Medical MacGyver w/ Doug Lindsay | CCP Harvesting Organs w/ BIll Walton | Jessica Story of Recovery

Welcome to American Medicine Today, I'm Kimberly Benatti alongside Ethan Euchre. Jam-packed show, let's get to it. So a rare disease left our next guest bedridden for more than a decade, and when doctors could offer no answers, he became his own researcher, scientist, surgical pioneer, inventing a procedure that changed his life. We welcome back to the program Doug Lindsay, nationally recognized speaker known as the Medical MacGyver. Welcome back, Doug. Thank you, Kimberly. Now, we had you on before, but if we can just quickly kind of recap. So if you can just quickly take us back to 1999 when you first started experiencing symptoms. Yeah, so I had just finished my junior year in college, and I was starting a summer biochemistry research position. I took the position because after watching my mom and my aunt go to doctors for their whole lives and come home with no answers and no results that could help them, I thought, well, I'm going to become a scientist. Maybe I can help them that way. So I chose the project I thought would give me the best background to start looking into something like their condition. And when I got there, I came down with what the doctors told me was mono. So I had to go home and rest, which is what people do when they get mono. They're exhausted, they're fatigued. The problem was after weeks and weeks of rest and recovery, I got worse instead of better. I ended up sick, and I had to drop out and come home. And when I dropped out of school at the beginning of my senior year, it was clear to me that I didn't just have mono. I had whatever had left my mother and my aunt sick for their whole lives. So I started seeing doctors and specialists, and they kept striking out. And when I looked at the situation, I thought, if I keep doing what they did, I'll get those same results. No one could tell me what was wrong or what would help. So I decided that I would tackle my problem like a scientist, and I would take the lead where the doctors had gotten stuck. Because you acted as a caregiver for your mom and your aunt, and it was this mysterious illness, right, that you just kind of got into that nobody, none of the experts seemed to know what was wrong with them. And so for you to start experiencing these symptoms, the analogy I made was it's like watching a movie that you already know the ending of, you know? So you knew where this was headed because you had seen it. And so kind of take it from there. I mean, were you scared? What was the pain like? So here I am, you know, the semester before, I'd been a normal college student. I'd been exercising, you know, I could hang out with friends and do some basic traveling and anything else that somebody who's 21 could do. And now I was just sick. My life was a disaster. My muscles felt like someone had run over them with a cheese grater. And this was all familiar enough in the sense that my mom and my aunt had been dealing with muscle rigidity and all sorts of different kinds of symptoms for decades. And so now I was in the position of trying to figure out what to do. I was going to use the way doctors work, which is, congratulations, we've figured out what you don't have. You don't have MS, you don't have cancer, you don't have this. And that would give me a chance to look into what I did have, assuming what I had was unusual. But even with them, after decades of seeing doctors, it wasn't clear which doctor should be their go-to. Did they have a neurological problem? Did they have an endocrinological problem? Did they have a, you know, rheumatology problem? It wasn't even clear which department within a university hospital system should be their home base. And so that's what it feels like to have something rare and confusing and unusual, is that no doctor even sees you as fully their problem, or at least fully their department's problem. And so that's where them telling me what I didn't have and helping me understand that I was very sick but I was safe would let me start to look into things that were unusual and try and find if they had missed something. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back after this. You are watching American Medicine Today. Revolutionary in his field, Dr. Bonatti created, perfected, and patented the Bonatti spine procedures. Using his genius, Bonatti invented the precise tools necessary to minimize surgery, scarring, anesthesia, and recovery. So successful are the Bonatti spine procedures. They consistently reflect 98.75% patient satisfaction. 