
Why is there an avoidance of scientific debate on the topic of injections? What are the consequences of the singular paradigm of modern science and medicine? Why does it seem certain topics are taboo? How can we gather information despite the censorship? Dr. Leland Stillman helps us take a hard look at what’s happening in science and medicine today. He reminds us of the importance of posing questions since our very life and health depend upon the answers.
Today, he also examines why opinions that differ from the mainstream are ignored or discredited. He reviews how this leads to the growing movement to force medical interventions on the public. He offers insights about ancient healing modalities for improved health and shares ideas for practical steps we can take to safeguard our health.
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Listen to the episode here:
Episode Transcript
Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda
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Welcome to Wise Traditions, Leland.
Thank you for having me.
Leland, you are a medical doctor and you see a lot of people in your practice. Tell us the story of the mom with the 4 or 5 kids who came to your practice. Why did she come to you and what has she observed in the health of her own children?
You asked me to tell a story to kick things off for our conversation about the ethics of vaccination. The story that came to mind is a patient who came to me herself for her own medical care but also brought in her 4 or 5 children to see me as well. We discussed why she brought them to see me. I’m clear with my patients that I’m not a pediatrician. I don’t offer vaccines in my clinic. Certainly not for children because we’re not set up to deliver them.
She told me that she had decided to stop vaccinating her children because I can’t remember if it was three of them getting vaccinated or fully vaccinated on the regular schedule, she had observed changes after some of their vaccinations that worried her. She started to do her own research and think for herself and not trust her pediatrician. She stopped vaccinating her children altogether and her subsequent pregnancies and children were much easier and the children were healthier.
She compared her sickest child who’d received the most vaccines, who is also her oldest child, and had been in and out of the hospital month-after-month, year-after-year with problems that doctors had struggled to control. Her youngest child had received no vaccines, slept better, ate better, growing more robustly, and had never required any urgent care like ER let alone hospitalizations. This forced me to think about what to tell my patients about vaccination, contrasting that to what I learned in residency in medical school, which is that vaccines are safe, effective, and they are moral good.
This is not the only story I could tell. I vague with the number of children this patient had because frankly, I could tell the story a number of different times with the same real punchline which is that many parents perceive the negative health effects of vaccination on their children or they perceive vaccination as having a negative effect on the health of their children and they choose then not to vaccinate. They’re smart people. They’re often highly educated.
I can think of doctors, lawyers, engineers, nurses. If you listen to the mainstream narrative, people would say that these people should know better. They should know to trust the science and the experts. In each of these cases, the patients’ parents were clear with me that even though they reviewed that science and they understood the conventional thinking around vaccination, they weren’t comfortable with the risks based on what they had read.
This then spurred me to go into this literature and look. Do we have papers that find different rates or severities of disease and patients who are vaccinated versus non-vaccinated? What’s troubling about this literature is that there are studies out there suggesting that vaccines pose a health threat compared to what we’re told to believe based on what’s reported widely in the mainstream media and in mainstream scientific journals. There are threats or risks to every treatment and every choice that you make but they’re vastly outweighed by the consequences.
When I talk to people about this now, the example that I use is the chickenpox vaccine. I asked them if they’re pro-vaccination, I say, “Tell me the chickenpox vaccine. How many people do you know who’ve died of chickenpox? How many people do you know who had a serious life-limiting or life-altering complication because of chickenpox vaccination?” Let’s say that the chickenpox vaccine is $10a shot, which would be affordable.
It’s probably more than that. If you were to have everybody in the world have chickenpox and spend that $10 on clean food and clean water in places where people are hungry or don’t have clean, safe drinking water, how many lives would you save? These are the kinds of questions that we’re being told not to ask frankly because they are inconvenient for the bottom line of corporations who stand to profit immensely off of pharmaceutical products.
It’s interesting that you mentioned these ethics because I heard that one of the COVID vaccine trials was aborted because they thought it was unethical not to vaccinate the placebo group. What do you make of that?
