JFK's Medical Saga - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 4/8/23

I've been reading the book, loved the book, almost finished the book, and so I'm so grateful that you came on Coast to Coast to talk about the Strange medical Saga of John F. Kennedy. Hello, Hi, how are you pretty good? Quite well? Okay, great ahead. I heard your introductions and it was quite good and quite quite accur I'm not sure what I could add, joy, Well, I know what you're going to add to it, because I

got a million questions. I dog eared this book more than I dog ear most and the the part I mean, so we know, and I'll go over your I mean, you certainly have plenty of bona fides, and you are an established authority on pain, and so it's interesting that even so much of what we don't know about John F. Kennedy was the real timeline of his pain that it starts really almost you know, this was news to me. So, I mean, I guess I've read bios and they didn't

go into they didn't drill down this deep. But born in nineteen seventeen, and almost from the very beginning, the point you make is that John F. Kennedy was born into a life of physical pain. Yes, yes, he exactly why he ever survived infancy and childhood is a miracle. I mean, Cash was nine lives had nothing on John F. Kennedy, No one really one are those things as you study his case, how and why he managed to live, it's

just some sort of a miracle. And I came to believe that his charm, his personality is vigor to live and to provide really excellent leadership, probably came from his experiences and just overcoming death one time after another. Well, you know, and I'm going to amplify something a point that you imply and sort of you kind of connect him, but I'm gonna I'm going to sharpen it even further and say, had he not been born into a family

of wealth, he would have died in infancy. He would have died before he was two years old, probably, but the family had so much money and were able to provide the best care, the best doctors that he would he he didn't have to die. He's lived proof of that. But it's it is a kind of medical miracle that he didn't well, it really is. And you know, I've written about two other men who have written the medical

song of Howard Us and all this presently. And you know, if they had not had access to well, let's be honest about it, to find the very best doctors and hire the very best doctors who were willing to innovate, none of those people would have lived very long. And John F. Kennedy, there's no two ways about it. They had enough money to find the very best doctors there at Harvard and around the country at which they did.

And you know, there's no question in my mind that if he had been born into a normal family of normal financial means, I don't think he would have made it, No, because he wouldn't be able to You're right from the start, like he to survive scarlet fever in those days and all his infection in childhood required, I mean you know, he spent half his time with doctors. I'm not talking about nurses, but the very best doctor. So that had

a factor in helping him survive. And there's a difference, and you know, please explain, but there's a difference between hospitals and clinics very often, and clinics is where I mean, that's the expensive care, that's the one on one care that you allude to, and that's what he got from a very early age as opposed to he's a sickly kid. He went to the hospital, yes, uh. And he also his doctors made house calls also, right, and so he had access to a patient clinic as well as going

into the hospital at any time. Uh. You know that his number of hospitalizations are not even countable, right, They go up into the dozens. And I try quantitates a number of hospital invasions, but I couldn't quite do that because sometimes he'd go into the hospital for a day. Another thing in those years which has totally gone today in medicine, doctors would admit people to a hospital just to do diagnostic workups. When I was a very young

daughter just graduated, that was common. I remember personally putting people in the hospital just to do glucose tolerance tests or X rays, and so that was common in those days. Today it's far too expensive to do that, and of course our technology is so much better that you don't need to go into the hospital. But again, he had excellent care by his physicians and also a very mother who was obviously quite quite a great nurse, right, and a course of nature. I mean, she was gonna she

was doing everything that she could. Again we're talking about and it is the perfect description the strange medical saga of John F. Kennedy. And thank you for as tenant again for being on it. We'll get to question for you later on, but let me let let's do this. If you could list the things that John F. Kennedy as a baby Jack suffered between birth and two, because that's how I really like how you broke up the book in terms of infancy, childhood, teenage years, young adult,

all that. So what can you name all of the of his afflictions during his during his infancy, right, That's that's quite easy to do because they were all infections. I think I have a chapter there I decided to Yeah, no no infection left behind. Right, He had all the usual childhood illnesses measles, bumps, but he also had whooping coughs, which in those years often took your life. And also

he developed scarlet fever. That was the one that his survival was unusual because scarlet fever was there was a steptocaucus bacteria and it's hardly known today, but it caused both rheumatic fever or scarlet fever and rheumatic heart disease, and it also caused later kidney failure any one of those. And he managed to survive the scarlet fever. And what's amazing about it is it see there were no antibiotics in those days, so exactly what the doctors did is

a mystery. If one starts to study medical practice prior to World War Two, you know, it's almost hard to find out. What in the world the doctors did do was recorded. Surprisingly, but whatever they did do, he did make scarlet fever. He was near death and that was the big one during his infancy. How he managed to survive scarlet fever, and that you know, thousands and thousands of babies dyed scarlet fever or rheumatic fever in those days.

