September 5, 2025 • 37 mins
In this episode, Tudor discusses the complex relationship between pharmaceuticals, particularly SSRIs, and their impact on mental health during pregnancy and child development with Dr. Adam Urato. They explore the consequences of chemical medications, the importance of informed choices, and the need for open discussions in the medical community regarding the risks and benefits of these treatments. The Tudor Dixon Podcast is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network. For more visit TudorDixonPodcast.com
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the Tutor Dixon Podcast. We have a podcast
for you today that is very timely because right now,
I think the entire world is looking at the Health
and Human Services Secretary and saying what exactly is going on?
And what we're seeing right now seems almost like a
battle of the pharma giants against the Maha movement, and
(00:23):
there's like this black and white line. It's like you're
either on the black and one side or the other
of this issue. You cannot cross that line. And that's
what we're seeing in these hearings right now is that
people who haven't been in the medical profession feel like
there's yes and no to everything, that there's no gray area.
And I think the Maha movement has come in and
(00:44):
said there is a big gray area that we haven't
been able to talk about for a long time. And
suddenly we're able to say, you know what, maybe this
isn't working for everybody, and maybe this doesn't work for everybody,
and there's a massive backlash against the idea that some
pharmaceuticals might not work for everybody. I mean, one of
them is the COVID vaccine, where you have the Health
(01:06):
and Human Services Secretary saying not every kid has to
have it. In fact, in Germany it shows that kids
didn't that didn't have any other underlying symptoms, didn't die
from COVID. They don't really get sick from it. So
I am excited today because we have doctor Adam Jurato
with me. You've heard me talk about what he has
(01:26):
worked on. I've written an op ed on some of
his work. He is a fetal and maternal medicine specialist
serving as the chief of the Maternal Fetal Medicine at
Metro west At Medical Center in Massachusetts, and he specializes
in high risk pregnancies. Thank you so much for being
on today.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Well, it's a real pleasure to join you, and I
really appreciate your bringing attention to this issue.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
It's to me, it's something that I think, like I said,
everybody feels like they have to be on one side
or the other. And there's a few doctors right now
who are coming out and saying, you know what, there
are times when this medication might be necessary, but we
should be very cautious about who we use medications with.
And I think that kind of is spanning a lot
(02:14):
of different types of medications right now. I think one
of the most powerful things I've heard you say is
chemicals have consequences.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Yeah. I think their points a very good one, which
is that there's not a one size fits all answer
to all of this. And this is particularly true in
the area that I talk about, which is depression and
antidepressants and pregnancy. Before I start, I just want to
say that this topic that I try to raise attention to,
this issue about chemicals, which I'm going to address that issue.
(02:42):
The idea is to try to inform the public, and
so that's really the key, that's really my goal. It's
been cast, particularly after the FDA conference. It's been cast
as is it designed to be pill shaming pregnant women
or disregarding their depression, or making light of it, pill shaming,
guilt tripping, things like that. From my standpoint, it's none
(03:03):
of that. What it's all about is just getting proper
information out to patients and the public. Depression can be awful,
human suffering is awful, and these patients deserve compassionate care.
But I always make the point that part of compassionate
care is proper information, accurately informing patients in the public,
and part of that accurate information informing the patients in
(03:26):
the public is getting people to understand that medications by
and large are chemicals, and they're synthesized in chemical manufacturing
facilities and they have consequences in the body. That's what
chemicals do. They have chemical effects. I tell people when
I lecture on this. They're not like growing on trees.
They're being made in chemical plants. And then when they
(03:48):
go into the body, for example, in pregnancy, they go
into the mom, they cross over the placenta, they go
into the baby, and what they do is they have
chemical effects. Now it doesn't mean we can't use medication,
but it means we have to always be aware of
the chemical effects and the consequences. That's where I started
using that phrase that chemicals have consequences.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
And so you recently had a panel on this, and
I think that one of the compassionate care issue is
what is really the controversy here, because people do get
concerned if you say, well, we've looked at this and
potentially there are risks that we didn't know and we
shouldn't be so quick to give out this medication. Not
to say that it's not right for some people, but
(04:30):
maybe we're too quick to give it to all people,
and people who have been on the medication or doctors
who have given it out. You can see that there
is a hesitancy or even kind of a strong reaction
to say, please, don't say that I was wrong in
what I did. And I can feel that as a
mom who's been pregnant. And now you hear you know,
(04:53):
there's this new study coming out that says pregnant mothers
shouldn't take tail and all. And when I was pregnant,
it was pregnant mothers shouldn't take you should take tailanel.
And now we're there's all these news articles coming out
and I go in my head, I go, gosh, how
many times did I take Talald? Did I take tailant?
You know, so it's a very personal it's a very
personal discussion.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Yeah. I tell the moms I take care of that.
I'm a clinician. I take care of pregnant women every day.
I tell them not to blame themselves. That's what they
always do. Whenever something comes out of a new story
or whenever something occurs in the pregnancy, they first blame themselves.
That you know, we're all on the same team. We're
not trying to blame anybody here except we're just trying
to get the proper information and then get that out
(05:35):
to pregnant women in the public. What I think is happening, though,
is that we are all on the same team in
a sense. But the pharmaceuticals industry's main goal is actually
not to be getting out proper information to patients in
the public. The pharmaceutical industry's main goal pharma wants to
increase sales and profits and return to shareholders. So what
(05:56):
they do in these various subjects, whatever the medication is
or the pharmaceutical is, is that they try to kind
of roll out the product, and they typically roll it
out with like basically a sales pitch, and that sales
pitch almost always follows the same routine. And what that
is is is they create fear about the condition, whether
(06:18):
that's an infection or whether that's depression, they create fear
about that, and then they sell what they have as
the cure, and they roll their drug out as being
almost entirely safe and very effective. And then what we
learn over time is people are using it, is that
it wasn't as safe, it's not as safe as originally built,
(06:38):
and it's not as effective. What people have to remember
is that the sales pitch is designed to increase sales,
but it's not the truth. And what we need to
do as a human community is to try to get
at the truth, and the way we do that is
with studies, with research, et cetera. In this particular case,
with the ssrintidepressants, the sales pitch is that depression is
(07:03):
harmful in pregnancy, leads to poor outcomes, so the moms
should take these SSRI chemicals, these antidepressants, thus reducing their
depression and leading to better pregnancy outcomes. That's the sales pitch,
but that's actually not supported by the scientific evidence. What
we see with the actual scientific evidence are poorer outcomes
(07:26):
in the moms who are taking SSRIs. That's simply what
the science shows. We see, and I'll march through quickly,
is that we see increased rates, for example, of miscarriage,
of birth defects, increased rates of pre term birth and
low birth weight. We see increase rates of a condition
called pre aclamsia, which can be quite dangerous. It's a
(07:47):
significant cause of morbidity immortality. And we see increased rates
of postpartum hemorrhage, for sure, that's very clear that these
SSRIs lead to increased rates of hemorrhage. After the babies
are born, we see increased newborn problems including nick you
admissions and other issues. And then the big question is
long term what the effects are here? And this is
(08:08):
being studied now, but we are finding that children who
were exposed in utero are showing in studies some studies
increased rates of depression, increase rates of speech and language disorders,
increased rates of neuro behavioral issues ADHD, autism. So this
is the truth of what we're actually seeing in the
(08:30):
science as opposed to this sales pitch as I was saying,
which a lot of these drugs and pharmaceuticals get rolled
out with. But what the public needs to understand is
that the sales pitch, what the pitch that's designed to
sell the pharmaceutical products, the drugs and otherwise is not
going to actually be the truth reality for when they're
used in the human populations.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
So let me give a little background from my experience
with this, because I had a friend who was involved
with getting drugs pro by the FDA, and then they
would they would fund the lab, and then you know
that that is just a cash cow. Once you get
it approved, then you bring in hundreds of millions or
billions of dollars. And it was kind of like the
(09:13):
way it worked was you go in front of almost
like you know, the FDA panels like the Wizard of Oz, right,
you go in front of them, and you're like, can
I get through this? Can I get them to say,
you know what, we bless you? You can go on
and sell this drug. And there's a lot that goes
through and sometimes you get kicked back and you have
to get some more information, and there's a lot that
(09:33):
goes through this. But it seems the as though from
my experience with these folks, and you can correct me
if I'm wrong, once you get that wave of approval,
no one goes back afterward and says, actually, what we're
Rarely do they go back afterwards, or it takes years
for them to go back afterwards and say, hey, this
isn't doing what it is it's supposed to be doing.