I did hear about that. I haven’t read that study to confirm that for my own satisfaction, but if they’re doing that, it’s concerning because there are questions about what are the long-term consequences of any medical intervention. What I like to go back to explain this to people is a well-established principle in the literature that has to do with something called the Hygiene Hypothesis. The Hygiene Hypothesis arose in the 1980s when researchers began to notice that populations that lived in more traditional lifestyles pertinent to wise traditions. Such as the Amish, Hutterites, people who were living a more agrarian, pastoral, natural life, living in traditional ways. Also, perhaps drinking raw milk, dairy, growing their grains, baking their bread, hunting their food, and raising their animals for slaughter.
These people have lower rates of allergic diseases, eczema, asthma, allergies of all kinds, hay fever, and rhinitis. When physicians and researchers realized this, they started to ask the question, “Why do these populations have lower rates and less severity of these diseases?” What they settled on was that the microbial environment of these people was radically different because of their lifestyles. In rural Bavarian, South Germany, they might have barns attached to their homes, so they were constantly being exposed to bacteria, fungi, even viruses from the animals that they were raising.
This is radically different from the microbial environment of the modern day person. At the end of the day, what they found is people who are exposed to a wide diversity of microbes naturally in their environment have less allergic diseases. What this implies is that small and seemingly inconsequential changes to our environments, our lifestyles, and our diets. Simply the fact that you may pasteurize your milk or not pasteurize your milk, whether you may go outside first thing in the morning or not go outside until noon, these may have long-term health consequences that we don’t detect for long periods of time.
Why is that important for vaccination? There are many studies documenting differences in outcomes of patients who’ve been vaccinated. To be fair on the other side of this debate, there are also studies that don’t show an association. When you’re talking about vaccine mandates, which is something that I’m strongly opposed against what you’re saying is we’re so sure this is safe and we’re so sure the benefit of this is so significant that we’re not going to allow any debate or not anyone to choose not to take this risk which is insane based on the medical literature and what we know about the uncertainty we have for the long term risks of any whether it’s a drug, vaccine or surgery.
You think it’s insane. People could hear you and say, “This man is insane because vaccines have saved the world population from these horrible diseases like polio.” I don’t know what other ones they would bring up.
Likely polio, measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, and all. We have to step back and say, “How many lives have truly been saved? Can we truly prove, for example, that polio would have continued unabated the way that it was feared to if we hadn’t banned DDT?” People don’t realize that DDT was phased out at the same time that polio epidemics disappeared. Is this an interaction between a virus and a chemical? Is it an effect solely of a chemical? Is the banning of DDT and the disappearance of polio epidemics coincidental? These are topics that should be and can be debated.

Let me get into other questions. The vaccine is not magical. You have to administer it. It has to have the effect but even if you have an antibody response to a vaccine, does it prevent infection? They’re giving us this line now with the current injectable vaccines that are saying, “It may not prevent infection.” If that’s true with this vaccine, why isn’t it true with previous vaccines? They’ll say, “We studied them in more detail,” to which I would ask, “If you studied those in such detail, why are you comfortable giving this one after studying it in much less detail?”
We could go on and on but at the end of the day, they’re making a lot of assumptions about how many lives have been saved. You have to ask, “What are the other things that we could do?” How many lives would we save if we gave everybody 2,000 international units of vitamin D every day? How many lives would we save? If we banned junk food? How many lives would we save if we ban vaping and cigarette smoking? You can go through this ad infinitum. Things that you can ban and mandate but you get into this weird dystopian situation where it’s like the SWAT team can go to poor people’s homes and force them to eat salad at gunpoint.
No one is proposing that. When you consider the reality we’re faced with, we live in a society where hundreds of thousands and millions of people every day are eating junk food, drinking soda, and spending money on vaccines that require optimal nutrition in order to work. We have our priorities mixed up. They need to be less about forcing people to do things that some experts think are so good that they must be mandated. We have to ask ourselves, for example, why is Tom Vilsack part of the new Biden administration? He’s called Mr. Monsanto.
