Dr. Amerling is a physician who was recently featured on EpochTV discussing how the medical profession has been destroyed. In that video, he said, “We’ve given up authority to central bodies of so-called experts, all of whom have agendas. The entire process is bought and paid for. If we don’t take back our authority as physicians, it’s all over…There’s massive over-prescribing. The model that we have adopted now is to not reverse the disease, but to rather treat those diseases with pharmaceutical products.” Dr. Amerling serves as the Chief Academic Officer for The Wellness Company.

CSDAP talked to Dr. Amerling to get his viewpoint on the use of medication-assisted treatment in the field of addiction medicine.  Dr. Amerling’s viewpoint reflects the medical industry’s growing concern regarding changes that reduce an individual doctor’s ability to properly treat patients according to his own insight and education, whether in relation to illness or recovery from addiction. 

Dr. Amerling on the pharmaceutical industry’s influence over medicine:

My observations over my career are that the pharma industry dominated medicine and psychiatry and every other field of medicine. Medical students are taught exclusively to push pills for virtually everything. I know from reading over the years that the only long-term effective treatments for addictions are group- and religion-based. If you have that sort of approach, that is what produces long-term rehabilitation in an addicted person. Getting them on a substitute drug does not do much for them. 

Reliance on naloxone and buprenorphine is a fig leaf. It doesn’t really solve a problem, it just creates a different problem. The answer is behavior modification and abstinence. 

On evidence-based medicine in general: 

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is a scam that was hijacked very early on by pharma to create guidelines to push their drugs. That’s really what it was all about. This scam has been extremely successful and doctors have by and large adopted this whole mantra of EBM without giving it a second thought. I was among them. I said, yeah, EBM, that sounds great.

However, I realized very early on that this was being used to narrow the scope of treatment and to push various pharmaceutical agendas and treatments. That’s because Pharma was behind this whole guideline approach to medicine. They funded the guideline groups, either directly or indirectly, and got their people to be on the panels. Their doctors who were proponents of their drugs—they got them to be on the panels. That’s all they really had to do. The panels would invariably come out with recommendations to use more and more pharmaceutical products. The term EBM has become synonymous with pharmacuetical-based. 

Evidence is available for everything. You can always find evidence to support a theory. Whoever has control over these committees controls the evidence. The evidence base, the published medical literature, shall we say, is heavily corrupted by Pharma. There is publication bias where they only publish favorable articles. They can point to the successes of their drugs, tiny though they may be. They spin articles in their favor. So that whole database is unreliable. Evidence-based medicine is based on what? Pharmaceutical studies? That’s really what it is.

About treating addiction with drugs:

Addictions create mental disorders that are then treated with drugs. They have to come off these drugs in order to have any hope of becoming a normal person again. That means abstinence from alcohol, giving up marijuana and whatever other drug they were addicted to. Then they have a chance of becoming sane, functioning people. But without that, no amount of pills will erase the problems being caused by the drugs. 

About his opinion that the medical industry has been destroyed: 

You have to make people aware. This is huge part of the problem. It’s a hard sell. Because I even have a hard time convincing my colleagues who are very visible in media to get them to come out and say the problem here is not just this particular program or drug or approach or vaccine. The problem is this concept of evidence-based medicine that says there is only one way to treat something. And it’s what we say because we are the authorities. Because we have this ability to give our seal of approval, we say, “this is the guideline.”

Going back 20 years, I’ve been criticizing guidelines as an approach. And one of the things I said was they have the potential now to create harm to thousands or millions if they are wrong. Once the doctors produced this piece of sausage they called a guideline, outside authorities could turn this into an enforceable standard and that’s what happened. 

We’ve gone from a standard of care, which was an idea that you would treat someone in a certain way based on ethical practice. You would give them informed consent, you would respond to someone, you would call them back. You would order a lab test and you would report back to the patient what it showed. Things like that, the standard of care. That’s a high-level of communication, basically,

But they morphed this into standardized care based on guidelines. If you don’t follow guidelines, you’re not practicing standard of care anymore and you are an outlier and you are subject to censorship, deplatforming and delicensing.

That’s one size fits all. Which everyone used to agree was the antithesis of good care. Because everybody is a unique individual and they deserve a unique approach. So if it’s one size fits all, you do away with all that and you can have centrally prescribed care which is exactly what we are seeing right now. 

On medical schools: 

They are compressing the basic sciences into smaller and smaller blocks of time. So it’s almost impossible to get any kind of mastery over these basic fundamental sciences that have been the backbone of scientific medicine for a long time now. Understanding pathophysiology, biochemistry, all these things are essential to know how to handle a unique problem. 

So this has been deemphasized. And at the same time, in every course, they promote guidelines. So they are literally teaching these students guidelines. They are being told in essence to turn off their brain. Don’t think. They don’t have to think any more. Just follow this cookbook. 

CSDAP would like to thank Dr. Amerling for the generous sharing of his time for this interview.