(09:54):
You were one of the early voices that came out
against a drug called I Think it's McKenna and said,
I don't think this is having the effects that it's
supposed to have. And that was not welcomed feedback.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Yeah, And and McKenna was a drug used for preterm
birth or to prevent recurrent preterm birth, and we started
using that around two thousand and three and obstetrics to
prevent a woman who'd had a preterm birth from having
another preterm birth. But the study that the approval was
based on at the FDA, and I like the way
you explained that going before the Wizard of Oz, the
(10:30):
study that that was based on was very shaky. There
were a lot of a lot of limitations of that study.
So from the get go, I thought that I had
real concerns about the drug. But then it got adopted
and readily and rapidly used, and again it was rolled
out with the sort of pharmaceutical rollout of it's safe,
it's effective, it prevents a recurrent preterm birth. But as
(10:52):
we studied it more and more over time, it was
shown to actually not be effective. And I was an
active voice against that, which is another issue here, which
is a lot of people have just heard me talking
about antidepressants, but my interest here is in actually just
informing pregnant women in the public about the medications they're
taking and I did play a role with McKenna, so
(11:15):
we petitioned the FDA about this. When the second trial
came out, which was the confirmatory trial, which took years
to do, but when it came out, it was shown
that it actually was not effective, which is what many
of us had been saying all along, and so it
was pulled off. The market was pulled off in twenty
twenty three. But it's a great example of this sort
of classic pharm of playbook where they get the approval
(11:38):
and then they start the rollout, and the rollout is
to scare the population about the condition, which in this
case was preterm birth, and then to oversell essentially that
they're safe, that they're effective, not mentioned risks, and highlight benefits.
But then over time it's often shown, as I was
saying earlier, to be not to have more risks than
(12:01):
we were being told about, and to be less effective
than we were told about. This is the typical trajectory
of a lot of the medications that the patients use.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
So and I want to be clear, I don't talk
about these things because I think everybody should question every
medication from now on. I mean, certainly, you know I've
had enough times where you get an infection and you
take an antibiotic, and if we didn't have those, we
would not be alive today. Many of us would not
survive a simple infection. There are medications that are great,
(12:30):
that do great things and save lives, and I think
that's why there's been this societal push that anytime there's
a new medication, you accept it, because you don't want
people to start to become skeptical of all medications, and
so there is a delicate balance there. We actually had
an author on who was exposing some of the products
(12:53):
that had come out of Johnson and Johnson, and there
was one in particular that was a vaginal mesh that
came out and it was on the market for twenty years,
and people had been saying, you know, this is causing
these women severe problems, and I mean the problems were
devastating problems, devastating in a third of women. So it's like, well,
(13:14):
it's not all of women, but a third of women
who have this. There's a lot of women, you know.
And it took twenty years, more than twenty years to
get that off the market because I do think that
even doctors seem afraid to push back when they see
something that's not right.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Yeah, I think that there's a certain self censorship that
goes on where people are afraid to rock the boat.
I think that a conventional wisdom develops, or a scientific consensus,
and then people physicians become afraid to be seen as
running against that consensus for a variety of reasons, and
(13:51):
so then they self censor and we end up with censorship,
which is not good because oftentimes the dissenting voices are
correct on issue. So I always make that point, whether
it's with me, I mean.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
Isn't that what science is really about, is to have discussion.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Absolutely, that's exactly right, Tutor. Descent is essentially the heart
of science, and so really we want to encourage dissenting voices. Unfortunately,
our society has taking a turn for the worse on
this before, maybe before COVID or since COVID, with this
idea of trying to censor and basically not allowed dissenting voices,
(14:31):
saying that they're dangerous, et cetera. They're harmful to patients,
harmful to public health. But that's a real turn in
the wrong direction, because, as you were just saying, it's
the heart and soul of the scientific method. Descent is
like the essence of science, and we need to hear
dissenting voices and that's often where the new ideas and
where the correct ideas are coming from.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
Let's take a quick commercial break. Will continue next on
a Tutor Dixon podcast. I saw an article that came
out in response to your f panel. So there was
recently an FDA panel on SSRIs in pregnant women and
the effects, and you had multiple different voices up there
speaking about this. And I saw a recent editorial on this,
(15:12):
and it was a woman who is I believe pregnant
now has two little kids, and talked about the importance
of her antidepressants, and it was, you know, she's very
upset about the fact that there were some questions as
to whether or not this was safe for the baby.
And I get that. I read it, and I was like, man,
I feel her. I feel exactly what she's saying. But
(15:34):
I also understand what you're saying, and that is that
you are starting to see changes. And I think the
most significant issue that has sat in my chest and
sat on my heart ever since I saw what you
guys were talking about was that you can actually tell
by looking at an ultrasound if the baby's mother is
(15:57):
on an SSRI.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
Yeah, to get back to her. I did read that article,
and I do applaud women who come forward and tell
their story, and I think that they should be heard,
and I applaud her for doing that. I think that
I think that some people mistake, you know what I'm saying.
I try to explain to people that there's two separate issues.
One issue, the issue that I'm focused on is do
(16:21):
the SSRI antidepressants chemically affect the pregnancy? What are the risks?
Do they chemically alter fetal brain development? And should the
public be informed about that? And I think the answer
to both aspects of that question are yes. I think
they do impact the pregnancy. I do think they do
alter fetal brain development, and I do think that the
(16:42):
public should be warned about that. The second question about
whether a given patient should stay on her antidepressant or
not during her pregnancy is a very individual and complex
question that requires a discussion in the office, and I
do this every day with patients, and so I think
sometimes people mistake my answer to the first question, which
(17:06):
is that I think these chemicals are impacting the pregnancy
and the developing brain, and the patient in that the
patients in the public should be warned. They mistake that
as thinking I'm talking about them and their pregnancy and
a specific patient. That's not the case. That requires individualized counseling.
So I think it's important to keep those issues separate.
(17:26):
As far as the chemical impact that you're talking about, yes,
serotonin plays a crucial role in fetal development, particularly fetal
brain development, and the SSRIs disrupt the serotonin system, so
it just stands to reason that they would impact development
of the brain. So when we're giving it during pregnancy
and we're looking, for example, by ultrasound. There have been
(17:49):
a couple of studies that have done this. One was
done by Malder in twenty eleven and another one by
Salisbury I believe in twenty twenty three or twenty twenty four,
and they looked at fetal movement after giving or when
the women were on antidepressants, and what they found is
that it alters fetal movement. The fetuses of the SSRI
(18:09):
exposed moms are moving much more, They're less quiescent, they
don't have the same quiescent periods that we would normally
see it's kind of like jittery or they described as
jittery or agitated movements. So these were two studies that
were done ultrasound studies that showed this. Now, this corresponds
to what we see after birth, where the newborns that
(18:32):
have been exposed to SSRIs tend to be jittery and agitated.