80,000 procedures have been performed exclusively at our location. Nearly half our patients have suffered from failed back and neck surgeries at other facilities. Bonatti succeeds where others fail. Welcome back to American Medicine Today. We're continuing our discussion with Doug Lindsay. Now, the doctors that you were working with, were they all on board trying to go through when you bring them new symptoms or new ideas of what you had? Or was it a painstaking process to find doctors that would work with you? Yeah. I mean, it was difficult at first because doctors train themselves. They say, when you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras. Rare problems are rare and common problems are common. So until I had seen enough doctors and ruled out enough things, any notion that I had that this was like what my mom had was just easy for them to overlook or ignore. So my background was biochemistry and physiology and such in college as an undergrad. So I was science literate. And so I was reading these medical texts and I ran across a couple passages. And I started to piece together the idea that the autonomic nervous system, this thing that functions below our level of consciousness, but controls a whole lot, maybe it was malfunctioning in me. And if it malfunctioned, it might create a suite of symptoms. But once I got a computer with internet access, and this was after I had theorized these conditions existed, within a month I was able to find a nonprofit devoted to these kinds of problems, the kinds I said existed that I likely had, and that lots of doctors told me didn't exist. Let's just jump ahead as well, because I mean, it's crazy that someone, especially your age, like you said, a college dropout, basically teamed up with a specialist between the two of you and essentially invented the surgery that changed your life and fixed the problem. Is that right? Yeah. So once I found that these problems existed, once I had articles showing that they created the kind of symptoms I described, now I was at least off to the races. I was still in the hospital bed and I was using dictation software to write things because I was too sick to sit and type. But intellectually and scientifically, we were off to the races. So I developed a new use for an old medication and I eventually found an academic partner. So Dr. H. Cecil Coughlin, who ran the Autonomic Nervous System Laboratory at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, he eventually became my partner. We met at a medical conference. I was there presenting a paper, you know, the poster before me was from the Mayo Clinic, the poster after me was from Japan. And I was a 24-year-old college dropout in a wheelchair presenting an idea for a proposed treatment for my own disorder there. And he didn't quite buy the treatment as in like great fit, but he offered a refinement because he saw where I was going. And then he came back with news. His evaluation said there was a chance I had a problem that was surgically correctable. Now it took us another almost two years of imaging to nail down that problem. And then that gave us a new problem. Yes, I had a condition that might be able to be fixed with surgery, but no, no good surgery existed to fix it. From what I read about your story, Doug, is that it dealt with overproduction of adrenaline, of course. So, and it's your adrenal glands and the only surgery where they would like remove part of the adrenal gland had been done, what, in mice or something like that? Like it had never been done on people. Yeah. So there were surgeries to remove part of the adrenal gland, but there was usually a specific encapsulated tumor that they would cut out and leave the rest. The way this was described, basically the simplest way to describe it would be like trying to take the yolk out of a hard-boiled egg and leave the white. And there was no surgery to do that because the adrenal gland is two different tissues around, you know, one surrounded by the other. And the one in the middle was the part that was making me sick. And there was no surgery to remove just the middle and leave the outside. And the problem with that is if you remove both parts of the adrenal gland in this metaphor, the egg yolk and the egg white, I would get a new disease. So I looked at this as an opportunity to say, is there a way to take the middle and leave the outside and create a circumstance where we can treat my problem without giving me another one? And so clearly, since you're here with us today, it worked. Yes. So yeah. So I found an animal model of surgery and it started with rats. And then I found it had been done in cats. And then I found it had been done in dogs and no one explained it. I had a veterinary pathologist do the surgery on a freshly dead cat and send me the photos of how it went. Because that was a way that we could study the adrenals without having to have a funded research study. Where can people learn more about your Lindsay Center? Is there a website? So there is. It's lindsaycenter.com. I'm Doug Lindsay with an A-Y, L-I-N-D-S-A-Y center.com. And, you know, I've got a bunch of cool friends who've done all this amazing scientific work as well. So there's a big world of patient advocacy. But when it comes to tackling specific families with complex conditions and medical mysteries, that's how I got nicknamed the medical MacGyver is what I did for myself, how I helped my mother and my aunt, and how I help people, you know, sometimes in one-off situations and sometimes in year-long engagements where we dig into things and say, what in God's name is going on here? Well, God bless you, because there was certainly a void that you filled with your brilliance. And that's exactly what it is. So God bless you. Thank you so much, Doug Lindsay, nationally recognized speaker known as the medical MacGyver. So if you need someone in your suffering with an undiagnosed problem or very rare problem, get in touch with Doug. Thanks, Doug. Thank you. Thank you, Kimberly, Ethan. Well, that's all the time we have for this segment. Stay tuned. We'll be back after the break. You were watching American Medicine Today. So I