around. But another way of looking at it is like, oh, we took like,

huge amounts of the population who were having life hardship problems and we numbed their emotions so they would be less bothered by them. And then we just kind of like left them in that state, not really helping them. And to me, I think it’s going to be the next thing that we look back on and say, wow, how did everyone think it was okay to take some kid who had childhood trauma and was having problems and then just tell them they were depressed or bipolar and just…

put them on drugs and just numb them out for like decades. And then all of a sudden this person is in their thirties or forties, never really getting the help that they needed to kind of move through life with the trauma and everything. And you say, that’s barbaric, that’s horrid. How could it, how could the doctors have done this to people? And so I like to remind people, I mean, I still think in many ways where…

where we’re repeating the same problems, but yeah, this commercial incentive just like forces these treatments on people and really fucks them up in a lot of cases. And so I think it’s still happening.

Ahmad (51:00.589)
Yeah, yeah, 100% the technology has just changed, but we’re still, we’re still fracking things up and it’s just crazy. And you know, sometimes I think, you know, maybe there’s a nefarious agenda, because I am aware, I know people who are on these drugs and what I’ve noticed is they’re just blunted. Like they just don’t feel anything. They don’t, if they’re sad before they don’t feel happiness now, but they don’t feel sadness. They feel nothing.

Dr. Josef (51:06.742)
Yeah.

Ahmad (51:30.417)
And I think if you’re gonna get all crazy conspiratorial, you might say, well, the government would love that. Because if you don’t feel anything, you don’t get upset about anything. I mean, that’s the perfect population to control. You can take away people’s rights and freedoms. You can make their life shit. You can reduce their quality of living. But guess what? You don’t feel anything. You just feel nothing. It’s like wonderful.

Dr. Josef (51:51.995)
Yeah, and you tell them it’s a problem in their brain, you know, they said this doesn’t have anything to do with the policies or kind of what’s happening in the society, you know, at large. It’s just you have a brain disease, you know.

Ahmad (52:05.345)
Yeah, you’ve got chemical imbalance. I love it. You’ve got chemical imbalance. I mean, I don’t know about you. I just think there’s so much medical gaslighting going on. It’s just crazy. Everywhere I look, I just go, oh God, here we go again. Let’s just totally gaslight our patients and tell them it’s all their fault. No. So anyway.

Dr. Josef (52:10.884)
Yeah.

Dr. Josef (52:24.686)
I mean, I think I mean, the most important thing we could tell people is just like, stop relying on medical doctors and medical care to fix problems that they really can’t, you know, life hardship problems, all that stuff, you know, I think as soon as people figure that out, it’s, you know, they can come to an orthopod when they have a broken leg, get your leg fixed. But these other things, they’ll mess you up, you know, don’t rely on them for that.

Ahmad (52:52.286)
Yeah. And it might change your original problem in some way and make you feel it’s helped, but it hasn’t got rid of the root cause. Again, the problem with the mental illness thing was when I was studying it, I didn’t really understand. No one told me why you got it. No one explained it to me and no one told me an effective way to get to the root cause and problem treat effectively. It was just symptom complex. Here’s the drug. And I don’t know that just

from a common sense point of view, just doesn’t make sense to me. But can you just rattle through some of like, you know, is it just generic, all antidepressants or is there specific ones? And also the same for anti anxiolytics. So there’s a lot of people who suffer from anxiety in society. You know, what would be the main kind of complications that you see in these groups of people taking these drugs?

Dr. Josef (53:43.638)
Yeah, sure. So yeah, let me start with the sedatives first because they’re really easy. I’m going to talk about permanent side effects. I think most people know that you take Xanax too long or these sedatives, you start to get more anxious over time, they start to destroy your sleep architecture. On the one hand, they make people worse while they take them long term and they don’t realize.

Ahmad (54:04.857)
Mm.

Dr. Josef (54:13.226)
When you come off the sedatives too quickly, a small fraction of people, it’s not everyone, I don’t even know what the percentage is, but it’s a growing proportion of people, the withdrawal of the sedatives is toxic. There’s something about coming off benzodiazepines that when you put yourself into a very acute withdrawal, some people don’t recover. And this is what protracted withdrawal is.

injury is you’ve caused brain damage. Yeah, that’s what that’s what happened to Jordan Peterson. And yeah, it’s brain damage, you’ve damaged your nervous system. And the reason it’s brain damage is after you go into that severe withdrawal, and you’re really suffering, you try to reintroduce the drug, it does nothing. And so the damage is done. There was something about being in that acute withdrawal state that was damaging.

Ahmad (54:43.605)
Is that what Jordan Peterson had? Is that what Jordan Pe-

Ahmad (54:57.849)
Mm.

Dr. Josef (55:09.994)
And this is what I do in my practice. So this is my bread and butter. I help people with these problems. There is nothing that you can do after that happens apart from wait it out. Because it is a time game. We’re talking about neurological healing. These people become bed bound, they have severe ringing in their ears. They’re so sensitive to light, they can’t see they can’t see things properly. They are they have anxious looping thoughts, which never end some of them pace incessantly.

My patients, some of them have considered, thankfully no one’s taken their life yet, but some of them have considered going to Sweden and Belgium for medically assisted suicide because the pain is so bad. I put people on fentanyl who have this condition. I have people on morphine and fentanyl and strong opiate pain relievers because they’re suicidal because the pain is so severe.

Ahmad (55:50.623)
Oh shit.

Ahmad (56:03.68)
Is this the same as Akasinesia or something like that? What’s that?

Dr. Josef (56:08.054)
Yeah, because the well, akathisia is the when I said people pace incessantly, there’s a condition called akathisia. And essentially think about it as a maybe you can relate to this, you’ve drunk 10 cups of coffee, and you just feel wired, and you’re just driven to pace and you’re exhausted and you can’t sleep. And you just constantly have this weird like energy.

Ahmad (56:12.371)
Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Josef (56:35.594)
going through your body, which you have to dispel by pacing. That’s why they pace so much. But it’s this kind of like amphetamine like kind of tired toxicity, and that people just they cannot stop pacing, they cannot stop moving and it drives them to take their life. That’s it. That’s akathisia. It’s it’s

Ahmad (56:50.605)
Dude that sounds like… That sounds like a frickin’ nightmare.

Dr. Josef (56:56.434)
Yeah, it’s like hell. Yeah, like 10 cups of coffee all the time all day. It’s like you’ve just snorted a bunch of cocaine every single second and you’re exhausted but your nervous system is so revved up and wired. Like, and the thing with it is there’s no relaxation. This is what my patients say to me. There’s not a single moment in their day where they feel calm or relaxed. They just feel like super wired all the time with these racing anxious thoughts and they end their life because I think it’s

some people in their life. It’s just awful. And so it’s not, yeah.

Ahmad (57:27.254)
And that’s with just sedative withdrawal or any drug?