So this makes sense that we're seeing a direct chemical
effect of the SSRI chemicals on the developing fetal brain.
Interestingly enough, a study just came out to it, or
just I'll wrap up this. A study just came out
looking at the length of the umbilical cord in babies
(18:54):
exposed to SSRIs and it found that the chords are long. Now,
this is the second study also showing this. The first
study on this came out in twenty sixteen and the
second one just came out now. But they think that
the length of the umbilical cord has to do with
fetal motion fetal activity. So all of this information would
(19:16):
hang together. The moms are taking ssrity to press sants
as in the SSRIs are crossing the placenta, they're going
into the baby, they're going into the baby's brain. They're
having an impact of agitation or jitteriness or motor impacts,
which is what we can see these medications do. And
we're seeing that as reflected on fetal ultrasound with increased movements,
(19:37):
and we're also seeing it with a result at birth
of a longer umbilical cord, possibly due to the increased movements.
And then also this jitteriness and agitation that we see
during the newborn period, which has been called the newborn
behavioral syndrome or newborn withdrawal or poor neonatal adaptation.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
So I'm going to go to a place that is
kind of controversial. One of the things that you, I
mean very controversial. I think that the country has been
looking at the impacts of mental health and the changes
in the mental health of our children for a couple
of decades.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
Now.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
If you look back, I will tell you there's a
stunning difference to me between the kids that are in
class with my children as compared to the children I
went to school with when I was young, and I
and most of my friends I've noticed this too. There's
just different behaviors. There are different ways that they metabolize
(20:32):
their food. I mean, so many changes in what the
kids of today look like as compared to the kids
that I grew up with behavior and everything. And I
think that as a society we have been saying, why
are we experiencing these higher levels of autism, higher levels
of adhd add all of these things. And you mentioned
(20:55):
that there have been studies in animals that show that
as these feed, as these babies grow up, if they
are you know, in animals, rats, rats, sheep, mice, as
those animals grow up, they show signs of autistic type behaviors.
And I know this is very sensitive because of course
(21:16):
you talked about maternal blame and all of that, and
I think that this is an area where it's very
hard for us to have this discussion. But isn't it
critical if this could be playing a role in some
of the mental illness we're seeing in children, that this
is made aware to doctors and to mothers.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Yeah. Absolutely. I think you're raising a really good point, though, Tutor,
about how much medication use is going on. And I
think a lot of people nowadays just take this for granted.
Everybody is on several medications, but this is not how
it's been I mean, we currently are the most heavily
medicated humans in human history Americans, modern day Americans. I
(22:03):
would say the most heavily medicated human beings that have
ever lived on the planet. And that's going to have
an impact when you're giving that many chemicals, that many
medications to pregnant women, to moms and babies, and then
to children. I'm seeing this in my office regularly. I'm
talking now about SSRI antidepressants, but I'm seeing it with adderall,
(22:27):
I'm seeing with ADHD medications. I'm seeing it with a
variety of different pharmaceuticals. So it's throughout our entire population.
And then to get to your specific question, are we
seeing impacts in terms of behaviors? Yes? Absolutely. The animal
studies show fairly clearly that if you expose pregnant rats, mice, etc.
(22:52):
To SSRIs, the offspring will behave differently. They'll have different
they say, different like social behaviors, different play seeking activities,
things like that. They'll have different behaviors, and they also
have different sexual behaviors. Several studies have looked at the
male offspring who we're exposed to SSRIs during development, and
(23:15):
they behave differently sexually when they're studied. They have different
populatory behavior, they mount less they put them in in
cages with females and they behave differently than the unexposed
males do.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
So should let this be a five alarm fire? I mean,
I know this is, like I said, it's so controversial
to say, but come on, I mean, at what point
do we say we have got to immediately start looking
at this. And I've had there's this SSRI conversation going
on right now, and there's this radical battle, and I've
(23:52):
seen people go on the news and say, can you
imagine people saying that folks need to get off of SSRIs?
Everybody would be killing themselves left and right. And then
there's another side that goes, man, if people get off
of an SSRI and they start killing themselves, like, should
we be worried about that? This is big stuff.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
Yeah, And I think people are now drawing attention to it.
People are now focusing more on this. This is why
I'm speaking out about it, because I agree with you.
I think this is big stuff. I think this is
very big stuff. We're talking about the development of the brain,
of the baby's brain. And I made the point during
the FDA meeting that never before in human history have
(24:34):
we chemically altered developing baby's brains in this way, and
we're doing that now, and we need to really raise
attention to what the studies are showing. It's not just
the rat in my studies, it's the human studies as well.
So we talked a little bit about the ultrasound studies.
There's twelve MRI studies. I mean, it's not one or two,
(24:56):
it's not well, maybe they got the study wrong. It's
twelve mr eye studies now showing in humans that SSRI
exposure during pregnancy leads to alterations of the brain. These
are MRI studies showing this. There's three EEG studies. EEGs
are done typically in patients that have seizures, looking at
(25:16):
brain waves, but they do these EEG studies now to
on expose newborns and expose children, and they're finding that
the brain wave patterns and the connectivity of the brain
is different in those exposed to the SSRI antidepressants. And
this just makes sense to most people looking at this
because of what a crucial role serotonin plays in brain development.
(25:41):
So if you tinker with that, if you interfere with that,
you'd expect that you'd get downstream effects. And that's in
fact what we are seeing. So I agree with you.
I don't want to be accused of fear mongering or
talking about five alarm fires or diminishing the importance of depression.
But I think your point is a very good one,
which is we're now collecting data. We've got information from
(26:04):
MRI studies, from studies on depression and language problems and autism.
We've got this whole wealth of data that's showing these things,
and we really need to get this information out to
pregnant women in the public. And we really need to,
as I was making that point at the FDA meeting,
is to change the label and to have the FDA
make a public statement on what the research is actually saying,
(26:26):
again the research versus what the sales pitch is, which
is that these drugs are essentially completely safe, very review
or no risks, and very effective, which is just not
what that scientific evidence is showing.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
Well, I just don't understand why the discussion of side
effects is then interpreted it as not caring about depression.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
Yeah, I think that some people that are doing this
are doing this as a distraction method, to distract from
the conversation. I don't want to blame all of that
for this, I think some of them are well meaning,
but this is sort of a pharmaceutical technique, a big
pharma industry technique, to divert attention away from the issue
(27:09):
at hand. So, for example, when the opioid crisis was
raging with OxyContin and people were raising issues, look, this
is a big problem, what's going on, they would often say,
we need to talk more about the crisis of untreated
pain in our country, focusing on pain rather than the
specific question that was at hand, which is is your
(27:32):
drug or is oxy conton causing these harms? But the
pharmaceutical industry moves away from the question about the drug
to the question about the condition in order to divert
your attention, to make you take your eye off the ball.
