First half guest Dr. Fabrizio Mancini joined Lisa Garr (email) to talk about natural healing methods and the benefits of chiropractic therapy. Mancini began his schooling as a traditional medical doctor, but after a car accident, he realized that he wanted to take another path to helping people as a medical professional and entered chiropractic school. Mancini recalled that in the 1980s, a landmark court case proved that the AMA had conspired to undermine the chiropractic profession. This helped to convince him that he was on the right track in his education. Mancini pointed out that countries, such as China, India, and Germany have adopted alternative therapies in addition to traditional medicine as part of their normal healthcare.
Mancini says that we have "been conditioned [to think] that health comes from the outside in, not the inside out" and that our emotions and state of mind in a great part determine how healthy we are. He also claims that there is evidence that we are designed to live 120 years, but that we must pay attention to the things that are making us sick in order to approach that kind of lifespan. Mancini believes that one of the most important aspects of health is examining and assessing our emotional state, and identified three emotions that he believes have the most powerful healing properties: forgiveness, gratitude and love. They allow us to let go of stress, which Mancini thinks is the main cause of an unbalanced immune system and a barrier to health and longevity.
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The first guest in the second half was Del Bigtree, producer of the controversial film Vaxxed, about possible improprieties in the manufacture and regulation of vaccines. Bigtree left his job as a successful producer of a television series to devote his full attention to issues with the vaccination industry. He says he realized that he was "going to risk my career on a subject that could be volatile." He emphasized that the first scientific paper on the possible connections between autism and vaccines suggested that further tests and studies were warranted, but did not establish a direct relationship. Lisa then welcomed biochemist Dr. Brian Hooker, who began peppering the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) with Freedom of Information Act requests for studies on ill effects of vaccines, but was eventually set upon by "harassing phone calls" informing him to cease while implying that he had a profit motive. Dr. William Thompson, an inside source at the CDC, later called him to reveal possible cover-ups and the suppression of findings linking excessive vaccination to an increase of autism in children. Hooker claimed that Thompson was then given a $25,000 bonus as hush money and moved into an area of the CDC where he wouldn’t have any access to vaccination studies.
In the final hour, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who Bigtree called "the father of the anti-vaccine movement," (and who had his medical license revoked in the UK in 2010) appeared on the program to describe his view of the controversy. His concern with the issue is that vaccines are sometimes being given to children in a variety too great to effect any sort of immunization, and in fact are causing other health problems. He said that diseases such as the mumps and measles have actually been rendered more dangerous by the haphazard and vigorous application of vaccines. Wakefield claims that the Merck drug company pushed for vaccines that were not needed, until they convinced many countries to embark on programs to vaccinate children against diseases that were not serious. He sees that trend continuing and getting worse and remarked that his crusade is "about vaccine safety, it’s not an anti-vaccine argument."