Dr. Josef (57:33.002)
Well, it happens with the antidepressants as well, but I’ll cover the benzos first. Protracted withdrawal injury, also known as BIND, benzodiazepine and just neurological dysfunction. It’s now widely recognized. I mean, this is since I think the end of 2019 or 2020, FDA has put it in all of the labels in the antidepressants, sorry, on the benzodiazepines in the market. They sent out a press release focused on, you know, higher want and saying that we’ve got more warnings in these drugs.

Ahmad (57:37.002)
Okay.

Ahmad (57:54.573)
Mmm.

Dr. Josef (58:02.11)
And so this is something that people should recognize now. And I’ll just wrap it up quickly on that one and just say the way you avoid it is with a slow withdrawal. You do not want to cold Turkey these things like, and I’ll say this. The majority of people who cold Turkey it, I’m not going to develop this problem. There’s something about a group of people who are susceptible to the withdrawal that it messes them up with this problem. But because we can’t predict who gets it, I would recommend everyone do a slow withdrawal.

Ahmad (58:24.909)
Mm.

Dr. Josef (58:30.858)
So what does that mean? If you’ve been on this drug for over a year, come off over a year. If you’ve been on it for 10 years, come off over maybe 18 months to two years, something like that. Slow it down when the withdrawal symptoms come. The aim of the game is to not go into severe withdrawal because that can be the thing that is damaging. So you want to do this slow withdrawal. There’s heaps of resources online. And that’s it. I’m going to plug my YouTube channel. I mean, if you’re interested in that.

Ahmad (58:50.802)
Mmm.

Dr. Josef (58:55.958)
Dr. Yosef, you know, I go over, that’s the YouTube channel, I go over how to safely withdraw yourself from Benzos. And so that’s the main thing that you need to be aware of with the sedatives, it’s that you can, yeah. Yeah.

Ahmad (59:04.903)
I’ve seen your YouTube channel, by the way. I’ve seen your YouTube channel, you’ve got great content and all the links will be on my website. Just.

Dr. Josef (59:12.959)
Yeah. So let’s shift. Can I tell you about the antidepressants? Yeah. So antidepressants, they also have the protracted withdrawal injury. It’s the exact same as the benzos. But interestingly, it only seems to happen with SSRIs, SNRIs and metaspine. Doesn’t happen with wellbutrin. And this is like another interesting thing about psychiatric

Ahmad (59:18.605)
Let’s do it, buddy.

Dr. Josef (59:41.334)
the stimulants don’t seem to cause these neurological problems. Because I think the rebound from the stimulants is it puts people in this depressive state and under stimulated state and that doesn’t seem to be harmful for people’s nervous systems. I don’t think I’ve had anyone in my caseload injured by a well buterin, bupropion or a stimulant. But things like Prozac, things like Cymbalta, things like Lexapro and Zoloft.

Same thing, a lot of people, cold turkey, come off them, come off them with rapid tapers, absolutely fine, no problems. There’s a group of people that when they come off, the same thing happens. Just devastated. And the only place, you know, in terms of professional recognition of what this is, it’s not as far along as it is with the antidepressants, but your neighborhood actually, the Royal College of Psychiatrists in the UK.

actually started publicly talking about the long-term and severe consequences of antidepressant withdrawal. So they’re at least educating the psychiatrist in your neck of the wood about this. They’re putting out examples of slow tapers that take several, several months. It’s the only major medical or psychiatric institution that I’ve seen so far start educating the physicians on how to safely…

Ahmad (01:00:47.481)
Mmm.

Dr. Josef (01:01:00.238)
bring people down and that’s because of people like Joanna Moncrief and Mark Horowitz and David Taylor in the UK who are really leading the, you know, talking to these groups and telling them about it. Aside from that, it’s talked about in the medical literature. I mean, a lot of that stuff is out there, but the UK is the only major group that’s started educating doctors about it. And so that’s…

protracted antidepressant withdrawal, come off slowly the same thing, could take you 18 months, two years, do it gradually, avoid severe withdrawal. And the other thing I’ll say for the audience, you can’t do these linear tables. People think I could just knock off a milligram every month and I’ll be okay. It has to get really small at the end, which is the other interesting thing. The way the drugs engage with the receptors is, it follows, I guess,

Ahmad (01:01:34.893)
Mmm.

Dr. Josef (01:01:52.054)
hyperbolic line. I know that’s not going to mean shit. Sorry, that’s not going to mean much to a lot of people on this. But essentially, the practical aspect of that is, as you get lower on the dose,

Dr. Josef (01:02:06.338)
the engagement with the receptors changes more. So, you know, dropping from 20 to 10 might change engagement at the receptor by maybe 10%, but dropping from one from two to one might change engagement at the receptor by like 50%. And so just, you know, the milligram doesn’t equal the amount of withdrawal that you might have. So when you get to like two milligrams, you might go down to 1.75 and then 1.5 and 1.25 and then like one. And so you have to take incrementally smaller

Ahmad (01:02:22.05)
Mmm.

Dr. Josef (01:02:35.938)
drops when you get to the bottom because a lot of people they’ll go, oh, just go from two to one milligram and then they go and have severe withdrawal and they go, this is weird. Like, it was just a milligram and I tolerated this my whole withdrawal and so this must be my depression or something like that but it’s not. There’s some interesting receptor stuff happening there which is really true for a lot of people I talk about. So as you get lower, you go slower.

Ahmad (01:02:48.149)
Mmm.

Ahmad (01:03:03.19)
Lower you go slower. Okay.

Dr. Josef (01:03:06.626)
Yep. And so the last thing is PSSD, which is persistent sexual dysfunction with the antidepressants and

Dr. Josef (01:03:18.198)
This has been talked about since the early 2000s. And so there’s a group of people that when they get on these drugs, I mean, the majority of people who get on the serotonergic antidepressants like SSRIs, SNRIs, Prozac, dental vaccine, things like that, they’ll experience some sexual dysfunction. It’s a difficulty maintaining an erection, decreased lubrication, decreased libido and interest in sex, and that’s really normal. That…

Ahmad (01:03:42.146)
Mm.

