Podcast host Shawn Ryan: “My fear is that we demonize all of the progress that we've made with medicine due to, you know, due to conspiratorial claims”
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From the September 29, 2025, edition of Vigilance Elite's The Shawn Ryan Show
SHAWN RYAN (HOST): And another thing, ever since COVID — it’s really caught fire after COVID. I mean, there's a lot of hesitation with vaccines. There's a lot of hesitation to pharmaceuticals. You know? And there's this massive movement on, I don't know what, kind of holistic type medicine. I mean what are your thoughts on that? I think it could be, you know, I mean, I don't know. I don't really know much in this sector, but I mean it seems, my fear is that we demonize all of the progress that we've made with medicine due to, you know, conspiratorial claims. And so I'm just curious. I mean, I think there's got to be a healthy balance here, I mean.
DR. DAVID FAJGENBAUM (GUEST): There has to be. Yeah, I mean my feeling is that I, and we, just want to help patients with the medicines that are available. And if it's from a holistic doctor or if it's from sort of traditional Western medicine or if it's from pharmaceutical companies. You know, the drug that I'm on, sirolimus, it actually was discovered in the soil on the island of Rapa Nui, in the Pacific. Like it literally was discovered in the soil and then a drug company figured out ways to manufacture it. And so like my drug is about as natural of a drug as you could ever take, but it's a pharmaceutical drug and it's used for transplant rejection and it destroys your immune system. We like to oftentimes think of things as very black and white. There's like, there's the natural stuff and then there's the pharmaceutical stuff. Well, my pharmaceutical stuff was natural. We just figured out how to make the exact same thing over and over again. And so it's a lot grayer than I think that it's easy to wrap our heads around. And I think that we've just got to followed the data and like what's, what are the drugs that can help people and is there data to suggest that it can help people? If so, like we should put people on them. And I think try to get less caught up on, you know, is it from a drug company or, you know, what's the source of it? But I think just really just, actually track like, you know, is there good data here?
And to your point earlier, like, when I was dying from my Castleman disease, there was no data for sirolimus to save my life. I had lab data that made me think it might, but sometimes you do follow the things that don't have much data because the alternative is that you're going to die and you just, you do that. But if you do have data on drugs, like, you know, what sort of breaks my heart is when I hear about people with terminal cancer that say, 'I'm not going to take this medicine because it's a pharmaceutical product, I'm going to take something else.' And then you hear about them passing away and you just think to yourself like, I wish they had given themselves a shot with the traditional pharma stuff. And who knows if the pharma stuff would've worked, but we have a lot of data to show that it does work in some people.