used to be very, very overweight. And because of that, I had some wear and tear on my discs. I had severe lumbar, lower back pain. I could not move my feet or anything like that. I would kind of shuffle a little bit just to be able to get to my destination. Any movement forward would cause my back to start to spasm. I'd literally have to stand. I couldn't sit. I couldn't do anything. I'd have to stand just to relieve the pressure. I had an increase in headaches. I couldn't lay on my back. I can't lay on my stomach. I couldn't sleep comfortably. I couldn't mop, sweep. I couldn't do any of that without feeling like my back started to spasm. I couldn't carry or lift anything. I've had hip pain as well as glute pain. Running down the leg, kind of similar to sciatica. Jolts of spasms in the back. I feel like my back's going to break. And I needed something different. And I was referred to Dr. Bonatti himself by my personal trainer. And so when I got off the operating table, and I noticed that I didn't have that pain anymore. So that was the moment where I realized they fixed me. Jessica had back issues that began to develop at a young age when she struggled with being overweight. It was later in life that the problems began to resurface. So my name is Jessica White. I am from South Texas, close to Brownsville, Texas. Since I was 18, I've had back issues. I used to be very overweight. I got up to 313 pounds, causing me to have some issues in my back. I never got it checked. And because of that, I had some wear and tear on my discs. Without knowing that, I started my weight loss journey. I did bodybuilding. I've done seven shows. When I was going to hit this national stage for the first time was when I had my first initial flare-up, lifting 200 pounds, 300 pounds with weights and things like that on my back. And not knowing that I was causing further damage. A lot of it had to do with being overweight, but it also had to do with the fact that I had poor body mechanics initially, not knowing what was going on. Being a nurse, Jessica found it difficult to perform her duties because of her back flare-ups. Simply standing and sitting became so painful. She often had to stay home under the care of her husband and a physical therapist. I used to work in a nursing home, so lifting patients, working geriatrics. As a nurse, we do wound care. We do certain things that we do have to sit down. So I would stand for about 20 minutes, sit for about 15, stand for another 20. Even, you know, when I was eating dinner, there was times where I would have to eat standing up because I couldn't sit down at the dinner table. Three years ago, I ended up having a very, very bad flare-up where my pain score was a 10 out of 10, you know, to my lower back. I just, I couldn't do anything. I had to call into work a few days. My husband was part of the reason why I was able to keep going because he would help me to and from, you know, the restroom, the shower. During my initial flare-ups, I could not move my feet or anything like that. I would kind of shuffle a little bit. I actually had started seeing my primary care physician who referred me to a physical therapist. They were helping manage the misalignment and my discogenic issues in the back and help with the pain. Jessica tried many conservative options to manage her pain, but unfortunately, they only made her life more limited. With my disc issues, I did try acupuncture. I've tried alignment. I've tried the deep muscle stimulation. I've tried the TENS unit. I did dry needling. I've done a lot of holistic measures. I've been doing peptide therapy as well. I had to have my SI belt on all the time, which is a belt that I used to keep my pelvis in place. I've had cushions in my van, in my car. At home, there were certain chairs I couldn't sit on. I couldn't sit on the sofa with my little one. I had a wedge cushion that I had to, I have to sleep with at night. There's just a lot of things that over time, I realized I was very, very limited with doing and my entire life changed because of the pain. After seeing her physician and getting an MRI, Jessica discovered the severities of her injuries, including two herniated discs. Finally went to my primary care doctor who then ordered an x-ray and an MRI, and that showed two herniated discs with two, two annular tears, and it also showed that I had a parse fracture, which I didn't know that I had at the time. My lumbar spine is just, it's shifting. It's kind of doing this number. So she was like, that's what's causing your pain. So finally, I reached a point where I literally was hanging over my bed one day and my mom came in and she's like, I can't, you need to do something about your back. It's just gotten to the point where you can't even, you can't even move. I was standing over and hovering over my bed for eight minutes before being able to move. It was at that moment where I came to the realization that I needed something different. So my trainer actually had mentioned he came here three years ago and he was ranting and raving about how amazing the Bonatti Spine Institute was, how Dr. Bonatti was just amazing. With all options exhausted and in unbearable pain, Jessica was convinced by her mother to contact the Bonatti Spine Institute. And so when I decided to contact the Bonatti Spine Institute, was Dr. Bonatti himself called me on the phone and he told