He has an obvious vested interest in the current agricultural paradigm. You can go on and on about all these conflicts of interest between industry, government, this revolving door of experts, and so on so forth. It all makes it look suspicious. The government wants to force people to take vaccines when they don’t care that the number 1 and 2 purchases of food stamps are junk food and soda.
It’s very concerning. What I’m thinking about is you’re giving me this information that it is not out there. I know even before this possibly mandated vaccine came on the horizon, many parents said we research the data and the data points to the fact that vaccines are safe and effective so we are going to vaccinate our baby. They can’t find the alternative studies that you referenced earlier.
They can and they can’t. There are many people out there speaking about this. The main thing that I wish is there was more of a civil dialogue within the scientific community and a purposeful movement to do definitive studies to answer these questions and layout the data side-by-side. How many people do we have to vaccinate to save? How many other people in this place at this time? We can’t assume that these numbers are going to be the same in all places.
Vaccinate to seasonal influenza in Florida, let’s say it’s for the sake of argument that it’s extremely effective and it saves a lot of lives. You’re going to save fewer lives per dose in Florida than you are in Maine because these states are vastly different latitudes. There’s none of this in the scientific literature. We think this vaccine is great. We’re going to mandate this one. Doctors or nurses could be fired for refusing this vaccine.
As an experiment at a hospital I was working at, I said, “I’m not getting the flu vaccine this year.” They said, “We don’t need you.” I was amazed by that because I thought, “You are telling me that you’re not going to employ me because I don’t think this intervention is maybe right for me.” There is mixed data on the flu vaccine. There’s plenty of studies to support that it doesn’t work at all. Many of the studies that support that it works are funded by the industry, which is an obvious conflict of interest.
At this time, it seems to be a global health crisis. Wouldn’t those merit push vaccines that might spare us more deaths?
Arguably and that’s the argument being advanced. First of all, we have to define what our ethics are going to be and it’s much more important to stick to our principles than it is to sacrifice those. As I was saying before, if your logic is, we should force people to do things that will save lives, maybe we should force people not to ride bicycles because that’s dangerous. We should force people to commute to work on the bus because if they take the bus, there are going to be fewer cars on the road and there’ll be fewer accidents. We should force people to go to bed at 10:00 PM by completely stopping residential internet service at 10:00 PM.
I’m quite certain that any of these interventions would save lives but there’s a reason we don’t do that. We don’t treat people like they are children. In our society, what we’ve seen, the recipe for progress is letting people do what they think they should do. They’re going to have bad ideas, they’re going to do bad things, and they’re going to hurt themselves and other people, but you also get these people like Elon Musk, who burns the candle at both ends and sacrifices his health to build a giant company. He generates a lot of wealth, creates jobs, and fuels progress in society.
If you want to hamstring those people and prevent them from developing new products and launching companies that employ people that fuel innovation and progress, you can, but there’s a word for that and it’s socialism. There’s no socialist nation on Earth that eclipses the United States as arguably historically anyway. The freest country on Earth, for the amount of scientific innovation that’s going on. It’s funny people who want to take away people’s freedoms seem to be ignoring the fact that it is freedom that has given them all of this improved quality of life, scientific advance, modern medicine, and all this stuff.
You talk about scientific advancement. Let’s talk about where science has been in the past, where it is now, and where it’s headed.
In the past, speaking broadly, it’s the whole idea of science as in a scientific revolution. It began as a movement to try, quantify, and be rigorous in our observations of nature and draw logical conclusions without perpetuating dogmas that didn’t reflect reality. Scientific medicine has evolved over the centuries from the magical thinking of ancient people. It’s interesting that a lot of those ancient observations remain true now. Many of my patients will tell me that they clearly have a difference in their symptoms with changes in the weather and changes in the season. When I look at that scientifically, that’s about changes in light, temperature, and barometric pressure, affecting how energy moves within the human body.
