As I often tell people, when Donald Trump came down the escalator to announce his run for president at Trump Tower on June 16, 2015, something profound happened. For me, like many people, it was the beginning of an unknown red-pill experience none of us asked for. I had no idea at the time because I thought it was a joke. Trump president? Don’t make me laugh. To say the least I wasn’t a fan. I explore some of the consequences of that experience in the book I’m finishing, but one of the significant ongoing of those consequences for millions of Americans is health. It started with the Covid catastrophe, which would have never happened if there was no Trump. It caused millions of Americans to question modern medicine, and the medical-Big Pharma industrial complex. Even for those who haven’t had this experience and still believe everything America does about health, they probably don’t trust the “experts” like they once did.

Indoctrinated is a strong word with negative connotations I want to use, but am hesitant because it implies people doing the indoctrinating are doing it in bad faith. We use it as a synonym for brainwashing. We can also use the word programmed, which also comes with negative connotations. Whatever we call it, we have been taught to see the world in a certain way. I often refer to this as a plausibility structure, the mental building in which we live that causes us to see certain things as real or believable whether they are or not. It causes us to take what happens in life for granted as just the way things are. There is nothing inherently nefarious about this process. It doesn’t imply some kind of cabal of people perpetrating conspiracies, a word now used to silence anyone who questions the leftist “narrative.”

This natural human process of creating a plausible world is not only inevitable in every culture in every time and place, but necessary. The late sociologist Peter Berger discusses this concept in his 1960s books The Sacred Canopy and The Social Construction of Reality. Whatever our worldview comes to be, there are an infinite number of influences that make it so. Which is the reason it’s so hard to change. In previous times we referred to a radical change in our perception of something a paradigm shift, now thanks to the movie The Matrix, we call it being red pilled, and boy of boy have I been red pilled since Trump came on the scene. Modern medicine and health has been a huge one, in fact so big I have no idea how I was able to swallow it, but swallow it I did. If I were to boil down what I’ve learned over the last three plus years I think it would be this:

God created our bodies to heal themselves.

For those of us who are Christians that’s kind of anticlimactic, right? That’s it? Yep, but this new understanding proverbially turned my world upside down, or more accurately right side up. It is impossible to convey how profoundly those seven little words changed my understanding of everything to do with health, and still are. What makes this revelation from Almighty God himself so revelatory? The current perspective we all have, or had, of modern medicine is the answer.

As I’ve learned over the last few years this is a long story, but to put it simply, we’ve been programmed/indoctrinated/taught to see what heals us is medicine, something that comes from outside of us and is made by human beings in a lab. We see diseases like rolling snake eyes or getting a pair of twos, just bad luck, and only medicine can heal us. While it can treat symptoms it can do nothing for underlying causes, and therein lies the disaster that is modern medicine and the dismal state of American health. But this is what I believed until God used the response to Covid to open my eyes.

On October 3, 2021, I wrote a post titled, “How I was Programmed by Modern Medicine” using the Netflix series The Last Kingdom to show just how programmed I was. I look back at that and I’m shocked. I really believed that? I state in the piece, “It never occurred to me, literally, that things that grow out of the ground could have healing effects on the human body. That’s what medicine did.” As I say, I believed in the amazing God-created human immune system, but thought without modern medicine the body really couldn’t heal itself. And I thought it was pure “Hollywood” that implied things growing out of the ground could heal us. Ugh.  In the summer of 2020 I started to learn about the foundation of modern medicine, something called germ theory. Like everyone else I’d heard of it, but I had no idea what the implications were of accepting this as our mental architecture for what health means.

There are certain things in our culture that we dare not question lest we endure the wrath of “the consensus,” and one of those is germ theory. I recently read a book called Good-Bye Germ Theory by Dr. William P. Trebing, and I highly recommend it if you want your health paradigm completely messed with. Trebing is more cynical than I am and the subtitle of the book indicates that: “ending a century of medical fraud and how to protect your family.” As I’ve told my own friends and family, if someone read this prior to spring 2020, nothing about the Covid catastrophe would have surprised them, nothing. I believe almost everyone involved in modern medicine is well-meaning and is convinced they are helping people, and often they are. But modern medicine is doing incalculable damage to millions of people all over the world. If that statement makes you angry with me, or makes you think I’m off my rocker, I would just encourage you to be open and read a book like this. You may not agree with everything he says, I certainly don’t, or come to his conclusions, but at the least it will cause you to question where you hadn’t before, and be more discerning about the health of you and your family. What you do with it is all your choice.

So, what has this to do with Greek gum? My cousin, Dr. Greg Brannon, was instrumental in guiding me through this journey of discovery. We grew up together, almost exactly the same age, and he knew he wanted to be a doctor from when we were five years old. He was an OB-GYN for thirty years, and then founded Optimal Bio, a bioidentical hormone replacement business eight or nine years ago. He went through his own health epiphany some time ago as well—it didn’t take Covid.

This video from their Optimal Bio podcast explains the Greek gum, and Greg’s daughter, Tyler, interviews the young man who started the business selling said gum. She also runs the business. It’s impossible to convey how much this short discussion about gum, and so much more, put yet more things together for me. You’ll hear them mention something I never heard in sixty years prior trusting modern medicine, gut health. Back in 2021 listening to their podcasts and also heard a phrase I’d never heard before, and which took me a while to wrap my mind around: food is medicine. Indeed it is! And the way God intended it to be. Modern medicine can absolutely be a blessing when you really need it. It’s awe inspiring what God has allowed human beings to invent and learn, but every health indicator in America has gotten worse over the last several decades because we’ve come to trust the medical profession and not the human body and immune system for our health care. I very much encourage you to listen to this, and learn.