Dr. Josef (01:03:47.234)
that happens to maybe like 70 to 80% of people who get on these. And for the vast majority of people, it goes away when they come off and they’re completely fine. But again, there’s a growing minority of people who are saying, it didn’t go away. Now it’s never come back and it just isn’t there. And on top of this, not only do they have these enduring sexual…

problems, a lot of them are having some cognitive problems as well. They’re talking about feeling very blunted, they’re talking about having brain fog. And a lot of these things, it’s interesting, it’ll sound crazy. A lot of these things get worse during withdrawal, which doesn’t really seem to make sense until you think about Tata dyskinesia, which is a…

side effect from antipsychotics, it’s a permanent movement disorder. People usually get involuntary movements around their mouth. And that happens a lot of the times when people come off the antipsychotic. So again, we’ve got this kind of, there’s something happening during withdrawal with these drugs that for some people it will worsen side effects and make them endure. And again, you can’t predict who this happens to. And

Ahmad (01:04:45.922)
Hmm

Dr. Josef (01:05:04.478)
Yeah, PSSD, it’s obviously, it’s a horrible problem. You know, I’ve had people on the channel who got on these drugs when they were 16, and now they’re in their early 20s and their sex life is absolute. I mean, they can’t do anything. You know, it’s hard to maintain an erection. And they’ve just lost that part of their life completely. I just spoke to two people over at San Diego Sexual Medicine who have been taking high powered ultrasounds.

to penile tissue and they’re finding that it’s scarred. They’ve done it with controls. So they’ve gotten two groups. They have men who have had penile injury from things like jumping on a bike seat or trauma or different things like that. And they can analyze the tissue from the penile fracture and the healthy parts of the penis in those men. And then they can compare it to the people who are coming in with PSSD.

Ahmad (01:05:48.866)
Ouch.

Dr. Josef (01:06:01.898)
And when they look at the quality of the tissue in the penis, at least what they’re saying to me is the people who have PSSD, their penile tissue looks like that of like an 80 year old man. And so they’ve done this stuff with controls. So they’re finally finding this objective stuff, this objective evidence that there’s something about these drugs that has changed the penile tissue. And so these aren’t… Yeah.

Ahmad (01:06:02.206)
Mm-hmm.

Ahmad (01:06:25.697)
So hold on one sec. Listen, listen, listen. So this should be an advert out there. All you young men out there are your 30, 40 year old dicks. If you take this antidepressant, there’s a risk you might end up with an 80 year old dick. I don’t think any guy would take that pill.

Dr. Josef (01:06:50.194)
Exactly. And I feel the same way because it’s like, you know, if they said, you know, it’s probably not going to happen, but we can’t predict it. Even if you couched it in that way, they go, no, thank you. You know, you could tell me it’s like a one in 5000 risk or something like that. I’m not taking that chance. That’s going to happen to me. And so what the hell are we doing in the Fed?

Ahmad (01:07:09.137)
I don’t want an 18 year old dick even when I’m 18 year old. Even when I’m 18 years old, I don’t want an 18 year old dick. Now, fuck, frack that. I’m like, and certainly not now. No matter what the risk, oh my God. Ah, and the PSSD just sounds like a nightmare. Another living nightmare. These are things that are, these drugs are meant to be helping people with mental illness and they just seem to be causing a lot of other mental illness. I’m not saying all drugs are bad, by the way.

Dr. Josef (01:07:15.223)
Yeah.

Dr. Josef (01:07:37.838)
Could you imagine this? Yeah, imagine this. You’re a kid and you go away for college and you’re having a hard time. You know, you’re 18 years old, you move across the country. It’s your first time away and maybe you’re anxious by nature and it just makes things worse and you go in to see a counselor and they just say, I think maybe you should see a doctor. And that same thing we just talked about happens where there’s this short visits and this guy’s just like, oh yeah, like…

Ahmad (01:07:55.629)
Mmm.

Dr. Josef (01:08:06.358)
just take this, it’s fine, you know, and then, and then this happens to you. And then you wake up one day and just like, what the what happened to me? Why didn’t the doctor say anything? And maybe you’re in the US and you just go, Oh, wow, this is in all of the drug labels in the in the European Union, you know, the second largest drug regulator recognizes this, how come my doctor didn’t tell me about this? How come the FDA didn’t tell me about this? Like, this is it’s

Ahmad (01:08:07.617)
Take this.

Dr. Josef (01:08:35.414)
The amount of betrayal people feel when this happens to them and they just go, my problems really weren’t that bad. Why did you give me something that could ruin my life for problems that really weren’t that bad? It’s unbelievable betrayal.

Ahmad (01:08:50.489)
100%. I mean, it goes back to that, again, like that story of Kim, like our husband was just a bit stressed out and said, I need something to help me sleep. And then he gets that pill. And next thing he’s suicidal and kills himself. I mean, what the hell? Ah, it’s just.

Dr. Josef (01:09:06.426)
This thing about the antidepressants and suicide is one of the… I cut my teeth on that issue. I want you to know that was the issue that got me interested in drug safety because for a long time, people were saying, oh, it’s the underlying condition when people become suicidal. And that was the line that the pharmaceutical company said. There’s no way you can tease out whether it was the underlying condition or not. And it’s just… It is. Because the thing is…

Ahmad (01:09:19.242)
Mm.

Ahmad (01:09:23.061)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dr. Josef (01:09:35.402)
And this is not antidepressants, this is all drugs. They all have the potential for paradoxical reactions. If you had like 10 guys sitting in a room, smoking joints or bowls or whatever, and you may have seen this in your own life, nine people are laughing their asses off, having a good time, and one person just becomes paranoid, and they’re just going, you know what? That experience is not for me. They’ve had a different reaction to the drug based on their physiology, and it’s been bad. And so the exact same thing.

Ahmad (01:10:01.529)
This, I don’t have.

Dr. Josef (01:10:05.291)
Yeah.

Ahmad (01:10:06.213)
I was going to say, I don’t have that experience with drugs, but growing up in Glasgow, I don’t know if you know Glasgow, it’s a very working class city in Scotland, very rough where I grew up. You know, you’d have nine people going, aye, all right, pal, I love you, I come out here, my brother, I’m going to give you a kiss. And then there’d be one guy going, I fucking hate you, I fucking, I’m going to fucking smash everybody’s face in. And it was like.

So you’d have nine people all dozy and loved up with their alcohol and being very nice and friendly and there’d be one guy just going off the rocker and just wanting to smash everybody’s face in. So you’re right, it’s the same drink but it has a different effect on different people. So is that, that’s that paradoxical, what did you call it?

Dr. Josef (01:10:48.63)
It’s a paradoxical reaction to having the opposite of the common reaction that you’d expect. And something like that, I think, is very intuitive for people to understand. They’d go, yeah, I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it happen with drugs before. But we gaslit people. I mean, the issue came out in the early 90s. We gaslit people until 2005 when we finally put it in the drug labels, just saying it wasn’t a thing. And…

And because of that, because the drug companies were so bent on saying, Hey, there’s no evidence to support this.

Dr. Josef (01:11:24.423)
There was a decade and a half where if someone got worse after selling the drug, they would double the dose and do something incredibly risky instead of saying, hey, let me dig into this. Are you getting worse because the context of your life has changed? Or are you getting worse in a way where maybe you also have a racing heartbeat and your sweating has changed and you’re in sympathetic overload and you’re having all of these signs that

Ahmad (01:11:46.721)
Mm.