I actually saw this during McKenna. When I would argue
about it not being an effective pre term birth drug,
(27:53):
I would get feedback that, well, pre term birth is
an important issue and we can't ignore the women that
have had a preterm birth and diminish preterm birth. And
they would spend, you know, half the time talking about
pre term birth. That's more of a diversionary tactic. What
you're seeing, actually you're seeing a lot of this in
the subsequent media, the corporate media, and some of the
(28:14):
editorials written by some of the perinatal psychiatrists. They spend
most of it talking about depression. Not the depression is
not important, but you need to answer the question what
are the risks of the drugs and what is the
evidence of their effectiveness? And that's the question that needs
to be answered. The public needs to laser focus on that.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
And some of these some of these situations are creating
even deeper problems for people or or more people with problems.
That's the other issue when you have a pregnant mother
taking these. The last thing I want to get to
is the PSSD, which is the sexual dysfunction, and you
talked about that in these animals. We've heard that there
(28:57):
is potential that some of these children get to adolescents
and they don't have interest in sex, or they can't
perform sexually, or there are other sexual dysfunctions. One of
your colleagues had an interview recently and he went into
kind of graphic detail about this and said, there are
people who take these and sometimes they are permanently. Sometimes
(29:21):
there's permanent sexual dysfunction. Sometimes they can get off of
the drug and that can be reversed, but too often
they are not told ahead of time that this could happen.
And he said that some people have described it as
they can touch their genitals and it's like touching the
back of their hand. They have no reaction whatsoever, that
all of those receptors are no longer having any type
(29:43):
of reaction to another person. In fact, men are even
coming out and saying, women who I used to have
this great relationship with I was completely sexually attracted to,
I don't have that at all. I'm questioning if I'm
even a sexual person anymore. To me, this is such
a critical part of relationships, and I cannot express enough
that if you suddenly have a marriage and you have
(30:08):
the one spouse that no longer has any interest in sex,
you're destroying that relationship. If you have a child that
gets to adolescence and they don't understand that relationship, what
is the future.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Yeah, I think you're raising really important issues. I think
we need to exercise, just as a general point, more
humility about tinkering with the chemicals that make our brains
and our bodies. Sarah, why do we behave sexually the
way we do, or why do we develop in that fashion?
Why do our brains develop that way? A lot of
(30:44):
it probably has to do with the way the tracks
are laid down in utero during development, and a lot
of the way those brain tracks are formed in the
brain is because of serotonin and other neurotransmitters. Put medications
in there, like the SSRI, antidepressants and others that alter
(31:04):
those neurotransmitters. Can you alter the development of those parts
of the brain or those tracks that then show up later?
The answer from the animal studies looks like yes, absolutely,
it appears to do that, and that just makes common sense.
And then does that have major implications and major ramifications? Absolutely? Yeah.
(31:26):
I agree with you. I agree with you wholeheartedly. And
that's why I think it's important that patients and the
public get this information so they can make an informed choice,
and that the information gets out not just to pregnant women,
because really that's not the time to make the choice
on this. It really needs to get out to women
(31:47):
of child bearing age because a lot of times the
patients that I see have been on the medications for
years and many of them can't come off of them
or would have great difficulty coming off of them. And
this is another aspect to this, the issue of withdrawal
and problems withdrawing from the drugs, difficulties in coming off.
So I think that it needs to get out to
(32:09):
pregnant to women of child bearing age, specifically with the
PSSD question. I think that many people are looking at
this as a chemical injury, which takes me full circle
now to what I started off with with these chemicals
half consequences. If you're putting these chemicals into your brain,
into your body, you can get chemical impacts. And then
even when you're not taking them anymore, if there's been
(32:31):
chemical toxicity, which chemicals often do have toxicity, it can
have long term effects, and in that case with PSSD,
long term sexual effects which can be devastated.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
Let's take a quick commercial break. We'll continue next on
a Tutor Dixon podcast. I will tell you so many
people that I know that have taken medications or on
medications have said to me, if I had known these
were the side effects, I wouldn't have originally agreed to take.
And even some side effects that are just really a pain.
(33:03):
Some side effects like sweat, constant sweating constant sweating. I
have some friends who've taken these medications and they're like,
and now it doesn't go I got off the medication,
but it doesn't go away. But that's your point is
people should be informed. There's so little information about how
these medications are going to affect people. And that's what
I want to bring attention to, is that there are
(33:25):
other consequences to taking these medications. And is there another answer.
It's not that we don't take the other issues seriously.
It's that you have to make sure that there is
enough information out there for people to know what they're
putting into their bodies. I'll just end on. When your
colleague was interviewed, they also gave an example of a
young woman twenty one years old was very suffering from
(33:49):
severe anxiety, and he said, she went on this medication
and there is an instant reaction. Well sometimes it takes
a couple of weeks, but there's a reaction of okay,
and I feel calm now, I feel better. I needed
this medication, but your body adjusts and then you need more.
And as she took more, she ended up with the
(34:09):
sexual dysfunction, and she started to get very upset about that,
and she went to her doctor and they admitted her
to a hospital and said, you have some sort of
you're having a mental break. And she was trying to
tell her parents, I'm not having a mental break. There's
something happening to me. I'm not the person I used
to be, and the system was telling her you're broken,
(34:31):
not even coming back to her and saying, actually, the
medication you're taking is wrong. And I think that in
some cases even the doctors don't know that that's what
the medication does, and they're like, oh man, this is
just a new thing. You're even worse now.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
Yeah, there's a real lack of knowledge, absolutely to there's
a real lack of knowledge about side effects. And I
think now particularly sensitive to the points that you're making
because I practice in my hometown. I was born, I practice,
I work in the hospital I was born at. I
work in my community, and I never want my patients
to come back to me five years from now, ten
(35:06):
years from now, twenty years from now and say, boy,
you didn't really counsel us about those drugs, those medications
and what you were seeing in the research literature. So
I feel an obligation to care for my community and
to correctly counsel. So again, this is not about pill shaming,
making anyone feel guilty taking anyone's medications away. It's just
(35:27):
about getting proper information out to patients in the public.
The last thing I want to just comment on is
what you mentioned about doing other things. Many much of
the discussion since the FDA meeting has been about is
it should it be ssrized or untreated depression? But it's
not a choice just between those things. I don't think
anyone's arguing for ignoring pregnant women, not treating them, making
(35:51):
them feel bad. There's just there are other methods that
can be considered in that in terms of how to
address depression, whether it's exercise, psychotherapy, diet, job counseling, relationship counseling,
taking other approaches. And so I think that looking at
the whole or counseling patients about all of the options
(36:12):
and then letting them make the best choice for themselves
and then supporting them, which is what I end up
doing every day in my community, is the is the
is the best way to go, But the key there
is to actually get them the information.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
Yeah, absolutely, and I so appreciate what you're doing there's
so much more that we could talk about on this,
and I'm sure we'll have to have you back to
talk about it. But as we see the country kind
of changing, and I do I get your point about
this is a time when people are really saying you
can't push back. But I think it's also because this
is the first time people have said, maybe these three
(36:47):
letter agencies don't know everything and we should push back.
So we are also seeing a lot of strong people
stand up and say, actually, I had a bad experience too,
And it's been amazing to me the number of patients
who have said, even on social media. I never wanted
to admit this before because I was so personally embarrassed.
I thought I was the only one. But I've had
this happen too. I've had this happen too, So I
(37:08):
encourage people to keep talking in doctor Doctor Adam Errado,
thank you so much for being out there and being
a voice for all of us.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
Well. Thank you, and you're a big part of this
push this pushing back through the podcast, through writing as
you did recently, through having guests on like myself, to
keep getting the message out.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
Thank you, Thank you so much, and thank you all
for joining us on the Tutor Dixon podcast for this
episode and others. Go to the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts and join us next time.