Science has always relied upon this basic ability to observe the environment but subsequent generations always take this in a bizarre direction. I’m reminded when it comes to Germ Theory of the fact that when Ignaz Semmelweis was initially saying, “We probably shouldn’t go from the autopsy room to the operating room or the delivery room because we’ll contaminate our patients with these with germs.” I don’t think he used that word. That was his basic idea. His colleagues ridiculed him, and they said he was crazy and they ignored him. He forced physicians briefly only in the hospitals he controlled to wash their hands between the autopsy room, operating room, or delivery room. He radically dropped the infections in patients who’d had deliveries of babies or who had surgeries.
Joseph Lister later did this work in England and became world-famous for it. His name is now born on the bottle of Listerine. It’s ironic. The medical establishment used to be against the Germ Theory of Disease and now, it’s totally all in on the Germ Theory of Disease. Your questions are broad but if I had to sum it up, the scientific consensus is much a matter of what’s in fashion at the time. Sometimes, a paradigm can sound good but people take it to an extreme that ignores certain information that is contrary to it and not even contrary to it but doesn’t fit the model.
I’ve noticed you’re saying the scientific community loves consensus and they have a certain paradigm. It’s not only them. I feel that social media platforms and the news and so forth are almost forcing their information to only be in one stream and that’s so narrow, controlling, and limiting to our freedoms but also to our access to information that could be helpful for our health and saving lives.
We have to tolerate alternative paradigms because sometimes they have something powerful to inform us of. When you censor scientific debate, there are people who will poke holes in a scientific theory that those holes are important. You need to revise the theory. For example, a lot of people are under the impression that vaccines can reduce or eliminate certain diseases. Certain diseases, their prevalence, and severity have plummeted since the introduction of vaccines for them. We may directly attribute this, but stop and think for a minute about potential exceptions to this rule.
How is it that people who are on a ship off the sea coast totally isolated from the rest of the world can have an outbreak of influenza on the ship? That’s a little odd, isn’t it? If it’s all about transmission, where do the viruses come in the beginning? They’re sitting in the human genome somewhere, waiting to be reactivated by environmental conditions. If that’s the case, the vaccine that you give for a virus now may not work for future iterations of that virus tomorrow. This is why there’s a yearly flu vaccine. The question of, “Should we vaccinate?” What vaccine? What virus? What time frame? How long will this vaccine work on a population level? That’s leaving aside the question of, “Does vaccination change long term health outcomes in certain ways? Does it change the incidence of heart disease? Does it change the incidence of certain cancers?”

There are papers I’ve seen and read that suggest there may be significant changes. To be fair to the opposing side of that argument, those findings may not be based in reality. They may be noise rather than actual signal. People who are skeptical deserve the right to be able to say, “We’re not going to go all-in on this paradigm. We want to remain open to the possibility that this paradigm has significant holes in its theories of how we should live our lives and how we should treat or prevent disease.”
Leland, do you think it is possible that mandated vaccines may come about in different parts of our world?
It’s quite clear that what they’re planning to do is enforce compliance by limiting the scope of people’s freedom. They’re not going to have the SWAT team go door-to-door in the Amish neighborhoods, hold the children down at gunpoint, and force-vaccinate them. Not that I know of. What they’re going to do is they’re going to say okay, “Delta, American, and United.” They’re not going to let people fly without a vaccine passport, or Amtrak is going to say you can’t take the train without a vaccine passport.
This will go to the court system. Circuit courts, district courts, and probably some of this will go to the Supreme Court. We’ll see what they do with that because it would be a violation of someone’s first amendment right. Especially given the fact that some of these vaccines we’re talking about do contain aborted fetal stem cell tissue or developed with aborted fetal stem cell tissue and many people object to the use of those materials in the vaccines. We’ll see what the court system says. What’s interesting about this, to me, is that people are voting with their feet. I know people here in Virginia who are ready to pack up their families and flee the state for friendlier and freer climbs if forced vaccination becomes a reality. This is the cycle of history.