Dr. Josef (01:11:50.41)
point to the fact that you’re having some kind of like amphetamine like reaction to this drug. Like we didn’t ask any of those questions for those years. We just told people, oh man, his depression is really evolving, it’s really getting severe. And so that’s how you have things like Kim. And I think in her story, I mean, they called the doctor or something like that. It might not have been hers, but in a lot of cases, they called the doctor and just like, he’s really bad. And they’re just like, double the dose. He needs to go higher, see you later. And.

that they completely write off the fact that, yeah, these drugs, they don’t suit everyone. Instead of having a, I guess you’d call this therapeutic blunting that can be useful for some people with severe anxiety. Instead of that happening, it makes them super anxious and restless and sometimes paranoid as well. People kill people, they kill their children, they kill their spouses, they stab them because they become delirious. I mean, they become and so…

That’s the whole school shooter thing, you know, where they’re just like, is there something going on with these drugs? Like how could there be so much chaos? And I mean, it’s a valid inquiry, you know, whether drugs have played a role in some of the most horrific school shootings out there. One of my colleagues, David Healy, does a lot of these forensic cases. He interviewed James Holmes, who shot up the Colorado, the Aurora.

theater was one of the worst mass shootings, I think there was 50 people killed or something like that. And he interviewed him and he was like, yeah, this guy went manic from an antidepressant. It’s very clear in the medical record. There’s a whole documentary about it online. And I totally believe that. I mean, you look at photos of this guy in the courtroom, he has like bright orange hair. I mean, the guy looks like he’s, he went manic and did it. So I mean,

Ahmad (01:13:44.311)
Mmm.

Dr. Josef (01:13:49.852)
Drugs have paradoxical reactions, be very careful.

Ahmad (01:13:53.569)
Wow. Are we finished on the list? Have we done everything now? Do we do anxiolytics? I don’t know.

Dr. Josef (01:14:03.906)
I mean, those are the main ones I talk about are the under recognized ones. So yeah, protracted withdrawal conditions with those two drugs and PSSD. I mean, they have a lot of other side effects, but I think those are the ones that people aren’t aware of. Yeah. Well, tell me about you. I mean, I don’t know. I know you had to run because you’ve got some family commitments, but if you have a minute, tell me.

Ahmad (01:14:21.718)
Right.

Dr. Josef (01:14:31.766)
What’s going on with you and your legal situation?

Ahmad (01:14:32.577)
No, no, we’ve got time. We’ve got time. So we’ve got 40 minutes. Then I have to go pick up my kids. And I just wanted plenty of time to talk to you. So we’ve got 40 minutes though. We’re doing great. We’re doing absolutely fantastic. So, oh dude, I don’t know what to, I don’t know. So I wanted to ask you why you started your podcast, but I’ll tell you about my story first. So I did this podcast because I was fed up with what I was listening to on the news and the…

print media, legacy media and on X. And I was getting really frustrated that while I had a big following on X, there’s only so much I could communicate in these tiny little tweets and the character limits. And there’s only so much information you can give. And I wanted to inform and educate as many people as possible because I think that’s how you empower them to make the right choices for them. You know, like listening to you, you know, I would urge all people if you’re feeling a bit down or anxious.

see a really good therapist, try and address the root causes, see what can be fixed in your life. And there’s so many things that you can do, like just get some really good sleep and start eating really well and exercise and get some natural light and all these kinds of things. But basically when I started doing my podcast and when I started speaking out against the things that I saw wrong in the world, and I think everything is linked, I think-

Our money system is flawed. The banking system, the fiat money, I think the perverse incentives that we’re seeing, the corruption and regulatory capture, the fact that we don’t have democracy anymore. Our politicians are all corrupt. Climate change is one big scam. It’s all a joke. You know, the pandemic was a plandemic. Vaccines are not as safe as we used to think. The COVID jabs are experimental.

Transgender ideology is harmful for many people, but if you wanna change your sex as an adult, go ahead. But I think most people aren’t mentally and psychologically mature enough until at least 25. I mean, I didn’t get mature until I was 35. Some people would argue at 48, I’m still not mature. So when I started talking about all these things, I got even more followers. I mean, I’m almost 150,000 now.

Ahmad (01:16:51.433)
And so clearly it resonates with a lot of people. I’m just telling people what I think and having great people on my show. But it drew the iron, you know, the, you know, the attention of the authorities and the hospitals and they don’t like what I’m doing. And they’re basically punishing me for that. And I’ve been dragged through investigations and million gazillion emails and referrals to the GMC, which is like, you know, the licensing board. They they’ve cleared me.

Anyway, one private hospitals basically told me to get lost. And that’s where most of my income was. I was working out there for 10 years plus. That’s where I live. That’s where my people know me. So 80% of my income just went out the door and you, you know, you, you run a private practice, you know, that like 50% of your income covers your overheads, you know, and then whatever you earn, then you pay tax on that. And then you keep about 30%. So, you know, my accountant would always say to me right at the beginning, when, when I started my private practice, just be aware.

Dr. Josef (01:17:42.734)
Mm-hmm.

Ahmad (01:17:51.149)
You don’t start earning money until October, November, December. That’s what you get to keep everything before that someone else is going to take. And that’s what my practice is like. So at 20%, I wasn’t able to cover my costs, but I thought I’m going to limp on. I’m taking legal action against the first hospital. Um, but then a couple of weeks ago, another hospital basically pulled a rug from below beneath my feet and said, Oh, you posted a clip of a podcast on your Instagram account.

And we think it’s offensive and can be taken out of context. So we’re suspending you with immediate effect and investigating you. So now like now I’m left with this dribble of a practice and I’ve actually had to tell my secretary, I don’t know if I can hold onto you and I don’t really know what I’m going to be doing in the new year because I, it’s just not sustainable. It’s just, I don’t know what to do. So I, from a, from, from my career point of view, my 25 year career just seems to have gone down the pan.

Um, and none of this has got to do with any patient. There’s no patient involved. You know, I’m actually a very, very good surgeon. I’ve got great outcomes, great feedback. I practice holistically, but I’m getting totally and utterly fracked from above because I’m, you know, I’m a dissident, you know, I’ve got people on my show calling out the statins, calling out PPIs, calling out the COVID shots, childhood

Ahmad (01:19:19.553)
You know, the fraud and corruption out there calling out, you know, like this psychiatric medication, you know? So when you think about the vested interests that I’ve upset these multi billion trillion dollar institutions, big pharma, big food, climate scammery, politicians, the media, you know, there’s a lot of people that don’t like me and want to shut me up. So yeah, dude.

Do you still want to go on with your podcast?

Dr. Josef (01:19:52.294)
Yeah, well, I mean, that’s why I kind of threw my support behind you when I saw the legal thing I was just like, I mean, this is just, you know, but for the grace of God, you know, it’s just like, this could happen. I mean, I think there’s a group of people out there that are talking about these problems. And I mean, that’s my community. These are the people that, you know, that I’m kind of on this mission with. And so I’m just like, man, I got to help this guy as much as I can. You know?