Have a blessing.
Welcome to the Tutor Dixon Podcast. We have a podcast
for you today that is very timely because right now,
I think the entire world is looking at the Health
and Human Services Secretary and saying what exactly is going on?
And what we're seeing right now seems almost like a
battle of the pharma giants against the Maha movement, and
(00:23):
there's like this black and white line. It's like you're
either on the black and one side or the other
of this issue. You cannot cross that line. And that's
what we're seeing in these hearings right now is that
people who haven't been in the medical profession feel like
there's yes and no to everything, that there's no gray area.
And I think the Maha movement has come in and
(00:44):
said there is a big gray area that we haven't
been able to talk about for a long time. And
suddenly we're able to say, you know what, maybe this
isn't working for everybody, and maybe this doesn't work for everybody,
and there's a massive backlash against the idea that some
pharmaceuticals might not work for everybody. I mean, one of
them is the COVID vaccine, where you have the Health
(01:06):
and Human Services Secretary saying not every kid has to
have it. In fact, in Germany it shows that kids
didn't that didn't have any other underlying symptoms, didn't die
from COVID. They don't really get sick from it. So
I am excited today because we have doctor Adam Jurato
with me. You've heard me talk about what he has
(01:26):
worked on. I've written an op ed on some of
his work. He is a fetal and maternal medicine specialist
serving as the chief of the Maternal Fetal Medicine at
Metro west At Medical Center in Massachusetts, and he specializes
in high risk pregnancies. Thank you so much for being
on today.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Well, it's a real pleasure to join you, and I
really appreciate your bringing attention to this issue.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
It's to me, it's something that I think, like I said,
everybody feels like they have to be on one side
or the other. And there's a few doctors right now
who are coming out and saying, you know what, there
are times when this medication might be necessary, but we
should be very cautious about who we use medications with.
And I think that kind of is spanning a lot
(02:14):
of different types of medications right now. I think one
of the most powerful things I've heard you say is
chemicals have consequences.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Yeah. I think their points a very good one, which
is that there's not a one size fits all answer
to all of this. And this is particularly true in
the area that I talk about, which is depression and
antidepressants and pregnancy. Before I start, I just want to
say that this topic that I try to raise attention to,
this issue about chemicals, which I'm going to address that issue.
(02:42):
The idea is to try to inform the public, and
so that's really the key, that's really my goal. It's
been cast, particularly after the FDA conference. It's been cast
as is it designed to be pill shaming pregnant women
or disregarding their depression, or making light of it, pill shaming,
guilt tripping, things like that. From my standpoint, it's none
(03:03):
of that. What it's all about is just getting proper
information out to patients and the public. Depression can be awful,
human suffering is awful, and these patients deserve compassionate care.
But I always make the point that part of compassionate
care is proper information, accurately informing patients in the public,
and part of that accurate information informing the patients in
(03:26):
the public is getting people to understand that medications by
and large are chemicals, and they're synthesized in chemical manufacturing
facilities and they have consequences in the body. That's what
chemicals do. They have chemical effects. I tell people when
I lecture on this. They're not like growing on trees.
They're being made in chemical plants. And then when they
(03:48):
go into the body, for example, in pregnancy, they go
into the mom, they cross over the placenta, they go
into the baby, and what they do is they have
chemical effects. Now it doesn't mean we can't use medication,
but it means we have to always be aware of
the chemical effects and the consequences. That's where I started
using that phrase that chemicals have consequences.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
And so you recently had a panel on this, and
I think that one of the compassionate care issue is
what is really the controversy here, because people do get
concerned if you say, well, we've looked at this and
potentially there are risks that we didn't know and we
shouldn't be so quick to give out this medication. Not
to say that it's not right for some people, but
(04:30):
maybe we're too quick to give it to all people,
and people who have been on the medication or doctors
who have given it out. You can see that there
is a hesitancy or even kind of a strong reaction
to say, please, don't say that I was wrong in
what I did. And I can feel that as a
mom who's been pregnant. And now you hear you know,
(04:53):
there's this new study coming out that says pregnant mothers
shouldn't take tail and all. And when I was pregnant,
it was pregnant mothers shouldn't take you should take tailanel.
And now we're there's all these news articles coming out
and I go in my head, I go, gosh, how
many times did I take Talald? Did I take tailant?
You know, so it's a very personal it's a very
personal discussion.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Yeah. I tell the moms I take care of that.
I'm a clinician. I take care of pregnant women every day.
I tell them not to blame themselves. That's what they
always do. Whenever something comes out of a new story
or whenever something occurs in the pregnancy, they first blame themselves.
That you know, we're all on the same team. We're
not trying to blame anybody here except we're just trying
to get the proper information and then get that out
(05:35):
to pregnant women in the public. What I think is happening, though,
is that we are all on the same team in
a sense. But the pharmaceuticals industry's main goal is actually
not to be getting out proper information to patients in
the public. The pharmaceutical industry's main goal pharma wants to
increase sales and profits and return to shareholders. So what
(05:56):
they do in these various subjects, whatever the medication is
or the pharmaceutical is, is that they try to kind
of roll out the product, and they typically roll it
out with like basically a sales pitch, and that sales
pitch almost always follows the same routine. And what that
is is is they create fear about the condition, whether
(06:18):
that's an infection or whether that's depression, they create fear
about that, and then they sell what they have as
the cure, and they roll their drug out as being
almost entirely safe and very effective. And then what we
learn over time is people are using it, is that
it wasn't as safe, it's not as safe as originally built,
(06:38):
and it's not as effective. What people have to remember
is that the sales pitch is designed to increase sales,
but it's not the truth. And what we need to
do as a human community is to try to get
at the truth, and the way we do that is
with studies, with research, et cetera. In this particular case,
with the ssrintidepressants, the sales pitch is that depression is
(07:03):
harmful in pregnancy, leads to poor outcomes, so the moms
should take these SSRI chemicals, these antidepressants, thus reducing their
depression and leading to better pregnancy outcomes. That's the sales pitch,
but that's actually not supported by the scientific evidence. What
we see with the actual scientific evidence are poorer outcomes
(07:26):
in the moms who are taking SSRIs. That's simply what
the science shows. We see, and I'll march through quickly,
is that we see increased rates, for example, of miscarriage,
of birth defects, increased rates of pre term birth and
low birth weight. We see increase rates of a condition
called pre aclamsia, which can be quite dangerous. It's a
(07:47):
significant cause of morbidity immortality. And we see increased rates
of postpartum hemorrhage, for sure, that's very clear that these
SSRIs lead to increased rates of hemorrhage. After the babies
are born, we see increased newborn problems including nick you
admissions and other issues. And then the big question is
long term what the effects are here? And this is
(08:08):
being studied now, but we are finding that children who
were exposed in utero are showing in studies some studies
increased rates of depression, increase rates of speech and language disorders,
increased rates of neuro behavioral issues ADHD, autism. So this
is the truth of what we're actually seeing in the
(08:30):
science as opposed to this sales pitch as I was saying,
which a lot of these drugs and pharmaceuticals get rolled
out with. But what the public needs to understand is
that the sales pitch, what the pitch that's designed to
sell the pharmaceutical products, the drugs and otherwise is not
going to actually be the truth reality for when they're
used in the human populations.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
So let me give a little background from my experience
with this, because I had a friend who was involved
with getting drugs pro by the FDA, and then they
would they would fund the lab, and then you know
that that is just a cash cow. Once you get
it approved, then you bring in hundreds of millions or
billions of dollars. And it was kind of like the
(09:13):
way it worked was you go in front of almost
like you know, the FDA panels like the Wizard of Oz, right,
you go in front of them, and you're like, can
I get through this? Can I get them to say,
you know what, we bless you? You can go on
and sell this drug. And there's a lot that goes
through and sometimes you get kicked back and you have
to get some more information, and there's a lot that
(09:33):
goes through this. But it seems the as though from
my experience with these folks, and you can correct me
if I'm wrong, once you get that wave of approval,
no one goes back afterward and says, actually, what we're
Rarely do they go back afterwards, or it takes years
for them to go back afterwards and say, hey, this
isn't doing what it is it's supposed to be doing.