me, I received your message and I want to see how I can help. And just with that initial contact gave me so much reassurance, you know, knowing that somebody cared that much to be able to contact me. So when I came in, initially Dr. Bonatti came to introduce himself and he then said, you know what, we're going to order an x-ray and MRI. We're going to do everything here so that I can review them with you. Within 30 minutes, I came back to the room. They had my MRI up on the screen. Dr. Bonatti went over my results with me. Your spinal cord goes in a tube, okay? The tube should lie the nerve like this. Okay. So when you look at the x-ray, it should look like this. It shouldn't look like this. Okay. All right. So you see it looking like this. That's what we call a spinal stenosis. He says, looking at this MRI, I'm looking at a 60-year-old back. Allow me to help you, you know, fix this issue so that you can go on and live your life normally. So in the initial evaluation, he told me that I was going to need two to three procedures. Jessica found Dr. Bonatti showed great care and desire to help. He created a surgical plan to tackle her pain at the source. They want you awake to be able to make sure that you're going to have the best surgery possible. You give feedback live while the surgery is going on. Yes, you're sedated, but you're awake enough to be able to communicate and explain to them what's hurting and what's bothering you, what to target, you know, if I could feel better with certain movements or certain things that they were doing to my back. So that was very, very reassuring for me. Surgeries performed at the Bonatti Spine Institute use conscious IV sedation, where the patient can communicate with the surgeon to target the pain while on the operating table. The first surgery went very well. They focused on my L4-L5. Yesterday was my L5-S1, which was significantly herniated. I felt a lot of pulling in that area before surgery. And before the surgery was almost finished, I noticed I didn't have any of that pulling anymore after he finished working on me. Hold it there. No pain here? No. No pain here? No. No pain here? No. All right, you got it. So right after surgery, you know, I come into the post-op area and I'm in the bed and, you know, she's like, we're going to get you up to walk. And they didn't tell me that I was going to have to I hadn't been able to jog like that in a good while. And I noticed that I didn't have that pain anymore. So that was the moment where I realized they fixed me. Yes. Dr. Bonatti encouraged Jessica to resume her daily activities. No longer having to wear uncomfortable braces, she was thrilled to discover she could continue her physical workouts without pain. Dr. Bonatti, after post-op, encouraged me to make sure, you know, at least for three days, monitor, make sure that things are going OK. You know, he's like, you can go golfing the next couple of days if you want to go golf, you're able to twist, move. You know, he's like, you can resume your physical therapy. Just being able to go back to work, you know, next week, he's like, you're fine to go back to work next week. And I said, wow, OK. Thanks to the Bonatti Spine Institute, I can now resume my workouts, you know, without having to worry about, you know, certain twisting or bending movements and having a pain, you know, right then and there. I mean, I've been working out for 10 years and it's really put a lot of limitations on me. Being able to do my core stability exercises, being able to have overall strength, you know, and feel well, being able to do what I need to do for my patients at work, just overall quality of life. I'm just super excited for, you know, the Bonatti Spine Institute has really given me a second chance. To see more stories of recovery just like this, search for the Bonatti Spine Institute on YouTube, Rumble, Apple's App Store, Google's Play Store, Roku, and Amazon Spire TV. Welcome back to American Medicine Today. I'm Kimberly Bonatti alongside Ethan Euker. So recent policy discussions in Washington, D.C. have renewed attention on allegations that the Chinese Communist Party is involved in systematic forced organ harvesting with profits in the billions. Joining us to discuss is Bill Walton, America's Renaissance CEO and host of The Bill Walton Show. Thank you for joining us again, Bill. Oh, great. Great to be on. Thanks. Certainly. So tell us about this organ harvesting in China. I mean, it's mainly from, what did they say, detained people? Well, I feel like I had to put a warning label on this, but what it says about China is not good. And the facts are this. So there have been rumors for decades that China was engaging in forced organ harvesting, and that's a euphemism for ripping livers and kidneys out of people while they're still alive. And their target for this are what they call the black people, which are, in one case, the Fulingong, which is a very, very attractive meditative practice that maybe 80 to 100 million Chinese engage in. And then the other one are the Uyghurs. Chinese culture, if you're not inside the circle of what they consider socially acceptable, you are fair game. It's been suspicious for years that if you need a kidney and you're in the United States, you can wait for months, you can wait for a year, you maybe can wait forever to find a proper donor match because you're waiting