Ahmad (01:19:57.933)
Oh, dude.

Ahmad (01:20:15.961)
Dude, thank you so much. Thank you.

So that’s what’s happening with me.

Dr. Josef (01:20:24.786)
Yeah. So, I mean, you gotta let me know what you end up doing because I’m gonna use it as a map for when I get canceled. So, you know, you have to… Yeah, so.

Ahmad (01:20:35.713)
Well, hopefully you won’t get canceled. I mean, hopefully you won’t get canceled. I mean, the problem is you have to be so careful now what you say and what you do. So take the second one. I mean, I don’t know if your scope is, your podcast is just about mental health. I was looking through it and a lot of it was just like mental health, but you know, I’ve had people on talking about Bitcoin, metabolic health, I’ve got climate change coming soon. So it’s quite varied. And I had some people talking about Israel-Palestine and I actually did pro and…

anti from both sides. I thought, you know, let’s platform everything. Let’s hear what everyone has to say. And I’m a free speech absolutist. And I think I have the right to offend people and no one has the right to not be offended. You know what? Just like grow thicker skin and, or if you don’t like it, just don’t listen and walk away, you know? Um, but they’ve basically taken a clip where I posted a, you know, short of Eva Bartlett talking about her time and, um,

Dr. Josef (01:21:17.99)
Mm-hmm.

Ahmad (01:21:34.941)
in the West Bank and Gaza. And they’ve found that offensive. And I don’t know about you, but when you do clips, you do the most spicy, interesting parts of a clip of a podcast to try and attract attention and get people to listen to it.

Dr. Josef (01:21:50.021)
Yeah, that’s how you do the sh… that’s the short. That’s the point. Yeah.

Ahmad (01:21:54.989)
That’s the whole point. But we’re now in a place where you’re not allowed to have an opinion. And the funny thing is if I said out in public, I’m pro-Israel Zionist or I’m pro-Ukraine war and I’m wearing the flags, no, I would not get into trouble because guess what? Those are state-sanctioned narratives. So those are the acceptable narratives. But simply…

I actually have said I’m not on anyone’s team, I’m on team humanity. But you know, if there’s wrongs being done, it’s pretty sad and we should not, you know, we should not condone violence. And I’m just platforming someone else, but just simply platforming someone else. That’s not the state sanctioned narrative has got me into trouble. And I think that’s quite scary because. Scary.

Dr. Josef (01:22:42.922)
What do you think goes on in the mind? Yeah, help me. Because I wonder if you meditate on this sometimes. What do you think is going on in the mind of the person that goes, like, reads something on Twitter and then goes out of their day to be like, where does this guy work? I’m going to call them up and just say, have you seen this? Like, what is happening with them?

Ahmad (01:23:06.529)
Well, I had a couple of orthopedic surgeons contact me at the Blue that I’ve, you know, one of whom I’ve never been in touch with. And he went on my Instagram account and he was saying, shame on you and you’re promoting propagandist and blah, blah. Interestingly, they’re also foot and ankle surgeons and they’re also British Jews. And I wonder whether someone who one of them worked in the same hospital has gone to management and said, look,

I don’t like what he’s doing. And the funny thing is like the hospital should say, well, this is a private thing. You know, this is like his opinion. If you don’t like it, suck it, you know, deal with him, go speak to him. The problem is it’s not even been done to my face. All I know is someone internally has complained. It’s not member of the public. And instead of the hospital saying, dude, there’s not our, this is nothing to do with us. Like get over it. They’ve taken a position and, and this is affecting.

corporations now. And I don’t know if it’s just ESG and DEI. I don’t know whether it’s the fact that, you know, they’re being influenced from above and you need to follow and toe the line. But whether it’s trans issues, Ukraine, climate change, you know, a lot of political ideologies have now come into the corporate world and public bodies. Because the difference between the state and the corporations are very, very fine line, as you know, with the FDA.

We’re in this kind of like corporate fascistocracy now. Um, the problem is you’ve now got these institutions kind of dictating what free speech is and what you’re allowed. And someone was saying to me, it’s actually someone who was from the East Eastern European block. It’s actually worse than the communist era. They’re like, during the communist times, you knew who the baddies were. They were the state. You could not question the state. You can, there were things you could not say. Like you had to say.

Dr. Josef (01:24:57.248)
you

Ahmad (01:25:02.321)
Stalin is fit and healthy, even though he’s about to die. You know, whereas now, whereas now you don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong. You know, you don’t know what’s in, you know, going to get you into trouble or not. And you don’t know who’s going to get you into trouble. Anyway, it’s not, it’s not just the state that can get you into trouble. It’s a goddamn hospital about a post on Instagram that’s got nothing to do with even healthcare and it’s like, what the heck, but this is the world we live in buddy.

Kind of bizarre.

Dr. Josef (01:25:34.162)
It’s the people, it’s your colleagues, it’s the people that you work alongside, you know, in the OR, I mean, it could, there’s anyone there. And I mean, things really took it. It was interesting. Um, I arrived in the U S in 2015. So it’s a year before Donald Trump got into power. And I remember the year before that, I remember my time in Australia and there was just something very different about 2015 onwards where, um,

social and political issues just became extremely dangerous to corporations. Like if someone said something that was against the grain politically, or that might’ve been offensive to some group in the past, I don’t think that was much of a big deal. But now we would have the media circuses, people would say this guy from this corporation, he said this thing and they stood by him. So now this corporation is all about that. And it really like threatened.

the profits and the image and the reputation of places that it hadn’t done before. And so people just started getting axed. It was like this whole thing just changed and I think people pipe down quickly. And the sad part about it is I don’t think you can really like challenge issues that go against the grain these days unless you have the financial resources to withhold lawsuits. Because I think if you do, like I think if…

Ahmad (01:26:37.371)
Mmm.

Dr. Josef (01:26:58.166)
something happens and you can hire a lawyer and just say, hey, I don’t really want to think about it. I want you to put my defense together. I’m going to keep on going. Like you’re fine. And I think things back down, but if you don’t have that money, then it’s such a time sink and it’s financially difficult. And so I think it’s mainly people who are, who are independent now and who have the resources that can really have the liberty.

to speak their mind. I think anyone else, it’s just like, you gotta toe the line now, because otherwise you could ruin your life, as I’m sure that’s probably felt at some points through this. It’s just like, I wish I really wasn’t dealing with this right now, because I got my patients that I need to serve. It’s like, I mean, it’s really through a spanner in their lives. Yeah.

Ahmad (01:27:46.529)
Make one.