And there's a little sidebar on the whole concept of autoimmunity, meaning you developed a disease later on and the day you hear about that with COVID all the time was really initially discovered following scarlet fever and rheumatic fever. You got a sore throat, you had a step to caucus infection, and then later on the step of coco infection turned into developed antibodies or autoimmune toxic substances in the body that caused the kidney disease and heart disease and death.

So he managed to survive that. He was never given the last rice for it or anything. He got that later. But we could summarize his whole problem and infantry in childhood as he was born without the normal resistance of the body to infections. And also I think it starts in infancy, right I have to go back and look at my notes, but where right away there was a

nourishment problem. Yes, this is the other thing that the fractory until I really got into studying his records and everything, and it was one of the things that the family didn't like to talk about it. John F. Kennedy didn't like to talk about it. But he was born with this autoimmune prout. And now let me define autoimmenity real simple for the audience, because people hear that tournament, they're not certain of what I mean autoimmunity. Immunity means you're

resistant to something. You're resistant or organisms, bacteria, toxins, poisons. So you would think that autoimmunity means it's automatic immunity, right, It doesn't mean that at all. What it means is that you've got a destructive element in the body that is slowly attacking and eating away any rootage in collagen in tissues. Now, that destructive substance can be a toxin, a enzyme, an infectious agents, a poison, or it can be an antibody. And so John F. Kennedy from birth

had some toxic element in his body. We think it was an antibody, but nobody knows that he had a toxic element in his body from birth that started eating away some of his tissues. And the one that caused him the most problem during his lifetime was an attack on his intestine. And he started in childhood developing all kinds of bowel and intestinal problems that he'd have alternating constipation one day, then diarrhea and floating pain, indigestion, and

he actually carried his intestinal problems until until death. In other words, from from day from year one to year forty six he had the intestinal problems. Now to day we would probably call that celiac disease. It was not that name was not applied at that time. His doctors

call to do it unitus or just colitis. But that began in his child and during childhood, so he had to fight the battle of the bathroom literally his entire life and the and then it also irritable bowel syndrome, so people with that overlap with that, so those those very sempstoms would be part of it. In other words, it would be called a mega irritable bowel. How about that? Yeah, no, no, yeah,

it's fair. Again, we're talking about the strange medical saga of John F. Kennedy and we're not even out of his infancy yet with the doctor Forrest Tenants. So here's how I understand autoimmune. This is how it's always been explained to me. Is um that auto meaning self and immune in this case meaning you're not even immune to yourself, and that you're attacking what you're thinking about it. That's

an excellent description, right, and so we are. That's how people who are autoimmune their their first line of defense is actually the first line of offense to their body. You got it, Okay, So that's that in itself. Again, were it not for the financial resources for the experimental treatments, that in itself could have killed John F. Kennedy as a baby. But he survives past the two year mark of infancy into childhood and at some point then we

get into this whole adrenal gland thing. Can you explain that that when going into the next phase of his health problems? Yes, we mentioned autoimmunity. And incidentally, what are the reasons for I wrote this book is that from what I can tell, this whole concept of autoimmunity may be the plague of all of humans in this century. I can't think of anything. It's a bigger public health

or issue. And COVID is only making people realize as they're calling it long COVID and trying to apply other names, and what it really is his post viral autoimmunity, meaning that you've got destructive elements in your body eating away at some of your tissues, and so his the interocnologists years after Kennedy's birth described a condition in which autoimmunity or destructive elements from birth started destroying glands, and Kennedy's the big target of his autoimmune gland over disease was

his adrenal glands, but he also had his thyroid attacked and his testicles attacked in later life. And so people who have this rare condition will have their pancreas attack that gives you the diabetes. Thyroid will be attacked, your testicles or ovary can be attacked, and certainly the addre glands can be attacked. What it looks like historically is that his adrenal glands probably were attacked and would detrior rates,

and then it probably regrow and then detriorate. And so it was kind of an up and down thing over a period of years until he was finally diagnosed with Addison's disease when he was right after World War Two, when he was right about thirty years of age. So between birth and age thirty, his adrenal glands slowly started to fail. Okay, explain the role of adrenal glands in the humanoity. Adrenal glands. First off, they were adrenal glands.

You have two of them. They're so valuable through the body that the Good Lord gives us two and the one sitting on top of the kidney. And they used to be called superrenal glands, meaning on top of the kidney, but just for short they call them adrenal glands. And in eighteen fifty five a pathologist in Britain with the name of Thomas Addison discovered that some people had their

adrenal glands that were eaten away and they died. Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at one am Eastern and go to Coast to Coast am dot com for more