Every Western nation that’s embraced totalitarianism has always seen the flight of a certain group of its educated elite, who sense that things could go horribly wrong with that orthodoxy. Think of the exodus of Jews from Nazi Germany before the crackdowns and in the Second World War. Think about the flight of Russians from Communist China before the Iron Curtain came out. That’s why they put up a wall in Berlin to keep people in Soviet communist Eastern Europe. They didn’t want people to leave. This is going to happen here in the United States between states. People may flee the country looking for nations where they’re not going to be vaccine passports but I don’t think it’s going to be mandated by the government as of yet. The first step is going to be having corporations, employees, or customers choose between using their services and not using their services. Employed or not being employed.
It’s not unlike a soft opening of a movie. In other words, it’s a slow wave that you see coming in it. At first, it doesn’t seem that big of a deal. Some people have said to me, “I won’t travel,” but it could be the beginning of greater things to come.
My friends who are Jewish who are concerned about forced vaccination tell me and in this situation to what their families and parents’ grandparents have told them about the 1930s and 1940s, Nazi Germany.
It so happens that I’m reading a book about that time. It’s called Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed and it talks about a small village in France that was putting up resistance. There’s a time for that, too, isn’t there?
Right. The most important thing for people to do is realize that the best thing that they can do to prepare to protect their freedoms is to network with like-minded people locally, who are not going to ostracize them for their political or religious views. In their opinion, prohibit them from receiving, say a vaccine or engaging in some other medical therapy or medical treatment. Personally, I’m ethically opposed to forcing people to accept medical treatment. For that reason alone, I intend not to get the vaccine. I’m also opposed to aborted fetal tissue being used to develop vaccines.
Another reason is I’m not confident in the data that they’ve generated showing the actual benefit of the vaccine, not to mention the possibility of side effects which multiple experts have weighed in on. These are opinions I’ve listened to and I’ve found quite compelling. People need to be aware that big corporations are not interested in your freedoms. They’re interested in currying favor with political groups and with the government and with other corporations. They’re perfectly willing to sacrifice people’s liberties and if you’re totally reliant upon them, you’re creating a situation where you may face hard and difficult choices if you choose not to vaccinate.
I’m thinking back to something you said at the top of our program. Those parents who see their children that have been injured by vaccines find themselves reliant on the medical and healthcare system because their kids are so sick. What’s interesting is, these corporations that are pushing these injections are creating lifetime customers.
It’s unavoidable. If vaccines increase the risk of certain diseases and make kids sick or on balance rather than building their health and being a positive force for society, there’s a total conflict of interest within the system to let’s say, “Not find that effect.” It was Upton Sinclair who said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something upon which his salary depends upon his not understanding.” In other words, if people are making a lot of money doing something, they’re going to have a hard time and they’re massively biased to not see it as problematic.
They have too much skin in the game, as they say. Let’s pivot here as we start to wrap up with some of the ancient healing modalities that you advise your patients to take in your practice. In other words, there are things that we can do to protect ourselves beyond injections.
This is one of the great tragedies of modern mainstream medicine is it’s totally focused on drugs, surgeries, and ignoring natural traditional, medicine which may not have robust grade A double-blinded, randomized placebo-controlled crossover clinical trials to support it, but works. I’m adamant with my patients that they need to spend time outside. They need to get bright light during the day, have some darkness, and they need to use warm natural light at night that’s not going to shut down their circadian rhythms. They can’t be relying overly on technology like watching TV several hours a day. It’s a no.
Using screens for work is usually non-negotiable for a lot of young professionals and freshmen who come to see me but I want them to be using blue light filters, so they’re not getting totally blasted by these super-bright screens, especially late at night. Prudent sun exposure to maintain optimal levels of vitamin D. I want people to be eating whole food natural diets. Depending on the patient in the case, I am always tailoring exactly what they’re eating to their unique lab profile. For example, somebody’s got a low copper level and a low vitamin A level then beef liver may be a great supplement for them. Likewise, for somebody who’s got a high vitamin A level and a low copper level, I might tell him to eat copper rich foods but not necessarily beef liver.