100%, you know, I had to have conversations with my patients and say, look, I’ve just been suspended again and I’m going to be potentially operating on you in the next few weeks and I could be suspended from the third hospital. And then suddenly you don’t have a surgeon looking after you post surgery. And, you know, your recovery is going to be four to six months. If there’s any complications in that timeframe, I won’t be able to help you. Potentially, if I get suspended from the like, you know, third strike,

I mean, I’m not being paranoid. I’ve already been struck off by two. Um, and the third hospital is one that instigated everything with the referral to the GMC and everything else. So, you know, I’m on shaky ground and I have to have this conversation because that’s part of consent. Do you feel comfortable me being your surgeon? And are you surprised when they go, uh, no, can, can we just park the surgery or maybe I need to go see another surgeon, you know? And so it’s been really, really tough for me. And.

stressful and sad. And I don’t know if this is the end of my 25 year career. It feels like it. And I’ve kind of almost gone for like a mourning process. Like, you know, I have bereavement. Like at one point I was in denial. Then I was like angry. Then I was like really crying. And now I’m just like, maybe this is just the way it’s meant to be. And there’s meant to be some other future that I have. I don’t know. My podcast seems to be…

growing every week and I have a lot of supporters from around the world. I was able to raise 26,000 people like you. Thank you so much. You’ll see like supporting me. Um, I’m going to have to do a lot more than that to keep this fight going. Um, but the thing is like, I want to fight and I will be fighting it because I don’t want these people to get away like Scott free. Like, I don’t know if we’ll win or not, but I want to go.

Ahmad (01:29:41.025)
down fighting and I want people to know who these people are and what they’ve been doing and why they’ve been doing it. But the key thing is trying not to have that negative energy drain you, stopping you from doing the other things you want to do. And that’s the challenge. I don’t want it to consume my life because I wrote about this on my sub stack where oftentimes the punishment is the process.

Dr. Josef (01:30:01.848)
Mm-hmm.

Ahmad (01:30:09.785)
dragging you through the coals and, you know, the misery of all of this. That’s the punishment, you know, and maybe two years from now they’ll turn around and go, oh, right, OK, yeah, sorry. OK, we’ll turn things around. You know, will that take away the pain and the harm? No. And it’s also unpredictable because a fan thinks that like in the UK, there’s no such thing as

Dr. Josef (01:30:30.925)
No. No way. No.

Ahmad (01:30:38.685)
you have the right to free speech. You know, it’s not like America, where you got the constitution and your bill of rights and amendments. You know, it’s not that great. And then you kind of figure out that a lot of the legal system is, it’s about who’s got the biggest war chest, who’s got the biggest guns. So then you kind of get all very cynical and you think, bloody hell, you know, the law’s an ass. It’s not about…

whether you’re right or wrong or they’re wrong. And what’s just is about who you know, it’s about how much money you got, legal teams. But I think we’re in a dangerous place in our society where you’re not free to say the things you wanna say because if you can’t, you’re not free and society is not free. So I’ll take it, I’ll give you an example, like over the weekend, I mentioned this in one of my other podcasts I’ve just done. I was at a wedding in the afternoon, on Saturday afternoon.

And two doctors came up to me, oh my God, you’re Doc Malik, you’re Doc Malik. I’m like, yeah, yeah. Oh my God, we love your work. Oh my God, I love your podcast, love following you. Oh my God, everything you say is 100% right. Trans, gender, kids, sexualization, the vaccines, you know, whatever. Yeah, yeah, true, no. And I said to these guys, so what are you guys doing about it? It’s like silence. Like looking at their feet like this, couldn’t give me eye contact. And then one of them said, finally, I’m not in a position.

to lose it all. And then I was like, and I am? Like, I’m in a position, I got three young kids, I got a stupid mortgage, I wasn’t a typical orthopod, I was only working two and a half days a week. I drive an eight year old secondhand car, like I’ve got everything to lose? Like what the hell, no, I can’t afford to lose all this, my practice and everything, but things, there’s some things that are important in life and some things are not. And.

Dr. Josef (01:32:10.841)
Yeah.

Ahmad (01:32:33.153)
freedom, liberty, patient safety. Yeah, this is important. And if we don’t speak up for this stuff now, it’s gonna be too late in the future. And then they were just quiet. They were just quiet, they had nothing to say. And then I went to a birthday party. I was invited by the surgeon. It was his 50th birthday party. And he was like, the moment I came in, he went, you are a fracking legend. And I was like, oh, that’s nice. He’s like, oh, these people over here, none of them think like us.

Dr. Josef (01:32:57.751)
Mm-hmm.

Ahmad (01:33:00.865)
And he’s like, right in the way, I know all of this, I’ve known about this since 2001, blah, since ago, and he’s like, blah, blah. He didn’t wanna hear anything I had to say. I just, I was listening mode. And then he goes, but I can’t do anything, I can’t say anything.

And I think it’s even worse if you can see everything that’s wrong and choose not to do anything about it, as opposed to those who genuinely just have swallowed the propaganda and the BS brainwashing. Because they don’t know any better. They genuinely believe what they’re doing is the right thing. But if you’re aware that there’s a problem and what is wrong and still choose not to do anything because you’re not brave enough, that’s kind of sad.

Dr. Josef (01:33:17.883)
Hmm

Ahmad (01:33:42.057)
And I know it’s not easy because I’m going for this difficulty. But the thing is, guess what? It would be a lot easier for me if like a hundred doctors were standing up in the UK and saying what I was saying. That would make massive shockwaves for the system. You know, you don’t need many people to stand up and say this is wrong to change things. But unfortunately, right now it seems like a very lonely position here in the UK.

Dr. Josef (01:34:09.61)
Yeah. It’s, I mean, I really resonate with the pain of being not in the position to do something because I think for a lot of time, that was me. I have a kid and I was working for the government. I wasn’t bringing in a great salary and I was just doing bread and butter psychiatry in emergency rooms. And every single day, because I knew there were problems, I had to just be like, I have like…

half an hour with this person, it’s not a lot of time. So it’s like practicing for years not helping people like and to me, that’s what kind of put me on this path around the like, I need practice independence, I need to have my own thing. And I did that for so many years. Oh, man, I hated it. I hated what I had to do every day. I hated this transactional cog in the wheel type thing and it’s and so I think these people that

that realize what’s happening and are still kind of practicing within the system. I’m going to say I don’t think they get off easy. I think it takes a toll over time. I think if you know, like, it starts to, I think you start to question your integrity a little bit. I would hope that they would come around eventually and start. And you know, maybe they don’t need to be standing up. And then maybe that’s not for everything, but at least

Ahmad (01:35:20.407)
Yeah.

Ahmad (01:35:28.418)
Yeah.

Dr. Josef (01:35:35.894)
do it for your patients, you know, and, um, and it’s like, you got to, or do it for your community or do it in the hospital that you’re in. Um, things like that because

I mean, I found it soul destroyed. That was just me. And that’s why now I just bring people off medications. That’s all we do. We just do tapering. I cannot practice in a general way anymore.