for somebody to die of natural causes. And in China, you can place an order and two weeks later show up in Shanghai, and next thing you know, they're checking your blood and you stay overnight and they wheel you into the operating room and you emerge shortly thereafter with a new kidney or whatever organ that you came to get replaced. Of course, the first in line for these organs are the high officials in the Chinese Communist Party. And there was a chilling moment when Xi and Putin met last time in Tiananmen, I think it was about three or four months ago, they were caught on a hot mic and they were both discussing the fact that if you could replace your organs, you could potentially live forever. As of yesterday, I was just reading an article about Putin and that he is, I guess, obsessed with what you were just saying. Did you see the same article? I haven't read it. It's in the journal. I was going to clip it just before we came on, in fact. Yeah, he has the same obsession. Yeah, obsessed with immortality. So I guess my question is, so how does the Chinese government profit from the harvesting? I mean, it's a no-brainer that obviously they're selling them, but who's buying them and all of that? To make patients from Japan, patients from the United States, Canada, all over the world, there's a fairly common knowledge that if you're willing to do, I haven't looked into what the procedures are, but you can find out how to make this happen when you travel to Shanghai. But I understand that they're doing these on military bases and there's a hospital in each base. And so they're behind the barriers of a military base when they do this. So it's away from prying eyes. And the thing to remember with China is what Mao put them through in 1966 through 1976, it was the so-called cultural revolution. And at first place, Mao tremendously feared the Chinese people and his hold on power. And so he engaged in a massive purge of people. But what he also did is he scoured all the cultural institutions of any of their standing. And so what was left after the cultural revolution ended was basically a highly fragmented population in China with no civil society to speak of, and the state, the Chinese Communist Party. And so the China we're dealing with now is not the China we might've thought it was in 1950 or something like that with an ancient culture and all the religious practices they had. Those are gone. We need to understand that in our dealings with them. And I think too often, our president who I like goes off to China to do business with them. I think he forgets that they don't see us in the way that we'd like to have them see us. Do we really have an influx of U.S. citizens that fly off to China for transplants? Well, there've been a couple of books. One book about it by John Jekielek, the lead guy, great interviewer, does his own show for Epoch Times. And he's written a book called Killed Order, which details this in gruesome detail. And then there's been another documentary out. It's called Silent Harvest. And the document says, and we don't know how many are done each year. The estimates range from 25,000 to 250,000, and maybe closer to a million. We're not sure how many Americans have had it done, but certainly enough to matter. And it's underreported. And unfortunately, I think a lot of the reasons it's not reported that much is there's still a lot of United States multinationals and financial institutions that want to keep doing business with China. What can we as a nation do to stop such an egregious action that they do over there? I think what we could do as a nation is stop believing what the Chinese tell us. They've not told us the truth about anything in World Trade or World Health Organization, any of their dealings. They don't feel like they have to use the truth and they've got their own law. We need to wake up to that bleak reality and to do less and less business with them and put pressure on them economically. And I don't think militarily, I hope at the time being, the party's hold over the Chinese has been that they've showed a growing economy and people are getting richer. Well, that's no longer the case with the real estate bust. So I think keep a clear eye view about who we're dealing with and be tough on our financial and business negotiations and continue to isolate China on the world stage. Why don't you plug your show real quick and tell people how to tune in? It's easy, billwaltonshow.com. We've got a website with about 275 evergreen episodes on it. We're also on Substack and YouTube and Rumble and Spotify. I won't go down the whole list. All the major podcast platforms, you can find us there. My ex-handle is xwmbillwalton and we post a lot there. I'm also doing some more writing and that's on our Substack site, which is The Bill Walton Show. Thank you so much, Bill Walton, America's Renaissance CEO and host of The Bill Walton Show. Thank you for joining us on the program. Great. Thanks for letting me share this with you. Well, that's all the time we have for this episode of American Medicine Today. If you would like to see previous shows, download the American Medicine Today app to your favorite streaming device. If you have any comments or questions, contact us at the numbers below, or you can tweet at Dr. Binotti using the hashtag AmericanMedicineToday or hashtag AMT. We would like to hear from you.