I am always incorporating these traditional foods into someone’s dietary plan or as supplements because believe me, a lot of people don’t want to eat beef liver in order to get their nutrition where it needs to be for them to have optimal health and immunity. This is one of the things that bothers me about modern day biology and infectious disease medicine as it’s being practiced. They’re never paying attention to how much of these critical vitamins for immunity and minerals patients are consuming. When you look at the diets of these patients, they’re almost always chronically and severely deficient. Why should any of them have normal immunity?
The question people should be asking is, if we properly nourished our society by promoting good agricultural practices and a healthy balanced diet instead of the frankenfood that’s being pushed on people that’s been so processed, it’s unrecognizable compared to the plants it came from, if we were to do that, what would be the mortality for the average American, not this year or last year, but at any point. Our life expectancy is basically plateaued. It’s plateaued well below what it should be. It’s low because the government is colluding with corporations to basically sell people things that are bad for them and they’re not willing to be honest with the public about it.
The media has been colluding with them to do this because, at the end of the day, the media gets paid by their advertisers and their advertisers are big corporations so they’re never going to cover the big news of how bad processed foods are for people or how dangerous certain drugs are. It’s always whitewashed. It’s always downplayed and called junk science, pseudoscience, quackery, or whatever. When you get out there and practice with patients, they get amazing results when they do simple things to get closer to nature and eat a more natural diet.
This encourages me so much to hear you speak this way. It’s aligned with our Wise Traditions, principles and it makes me hopeful for the future because those who are open and investigating will indeed find answers to how to shore up their health and how to help all of us move forward.
I agree. Thank you.
I was going to ask you lastly, what do you see as the future of science, Leland?

Scientists are going to get back to what they used to do. When you go back and you read medical papers from the ‘20s, and ‘30s, they’re refreshingly frank and simple. They say, “We took twenty patients with the same laboratory abnormalities and the same history and we treated them with this series of dietary interventions, lifestyle, interventions, whatever, and we saw this effect.” You’ll see other researchers confirming that. You’ll see people pooling data.
I hope that it goes towards a much more decentralized model instead of what I consider to be suspicious and sometimes outright fraudulent large-scale trials being conducted only by academicians in Ivory Towers. The data from which, quite frankly, can easily be doctored by the pharmaceutical industry with no one ever noticing or becoming the wiser. That’s why I’m so skeptical of modern scientific and medical publishing. I don’t read the conventional journals anymore except out of vague curiosity because so much of what the reporting is obvious propaganda for the industry.
I’ve heard even some editors of those journals calling them out and saying that they are no longer promoting real science.
Those are not any editors. It’s some of the top names in medical editing and publishing. Those are people who burned a lot of bridges by speaking their minds and acting according to their conscience in order to do that. These are people who if they hadn’t come out and taken the stand, could easily have made enormous amounts of money working for the industry that they were publishing for. People like Marcia Angell and Richard Smith. Marcia Angell is the former Editor-In-Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and Richard Smith is the former Editor of the BMJ, the British Medical Journal, which is two of the most prestigious medical journals in the world. This is not some conspiracy theory. It’s a fact.
Thank you for speaking your own mind and I want to wrap up with a question I often pose at the end. Leland, if the reader could do one thing to improve their health that might be one among one of the ancient modalities you mentioned earlier, what would you recommend that they do?
Spend more time outside.
Leland, thank you for that advice and for this whole conversation. It’s been a pleasure.
Thank you for having me.
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About Dr. Leland Stillman
Dr. Leland Stillman studied at Connecticut College for his undergraduate degree and received his medical doctorate from the University of Virginia. He specialized in Internal Medicine and today works with people all over the world, using a whole-body approach to wellness. He takes the best of many disciplines and therapeutic modalities, and work with individuals to develop a comprehensive plan to achieve health and performance goals.
His is a systematic approach that addresses all aspects of diet, lifestyle, mindset, and environment that impact health. He teaches how to live a healthy life. Hippocrates said that “The greatest medicine of all is teaching people how not to need it.” That is exactly what Leland does.
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