Ahmad (01:36:01.469)
Well, you’re doing an amazing job. And I mean, there’s a reason why I reached out to you and wanted you on my podcast, buddy, because I saw what you’re doing and I loved it. And we can all fight back in our own ways. And I think what you’re doing is highlighting and raising awareness. You’re going against the grain. You’re challenging Big Pharma, whether you know it or not. You are a threat to them. You’re a credible doctor, authority. You got great hair. You look great.

And you got a wonderful looking podcast. And you’re doing the right thing. You’re doing the right thing for people, which is amazing. And you look happy as a result. So despite the fact that I’m like, oh shit, where am I gonna pay the bills next year? I’m still happy. Like my wife and I are happy. We’re happy in our little misfortune because we know we’re doing the right thing.

Dr. Josef (01:36:32.642)
Yeah.

Dr. Josef (01:36:45.362)
Yep.

Ahmad (01:36:56.649)
I look at these other people, I look at these other doctors, look at that guy who had his birthday party. They look shit, they look shit. They got lines everywhere. They’ve got bags under their eyes. They’re not happy people, you know? Do you know what I mean? Living with that stress, living with that, it’s just not healthy for you, living that lie.

Dr. Josef (01:37:06.99)
They do, they do. I know, I see it as well. The days. Yeah.

Dr. Josef (01:37:19.438)
It is living a lie and it’s, you know, where someone tells you how to practice and you practice within the system where you, where it goes against what you believe. You start to hate your job. You kind of resent it. The days drag on not in a good way. You know, the days drag on in a bad way. And I know all of this because I’ve recently been doing that, you know, and just, you’re pissed off, you’re irritable at the end of the day. Like things get under your skin and.

I mean, since I’ve been doing this, like, in some ways, I hate it. The days fly by, you know, I lose months at a time just like that. But it’s this I’m in flow, you know, I’m loving what I’m doing. I’m loving the people I’m helping. I have a creative outlet online. I mean, my daughter’s aging like, you know, at warp speed, which is scary for me. But she’s happy and I’m happy. And it’s just

The shift from when I became fully independent to now, it’s been amazing. It’s been amazing just the flow that you can get into. And so these people that you talk about, I mean, I really hope they…

they can hear what’s on the other side. Once you start living in alignment, how great it can be, even with the hardship, because I know you’re going through hardship, but I bet you feel what I feel on the good days when you’re doing this type of stuff in the podcasting and when you’re being creative with your social media and the ideas that you’re sharing. I mean, it’s kind of, I think what, it’s your true self, what you’re meant to be doing. And I think that it just…

deeply feels good.

Ahmad (01:39:06.457)
100%, 100%. It’s just, you’re in tune with yourself and you’re just being true to yourself and just being happy. I’m just, it sounds ridiculous. My colleagues would think I’m mad. You’ve given up a good salary, you get your career, your hard fought career. Cause it’s hard, it’s not easy to become an orthopedic consultant. Like when you start off in the rat race and 250 people in your class, you know.

only a handful will end up becoming an orthopedic consultant. Like there’s a lot of hurdles. And to think you’ve given all this up, I’m like, yeah, because I know what I’m doing is the right thing. And I might not get the rewards in this lifetime, but hopefully in the next lifetime. And I keep saying, I want my three kids to look back at me and go, my dad was a fracking legend. And hopefully that they will be thinking that. So can I ask you something?

Dr. Josef (01:39:59.117)
Yeah.

Ahmad (01:40:03.629)
Joseph, I wanna ask you, like from a mental health point of view, right? Cause we still got some 15 minutes. From a mental health point of view, how do you protect your mental health? How do you, what’s the biggest bang for the buck in terms of steps and measures that you can look after yourself? Cause I don’t believe anyone is immune to mental health problems. I’ve had mental health problems at one point in my life. I’m not gonna go into it. I’ve talked about it before, but you know, I was suicidal at one point. You know.

How do you make sure that you’re bulletproof and you look after your mental health?

Dr. Josef (01:40:42.842)
Um, so what I would say is, uh, you know, my mental health is still, uh, kind of fluctuates a lot. Um, and.

Dr. Josef (01:40:56.43)
I think there’s a couple of things. I mean, I’m going to say the easy things. I think diet and exercise, I mean, I think that’s a really lowest common denominator that I think people should handle. But then outside of that, I think you need to start listening to yourself and not shutting down the impulses and the ideas that you’re having, because I think a lot of the anxiety and the depression, I think it means something. And when you can be like,

Why am I irritable? Why am I anxious? Why aren’t things working in my relationship? I think there needs, you have to have, be curious and really have the time to tease out these things because your emotions are trying to tell you things. Maybe they’re trying to tell you things that you might not even realize. Maybe they’re trying to tell you that, hey, you need to stop using nicotine. Maybe you’re drinking too much caffeine. You’re on this emotional roller coaster. Or maybe, hey, you actually don’t.

you know, really know how to resolve conflicts with your wife in a healthy way. And you guys need to figure that out and think about it. So I think you might maybe the what I would say is I think people really need to learn to listen to their emotions and be like a detective and tease it out because now I mean you do that long enough. And if you can kind of address them, I think you can get to a place where you’re reasonably happy.

Also seek out coaching, seek out help. Some of the things that I’ve been able to do with my practice, you know, and getting independent there’s no way I could have been able to do them on my own. I had to seek out mentors and advisors and consultants to kind of say, how am I gonna do this? And so I think asking for help as well is really important because now I’ve solved the problem of like, I hate what I do. I think about that, that’s a big problem to solve. You know, that’s something that you deal with for decades.

Ahmad (01:42:53.398)
Yeah.

Dr. Josef (01:42:55.686)
I’m doing something that I like. I had to listen to myself a lot and I had to spend a lot of money on different coaches and groups and figuring it out. So maybe the main thing is just listen to yourself and then keep on going. And hopefully that’s relevant to like 80% of people. I know there’s some problems where it’s not going to fall into that bucket, but I think a lot of problems do. A lot of problems have to do with work and they have to do with relationships. And I think you can really…

kind of hit those two major, major parts with.

a lot of attention.

Ahmad (01:43:33.609)
100%. Let’s talk about your podcast. What’s been your most enjoyable podcast? Who was the best guest that you had, the most memorable?

Dr. Josef (01:43:48.766)
I… you know…

Dr. Josef (01:43:54.918)
My podcast is, it’s really like detective work. It’s what’s going on. I didn’t really

I didn’t really start at wanting… I don’t even know. Yeah, this is a really good question. What’s my most important one?

Dr. Josef (01:44:16.43)
Hard for me to say. Let me just tell you about the podcast and what I love about it in general. The podcast is about people who have been – yeah, yeah. It’s about people who have been harmed by psychiatric medication and it’s part diagnostic – well, it’s part like exploratory. So I asked them, when did you know that you had a side effects? What were the things that were happening kind of in your body? What happened when you came off the drugs?