(09:54):
You were one of the early voices that came out
against a drug called I Think it's McKenna and said,
I don't think this is having the effects that it's
supposed to have. And that was not welcomed feedback.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Yeah, And and McKenna was a drug used for preterm
birth or to prevent recurrent preterm birth, and we started
using that around two thousand and three and obstetrics to
prevent a woman who'd had a preterm birth from having
another preterm birth. But the study that the approval was
based on at the FDA, and I like the way
you explained that going before the Wizard of Oz, the
(10:30):
study that that was based on was very shaky. There
were a lot of a lot of limitations of that study.
So from the get go, I thought that I had
real concerns about the drug. But then it got adopted
and readily and rapidly used, and again it was rolled
out with the sort of pharmaceutical rollout of it's safe,
it's effective, it prevents a recurrent preterm birth. But as
(10:52):
we studied it more and more over time, it was
shown to actually not be effective. And I was an
active voice against that, which is another issue here, which
is a lot of people have just heard me talking
about antidepressants, but my interest here is in actually just
informing pregnant women in the public about the medications they're
taking and I did play a role with McKenna, so
(11:15):
we petitioned the FDA about this. When the second trial
came out, which was the confirmatory trial, which took years
to do, but when it came out, it was shown
that it actually was not effective, which is what many
of us had been saying all along, and so it
was pulled off. The market was pulled off in twenty
twenty three. But it's a great example of this sort
of classic pharm of playbook where they get the approval
(11:38):
and then they start the rollout, and the rollout is
to scare the population about the condition, which in this
case was preterm birth, and then to oversell essentially that
they're safe, that they're effective, not mentioned risks, and highlight benefits.
But then over time it's often shown, as I was
saying earlier, to be not to have more risks than
(12:01):
we were being told about, and to be less effective
than we were told about. This is the typical trajectory
of a lot of the medications that the patients use.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
So and I want to be clear, I don't talk
about these things because I think everybody should question every
medication from now on. I mean, certainly, you know I've
had enough times where you get an infection and you
take an antibiotic, and if we didn't have those, we
would not be alive today. Many of us would not
survive a simple infection. There are medications that are great,
(12:30):
that do great things and save lives, and I think
that's why there's been this societal push that anytime there's
a new medication, you accept it, because you don't want
people to start to become skeptical of all medications, and
so there is a delicate balance there. We actually had
an author on who was exposing some of the products
(12:53):
that had come out of Johnson and Johnson, and there
was one in particular that was a vaginal mesh that
came out and it was on the market for twenty years,
and people had been saying, you know, this is causing
these women severe problems, and I mean the problems were
devastating problems, devastating in a third of women. So it's like, well,
(13:14):
it's not all of women, but a third of women
who have this. There's a lot of women, you know.
And it took twenty years, more than twenty years to
get that off the market because I do think that
even doctors seem afraid to push back when they see
something that's not right.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Yeah, I think that there's a certain self censorship that
goes on where people are afraid to rock the boat.
I think that a conventional wisdom develops, or a scientific consensus,
and then people physicians become afraid to be seen as
running against that consensus for a variety of reasons, and
(13:51):
so then they self censor and we end up with censorship,
which is not good because oftentimes the dissenting voices are
correct on issue. So I always make that point, whether
it's with me, I mean.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
Isn't that what science is really about, is to have discussion.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Absolutely, that's exactly right, Tutor. Descent is essentially the heart
of science, and so really we want to encourage dissenting voices. Unfortunately,
our society has taking a turn for the worse on
this before, maybe before COVID or since COVID, with this
idea of trying to censor and basically not allowed dissenting voices,
(14:31):
saying that they're dangerous, et cetera. They're harmful to patients,
harmful to public health. But that's a real turn in
the wrong direction, because, as you were just saying, it's
the heart and soul of the scientific method. Descent is
like the essence of science, and we need to hear
dissenting voices and that's often where the new ideas and
where the correct ideas are coming from.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
Let's take a quick commercial break. Will continue next on
a Tutor Dixon podcast. I saw an article that came
out in response to your f panel. So there was
recently an FDA panel on SSRIs in pregnant women and
the effects, and you had multiple different voices up there
speaking about this. And I saw a recent editorial on this,
(15:12):
and it was a woman who is I believe pregnant
now has two little kids, and talked about the importance
of her antidepressants, and it was, you know, she's very
upset about the fact that there were some questions as
to whether or not this was safe for the baby.
And I get that. I read it, and I was like, man,
I feel her. I feel exactly what she's saying. But
(15:34):
I also understand what you're saying, and that is that
you are starting to see changes. And I think the
most significant issue that has sat in my chest and
sat on my heart ever since I saw what you
guys were talking about was that you can actually tell
by looking at an ultrasound if the baby's mother is
(15:57):
on an SSRI.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
Yeah, to get back to her. I did read that article,
and I do applaud women who come forward and tell
their story, and I think that they should be heard,
and I applaud her for doing that. I think that
I think that some people mistake, you know what I'm saying.
I try to explain to people that there's two separate issues.
One issue, the issue that I'm focused on is do
(16:21):
the SSRI antidepressants chemically affect the pregnancy? What are the risks?
Do they chemically alter fetal brain development? And should the
public be informed about that? And I think the answer
to both aspects of that question are yes. I think
they do impact the pregnancy. I do think they do
alter fetal brain development, and I do think that the
(16:42):
public should be warned about that. The second question about
whether a given patient should stay on her antidepressant or
not during her pregnancy is a very individual and complex
question that requires a discussion in the office, and I
do this every day with patients, and so I think
sometimes people mistake my answer to the first question, which
(17:06):
is that I think these chemicals are impacting the pregnancy
and the developing brain, and the patient in that the
patients in the public should be warned. They mistake that
as thinking I'm talking about them and their pregnancy and
a specific patient. That's not the case. That requires individualized counseling.
So I think it's important to keep those issues separate.
(17:26):
As far as the chemical impact that you're talking about, yes,
serotonin plays a crucial role in fetal development, particularly fetal
brain development, and the SSRIs disrupt the serotonin system, so
it just stands to reason that they would impact development
of the brain. So when we're giving it during pregnancy
and we're looking, for example, by ultrasound. There have been
(17:49):
a couple of studies that have done this. One was
done by Malder in twenty eleven and another one by
Salisbury I believe in twenty twenty three or twenty twenty four,
and they looked at fetal movement after giving or when
the women were on antidepressants, and what they found is
that it alters fetal movement. The fetuses of the SSRI
(18:09):
exposed moms are moving much more, They're less quiescent, they
don't have the same quiescent periods that we would normally
see it's kind of like jittery or they described as
jittery or agitated movements. So these were two studies that
were done ultrasound studies that showed this. Now, this corresponds
to what we see after birth, where the newborns that
(18:32):
have been exposed to SSRIs tend to be jittery and agitated.