Ahmad (01:44:21.881)
Tell me. Yeah, tell me that.

Dr. Josef (01:44:42.89)
We go through stories of how people realized that they were having drug side effects, and then we explore their interaction with their mental health care system. Well, you know, okay, so you were told you had depression. Looking back now, where was that coming from? What do you think the doctors could have done better? And so we really dig into these narratives of people who get kind of chewed up and spat out by a system that was really meant to help them.

And I love shining a light on those stories. A lot of the people that reach out to me, they just don’t want this to happen to anyone else. And I actually think that my podcast has the biggest repository of patient stories about things like PSSD, things about protracted withdrawal. I know how doctors and nurse practitioners reaching out to me saying that they’ve been able to learn clinical information.

from there. So they’re like, this is what that looks like. Wow, that was really helpful. And so in a way, yeah, it’s become a place where people who have been harmed have a voice to talk about what happened to them. It’s become a place where people can learn about how to better care for these patients. And so those are the two things I do. I do in-depth interviews with people who, well, people who’ve been drug harmed. And then I do a lot of how-to content where it’s like

Ahmad (01:45:47.901)
Mmm.

Dr. Josef (01:46:10.142)
Okay, so you’re thinking about coming off your antidepressant. What’s the safest way to do that? You want to come off your sedatives? How do you do that? You’re on like five different drugs right now and you want to start untangling this thing. How do you know which drug to start with? How do you find a doctor? What’s the equipment you need? So it’s these interviews with people who have been injured and then it’s a lot of how-to content. And so, and honestly, I can’t pick anything I love because I love it all. I love the whole thing.

Ahmad (01:46:27.786)
Mmm.

Ahmad (01:46:38.797)
Well, that’s a great answer. I’m the same. I am 100% the same. I did a podcast with someone yesterday, and I’m sure it’s the same with you. I loved the podcast because I learned so much. Oh my God, I learned so much. And there’s so much to learn. Yesterday I had someone called David Haralambos on, who’s a behavioral scientist, and we were talking about how people can manipulate us, corporations and governments, using psychological techniques and mind space and stuff like that.

Dr. Josef (01:46:42.718)
Yeah.

Ahmad (01:47:08.449)
But you can also fight back. And you were saying one of the most powerful things is stories. And you mentioned the word stories several times, by the way, in that last response. And it’s all, and it’s the fact, it’s the fact that, you know, we look at people, not as numbers or data points and facts and figures, but we listen to their stories. And when you get through to people’s stories, that’s the most powerful and effective tool for change. So, you know, honestly, I think that’s what you’re doing. You’re doing a great job.

because you’re taking these things that are just, you know, on a patient information leaflet, which is just in black and white, you know, this is a potential side effect, you’re converting it into a real life story that people can relate to and understand, and that is the most powerful thing. So well done you, buddy, and keep it up.

Dr. Josef (01:48:00.09)
And sometimes some of them are like a horror story. I mean, if you guys want to hear a horror story and they’re engaging and I like the genre, but it’s not, it’s not, maybe it sounds kind of, I mean, it sounds bad to equate the stories of the people on my podcast to horror stories, but they really are sometimes. There was one girl, Rosie, who did an interview with me. She developed PSSD. And then when she talked to the psychiatrist about it, they diagnosed her with a delusional disorder.

involuntarily committed her into a psychiatric hospital and then forced psychiatric drugs on her and said that she wasn’t allowed able to leave unless she took anti-psychotic medication or some other drug. I think it was an anti-psychotic. This happened to another gentleman in India as well, where he was hospitalized for three months involuntarily because the families listened to the doctors and they said there’s no way he could have this sexual dysfunction. He’s become psychotic. He has a delusional disorder.

Ahmad (01:48:31.553)
Oh no-

Dr. Josef (01:48:56.558)
So they locked people up and medicated them. Think about that. I mean, that is the narrative of a horror story. You’re living your life, doing well, you get on this medication because the doctor tells you it’s safe. Before you know it, your nervous system’s destroyed, and your body’s, your sexual dysfunction’s lost, and you’re locked in a psych unit getting forced drugs. The doctors gaslight you, they gaslight your family, your family doesn’t believe you anymore.

Ahmad (01:49:03.553)
That’s a horror story.

Dr. Josef (01:49:26.93)
And then, and then I mean, there’s a happy ending because I mean, these people come out of it, their families turn around and you see the journey out the other side of that. But it’s just like, how could we do things so terrible to people? Um, and, and so, I mean, that’s, that’s the kind of stuff that we go into on my show. I know it’s definitely not going to be for everyone, but those are the stories that are really interesting to me and the ones I want to bring out. But it’s some of it. Yeah, it’s, it’s

of the horror genre over there, unfortunately. Unfortunately for the people who I talk to mostly.

Ahmad (01:50:02.209)
Mmm. All right, my friend, one last question. You’re on your deathbed, don’t worry, it’s 100 years from now. You’re surrounded by your family and loved ones. Before you meet your maker, what advice, health or otherwise, would you give all of your family and friends around you?

Dr. Josef (01:50:28.79)
You have to give me a minute for this. I’m not gonna just kind of blurt something out. I’m gonna think about it. Yeah.

Ahmad (01:50:40.441)
I’ve had some guests get quite tearful at this stage.

Dr. Josef (01:50:46.262)
I actually feel it welling up. I do. I feel it welling up. And I think, I would say don’t be afraid. I think you need to, don’t live a life.

controlled by what other people think of you and I would say Lean into what you think is true and do it that would be the advice that I would give people around me

Ahmad (01:51:22.101)
Well, it’s bloody good advice, my friend. Joseph, thank you so much for a lovely, lovely conversation. And I just want everyone to know Joseph got up ridiculously early to do this. And I really appreciate you doing that, buddy, and taking the time. Um, and I hope it was worth it, but it was wonderful hearing what you’re doing and you’re just gleaning some of your wisdom and knowledge and

Dr. Josef (01:51:27.345)
Mm-hmm.

Ahmad (01:51:50.229)
You know, all the links to your website and YouTube channel and social media will be on the website and I please urge everyone to listen and follow and like what he’s doing and if you know of anyone in your family or you yourself is on any medication or thinking of going on any medication, just check out his content. I don’t think you’re going to go wrong. So thank you for listening, Joseph. Last words over to you, buddy.

Dr. Josef (01:52:21.186)
Hey, thanks for having me on. If you’re in the US, there’s a good chance that I could help you if you want to come off medications. And so states like California, Texas, New York, a couple of them. If you go to my social media, Dr. Yosuf on YouTube is the main place you would find me. Or on Twitter, yeah, there’s links to my website. And if that’s something you need help with, I would love the opportunity to help you.

Ahmad (01:52:48.737)
Alright, God bless, bye bye.