So this makes sense that we're seeing a direct chemical
effect of the SSRI chemicals on the developing fetal brain.
Interestingly enough, a study just came out to it, or
just I'll wrap up this. A study just came out
looking at the length of the umbilical cord in babies
(18:54):
exposed to SSRIs and it found that the chords are long. Now,
this is the second study also showing this. The first
study on this came out in twenty sixteen and the
second one just came out now. But they think that
the length of the umbilical cord has to do with
fetal motion fetal activity. So all of this information would
(19:16):
hang together. The moms are taking ssrity to press sants
as in the SSRIs are crossing the placenta, they're going
into the baby, they're going into the baby's brain. They're
having an impact of agitation or jitteriness or motor impacts,
which is what we can see these medications do. And
we're seeing that as reflected on fetal ultrasound with increased movements,
(19:37):
and we're also seeing it with a result at birth
of a longer umbilical cord, possibly due to the increased movements.
And then also this jitteriness and agitation that we see
during the newborn period, which has been called the newborn
behavioral syndrome or newborn withdrawal or poor neonatal adaptation.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
So I'm going to go to a place that is
kind of controversial. One of the things that you, I
mean very controversial. I think that the country has been
looking at the impacts of mental health and the changes
in the mental health of our children for a couple
of decades.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
Now.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
If you look back, I will tell you there's a
stunning difference to me between the kids that are in
class with my children as compared to the children I
went to school with when I was young, and I
and most of my friends I've noticed this too. There's
just different behaviors. There are different ways that they metabolize
(20:32):
their food. I mean, so many changes in what the
kids of today look like as compared to the kids
that I grew up with behavior and everything. And I
think that as a society we have been saying, why
are we experiencing these higher levels of autism, higher levels
of adhd add all of these things. And you mentioned
(20:55):
that there have been studies in animals that show that
as these feed, as these babies grow up, if they
are you know, in animals, rats, rats, sheep, mice, as
those animals grow up, they show signs of autistic type behaviors.
And I know this is very sensitive because of course
(21:16):
you talked about maternal blame and all of that, and
I think that this is an area where it's very
hard for us to have this discussion. But isn't it
critical if this could be playing a role in some
of the mental illness we're seeing in children, that this
is made aware to doctors and to mothers.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Yeah. Absolutely. I think you're raising a really good point, though, Tutor,
about how much medication use is going on. And I
think a lot of people nowadays just take this for granted.
Everybody is on several medications, but this is not how
it's been I mean, we currently are the most heavily
medicated humans in human history Americans, modern day Americans. I
(22:03):
would say the most heavily medicated human beings that have
ever lived on the planet. And that's going to have
an impact when you're giving that many chemicals, that many
medications to pregnant women, to moms and babies, and then
to children. I'm seeing this in my office regularly. I'm
talking now about SSRI antidepressants, but I'm seeing it with adderall,
(22:27):
I'm seeing with ADHD medications. I'm seeing it with a
variety of different pharmaceuticals. So it's throughout our entire population.
And then to get to your specific question, are we
seeing impacts in terms of behaviors? Yes? Absolutely. The animal
studies show fairly clearly that if you expose pregnant rats, mice, etc.
(22:52):
To SSRIs, the offspring will behave differently. They'll have different
they say, different like social behaviors, different play seeking activities,
things like that. They'll have different behaviors, and they also
have different sexual behaviors. Several studies have looked at the
male offspring who we're exposed to SSRIs during development, and
(23:15):
they behave differently sexually when they're studied. They have different
populatory behavior, they mount less they put them in in
cages with females and they behave differently than the unexposed
males do.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
So should let this be a five alarm fire? I mean,
I know this is, like I said, it's so controversial
to say, but come on, I mean, at what point
do we say we have got to immediately start looking
at this. And I've had there's this SSRI conversation going
on right now, and there's this radical battle, and I've
(23:52):
seen people go on the news and say, can you
imagine people saying that folks need to get off of SSRIs?
Everybody would be killing themselves left and right. And then
there's another side that goes, man, if people get off
of an SSRI and they start killing themselves, like, should
we be worried about that? This is big stuff.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
Yeah, And I think people are now drawing attention to it.
People are now focusing more on this. This is why
I'm speaking out about it, because I agree with you.
I think this is big stuff. I think this is
very big stuff. We're talking about the development of the brain,
of the baby's brain. And I made the point during
the FDA meeting that never before in human history have
(24:34):
we chemically altered developing baby's brains in this way, and
we're doing that now, and we need to really raise
attention to what the studies are showing. It's not just
the rat in my studies, it's the human studies as well.
So we talked a little bit about the ultrasound studies.
There's twelve MRI studies. I mean, it's not one or two,
(24:56):
it's not well, maybe they got the study wrong. It's
twelve mr eye studies now showing in humans that SSRI
exposure during pregnancy leads to alterations of the brain. These
are MRI studies showing this. There's three EEG studies. EEGs
are done typically in patients that have seizures, looking at
(25:16):
brain waves, but they do these EEG studies now to
on expose newborns and expose children, and they're finding that
the brain wave patterns and the connectivity of the brain
is different in those exposed to the SSRI antidepressants. And
this just makes sense to most people looking at this
because of what a crucial role serotonin plays in brain development.
(25:41):
So if you tinker with that, if you interfere with that,
you'd expect that you'd get downstream effects. And that's in
fact what we are seeing. So I agree with you.
I don't want to be accused of fear mongering or
talking about five alarm fires or diminishing the importance of depression.
But I think your point is a very good one,
which is we're now collecting data. We've got information from
(26:04):
MRI studies, from studies on depression and language problems and autism.
We've got this whole wealth of data that's showing these things,
and we really need to get this information out to
pregnant women in the public. And we really need to,
as I was making that point at the FDA meeting,
is to change the label and to have the FDA
make a public statement on what the research is actually saying,
(26:26):
again the research versus what the sales pitch is, which
is that these drugs are essentially completely safe, very review
or no risks, and very effective, which is just not
what that scientific evidence is showing.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
Well, I just don't understand why the discussion of side
effects is then interpreted it as not caring about depression.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
Yeah, I think that some people that are doing this
are doing this as a distraction method, to distract from
the conversation. I don't want to blame all of that
for this, I think some of them are well meaning,
but this is sort of a pharmaceutical technique, a big
pharma industry technique, to divert attention away from the issue
(27:09):
at hand. So, for example, when the opioid crisis was
raging with OxyContin and people were raising issues, look, this
is a big problem, what's going on, they would often say,
we need to talk more about the crisis of untreated
pain in our country, focusing on pain rather than the
specific question that was at hand, which is is your
(27:32):
drug or is oxy conton causing these harms? But the
pharmaceutical industry moves away from the question about the drug
to the question about the condition in order to divert
your attention, to make you take your eye off the ball.
I actually saw this during McKenna. When I would argue
about it not being an effective pre term birth drug,
(27:53):
I would get feedback that, well, pre term birth is
an important issue and we can't ignore the women that
have had a preterm birth and diminish preterm birth. And
they would spend, you know, half the time talking about
pre term birth. That's more of a diversionary tactic. What
you're seeing, actually you're seeing a lot of this in
the subsequent media, the corporate media, and some of the
(28:14):
editorials written by some of the perinatal psychiatrists. They spend
most of it talking about depression. Not the depression is
not important, but you need to answer the question what
are the risks of the drugs and what is the
evidence of their effectiveness? And that's the question that needs
to be answered. The public needs to laser focus on that.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
And some of these some of these situations are creating
even deeper problems for people or or more people with problems.
That's the other issue when you have a pregnant mother
taking these. The last thing I want to get to
is the PSSD, which is the sexual dysfunction, and you
talked about that in these animals. We've heard that there
(28:57):
is potential that some of these children get to adolescents
and they don't have interest in sex, or they can't
perform sexually, or there are other sexual dysfunctions. One of
your colleagues had an interview recently and he went into
kind of graphic detail about this and said, there are
people who take these and sometimes they are permanently. Sometimes
(29:21):
there's permanent sexual dysfunction. Sometimes they can get off of
the drug and that can be reversed, but too often
they are not told ahead of time that this could happen.
And he said that some people have described it as
they can touch their genitals and it's like touching the
back of their hand. They have no reaction whatsoever, that
all of those receptors are no longer having any type
(29:43):
of reaction to another person. In fact, men are even
coming out and saying, women who I used to have
this great relationship with I was completely sexually attracted to,
I don't have that at all. I'm questioning if I'm
even a sexual person anymore. To me, this is such
a critical part of relationships, and I cannot express enough
that if you suddenly have a marriage and you have
(30:08):
the one spouse that no longer has any interest in sex,
you're destroying that relationship. If you have a child that
gets to adolescence and they don't understand that relationship, what
is the future.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Yeah, I think you're raising really important issues. I think
we need to exercise, just as a general point, more
humility about tinkering with the chemicals that make our brains
and our bodies. Sarah, why do we behave sexually the
way we do, or why do we develop in that fashion?
Why do our brains develop that way? A lot of
(30:44):
it probably has to do with the way the tracks
are laid down in utero during development, and a lot
of the way those brain tracks are formed in the
brain is because of serotonin and other neurotransmitters. Put medications
in there, like the SSRI, antidepressants and others that alter
(31:04):
those neurotransmitters. Can you alter the development of those parts
of the brain or those tracks that then show up later?
The answer from the animal studies looks like yes, absolutely,
it appears to do that, and that just makes common sense.
And then does that have major implications and major ramifications? Absolutely? Yeah.
(31:26):
I agree with you. I agree with you wholeheartedly. And
that's why I think it's important that patients and the
public get this information so they can make an informed choice,
and that the information gets out not just to pregnant women,
because really that's not the time to make the choice
on this. It really needs to get out to women
(31:47):
of child bearing age because a lot of times the
patients that I see have been on the medications for
years and many of them can't come off of them
or would have great difficulty coming off of them. And
this is another aspect to this, the issue of withdrawal
and problems withdrawing from the drugs, difficulties in coming off.
So I think that it needs to get out to
(32:09):
pregnant to women of child bearing age, specifically with the
PSSD question. I think that many people are looking at
this as a chemical injury, which takes me full circle
now to what I started off with with these chemicals
half consequences. If you're putting these chemicals into your brain,
into your body, you can get chemical impacts. And then
even when you're not taking them anymore, if there's been
(32:31):
chemical toxicity, which chemicals often do have toxicity, it can
have long term effects, and in that case with PSSD,
long term sexual effects which can be devastated.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
Let's take a quick commercial break. We'll continue next on
a Tutor Dixon podcast. I will tell you so many
people that I know that have taken medications or on
medications have said to me, if I had known these
were the side effects, I wouldn't have originally agreed to take.
And even some side effects that are just really a pain.
(33:03):
Some side effects like sweat, constant sweating constant sweating. I
have some friends who've taken these medications and they're like,
and now it doesn't go I got off the medication,
but it doesn't go away. But that's your point is
people should be informed. There's so little information about how
these medications are going to affect people. And that's what
I want to bring attention to, is that there are
(33:25):
other consequences to taking these medications. And is there another answer.
It's not that we don't take the other issues seriously.
It's that you have to make sure that there is
enough information out there for people to know what they're
putting into their bodies. I'll just end on. When your
colleague was interviewed, they also gave an example of a
young woman twenty one years old was very suffering from
(33:49):
severe anxiety, and he said, she went on this medication
and there is an instant reaction. Well sometimes it takes
a couple of weeks, but there's a reaction of okay,
and I feel calm now, I feel better. I needed
this medication, but your body adjusts and then you need more.
And as she took more, she ended up with the
(34:09):
sexual dysfunction, and she started to get very upset about that,
and she went to her doctor and they admitted her
to a hospital and said, you have some sort of
you're having a mental break. And she was trying to
tell her parents, I'm not having a mental break. There's
something happening to me. I'm not the person I used
to be, and the system was telling her you're broken,
(34:31):
not even coming back to her and saying, actually, the
medication you're taking is wrong. And I think that in
some cases even the doctors don't know that that's what
the medication does, and they're like, oh man, this is
just a new thing. You're even worse now.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
Yeah, there's a real lack of knowledge, absolutely to there's
a real lack of knowledge about side effects. And I
think now particularly sensitive to the points that you're making
because I practice in my hometown. I was born, I practice,
I work in the hospital I was born at. I
work in my community, and I never want my patients
to come back to me five years from now, ten
(35:06):
years from now, twenty years from now and say, boy,
you didn't really counsel us about those drugs, those medications
and what you were seeing in the research literature. So
I feel an obligation to care for my community and
to correctly counsel. So again, this is not about pill shaming,
making anyone feel guilty taking anyone's medications away. It's just
(35:27):
about getting proper information out to patients in the public.
The last thing I want to just comment on is
what you mentioned about doing other things. Many much of
the discussion since the FDA meeting has been about is
it should it be ssrized or untreated depression? But it's
not a choice just between those things. I don't think
anyone's arguing for ignoring pregnant women, not treating them, making
(35:51):
them feel bad. There's just there are other methods that
can be considered in that in terms of how to
address depression, whether it's exercise, psychotherapy, diet, job counseling, relationship counseling,
taking other approaches. And so I think that looking at
the whole or counseling patients about all of the options
(36:12):
and then letting them make the best choice for themselves
and then supporting them, which is what I end up
doing every day in my community, is the is the
is the best way to go, But the key there
is to actually get them the information.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
Yeah, absolutely, and I so appreciate what you're doing there's
so much more that we could talk about on this,
and I'm sure we'll have to have you back to
talk about it. But as we see the country kind
of changing, and I do I get your point about
this is a time when people are really saying you
can't push back. But I think it's also because this
is the first time people have said, maybe these three
(36:47):
letter agencies don't know everything and we should push back.
So we are also seeing a lot of strong people
stand up and say, actually, I had a bad experience too,
And it's been amazing to me the number of patients
who have said, even on social media. I never wanted
to admit this before because I was so personally embarrassed.
I thought I was the only one. But I've had
this happen too. I've had this happen too, So I
(37:08):
encourage people to keep talking in doctor Doctor Adam Errado,
thank you so much for being out there and being
a voice for all of us.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
Well. Thank you, and you're a big part of this
push this pushing back through the podcast, through writing as
you did recently, through having guests on like myself, to
keep getting the message out.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
Thank you, Thank you so much, and thank you all
for joining us on the Tutor Dixon podcast for this
episode and others. Go to the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts and join us next time.
Have a blessing.
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