Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on
Speaker 1: iHeart Radio. Oh, I'm so sorry. I hate to start
Speaker 1: an interview like that, but I don't know why I did.
Speaker 1: That's it's doctor Forrest Tenant, and I'm sorry about that.
Speaker 1: The strange medical Saga of John F. Kennedy. And I
Speaker 1: have no explanation why I said, William, So I won't
Speaker 1: even pretend to know why that came out of my mouth.
Speaker 1: I've been reading the book, loved the book, almost finished
Speaker 1: the book, and so I'm so grateful that you came
Speaker 1: on Coast to Coast to talk about the Strange medical
Speaker 1: Saga of John F. Kennedy. Hello, Hi, how are you
Speaker 1: pretty good? Quite well? Okay, great ahead. I heard your
Speaker 1: introductions and it was quite good and quite quite accur
Speaker 1: I'm not sure what I could add, joy, Well, I
Speaker 1: know what you're going to add to it, because I
Speaker 1: got a million questions. I dog eared this book more
Speaker 1: than I dog ear most and the the part I mean,
Speaker 1: so we know, and I'll go over your I mean,
Speaker 1: you certainly have plenty of bona fides, and you are
Speaker 1: an established authority on pain, and so it's interesting that
Speaker 1: even so much of what we don't know about John F.
Speaker 1: Kennedy was the real timeline of his pain that it
Speaker 1: starts really almost you know, this was news to me. So,
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess I've read bios and they didn't
Speaker 1: go into they didn't drill down this deep. But born
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventeen, and almost from the very beginning, the
Speaker 1: point you make is that John F. Kennedy was born
Speaker 1: into a life of physical pain. Yes, yes, he exactly
Speaker 1: why he ever survived infancy and childhood is a miracle.
Speaker 1: I mean, Cash was nine lives had nothing on John F. Kennedy,
Speaker 1: No one really one are those things as you study
Speaker 1: his case, how and why he managed to live, it's
Speaker 1: just some sort of a miracle. And I came to
Speaker 1: believe that his charm, his personality is vigor to live
Speaker 1: and to provide really excellent leadership, probably came from his
Speaker 1: experiences and just overcoming death one time after another. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, and I'm going to amplify something a point
Speaker 1: that you imply and sort of you kind of connect him,
Speaker 1: but I'm gonna I'm going to sharpen it even further
Speaker 1: and say, had he not been born into a family
Speaker 1: of wealth, he would have died in infancy. He would
Speaker 1: have died before he was two years old, probably, but
Speaker 1: the family had so much money and were able to
Speaker 1: provide the best care, the best doctors that he would
Speaker 1: he he didn't have to die. He's lived proof of that.
Speaker 1: But it's it is a kind of medical miracle that
Speaker 1: he didn't well, it really is. And you know, I've
Speaker 1: written about two other men who have written the medical
Speaker 1: song of Howard Us and all this presently. And you know,
Speaker 1: if they had not had access to well, let's be
Speaker 1: honest about it, to find the very best doctors and
Speaker 1: hire the very best doctors who were willing to innovate,
Speaker 1: none of those people would have lived very long. And
Speaker 1: John F. Kennedy, there's no two ways about it. They
Speaker 1: had enough money to find the very best doctors there
Speaker 1: at Harvard and around the country at which they did.
Speaker 1: And you know, there's no question in my mind that
Speaker 1: if he had been born into a normal family of
Speaker 1: normal financial means, I don't think he would have made it, No,
Speaker 1: because he wouldn't be able to You're right from the start,
Speaker 1: like he to survive scarlet fever in those days and
Speaker 1: all his infection in childhood required, I mean you know,
Speaker 1: he spent half his time with doctors. I'm not talking
Speaker 1: about nurses, but the very best doctor. So that had
Speaker 1: a factor in helping him survive. And there's a difference,
Speaker 1: and you know, please explain, but there's a difference between
Speaker 1: hospitals and clinics very often, and clinics is where I mean,
Speaker 1: that's the expensive care, that's the one on one care
Speaker 1: that you allude to, and that's what he got from
Speaker 1: a very early age as opposed to he's a sickly kid.
Speaker 1: He went to the hospital, yes, uh. And he also
Speaker 1: his doctors made house calls also, right, and so he
Speaker 1: had access to a patient clinic as well as going
Speaker 1: into the hospital at any time. Uh. You know that
Speaker 1: his number of hospitalizations are not even countable, right, They
Speaker 1: go up into the dozens. And I try quantitates a
Speaker 1: number of hospital invasions, but I couldn't quite do that
Speaker 1: because sometimes he'd go into the hospital for a day.
Speaker 1: Another thing in those years which has totally gone today
Speaker 1: in medicine, doctors would admit people to a hospital just
Speaker 1: to do diagnostic workups. When I was a very young
Speaker 1: daughter just graduated, that was common. I remember personally putting
Speaker 1: people in the hospital just to do glucose tolerance tests
Speaker 1: or X rays, and so that was common in those days.
Speaker 1: Today it's far too expensive to do that, and of
Speaker 1: course our technology is so much better that you don't
Speaker 1: need to go into the hospital. But again, he had
Speaker 1: excellent care by his physicians and also a very mother
Speaker 1: who was obviously quite quite a great nurse, right, and
Speaker 1: a course of nature. I mean, she was gonna she
Speaker 1: was doing everything that she could. Again we're talking about
Speaker 1: and it is the perfect description the strange medical saga
Speaker 1: of John F. Kennedy. And thank you for as tenant
Speaker 1: again for being on it. We'll get to question for
Speaker 1: you later on, but let me let let's do this.
Speaker 1: If you could list the things that John F. Kennedy
Speaker 1: as a baby Jack suffered between birth and two, because
Speaker 1: that's how I really like how you broke up the
Speaker 1: book in terms of infancy, childhood, teenage years, young adult,
Speaker 1: all that. So what can you name all of the
Speaker 1: of his afflictions during his during his infancy, right, That's
Speaker 1: that's quite easy to do because they were all infections.
Speaker 1: I think I have a chapter there I decided to Yeah,
Speaker 1: no no infection left behind. Right, He had all the
Speaker 1: usual childhood illnesses measles, bumps, but he also had whooping coughs,
Speaker 1: which in those years often took your life. And also
Speaker 1: he developed scarlet fever. That was the one that his
Speaker 1: survival was unusual because scarlet fever was there was a
Speaker 1: steptocaucus bacteria and it's hardly known today, but it caused
Speaker 1: both rheumatic fever or scarlet fever and rheumatic heart disease,
Speaker 1: and it also caused later kidney failure any one of those.
Speaker 1: And he managed to survive the scarlet fever. And what's
Speaker 1: amazing about it is it see there were no antibiotics
Speaker 1: in those days, so exactly what the doctors did is
Speaker 1: a mystery. If one starts to study medical practice prior
Speaker 1: to World War Two, you know, it's almost hard to
Speaker 1: find out. What in the world the doctors did do
Speaker 1: was recorded. Surprisingly, but whatever they did do, he did
Speaker 1: make scarlet fever. He was near death and that was
Speaker 1: the big one during his infancy. How he managed to
Speaker 1: survive scarlet fever, and that you know, thousands and thousands
Speaker 1: of babies dyed scarlet fever or rheumatic fever in those days.
Speaker 1: And there's a little sidebar on the whole concept of autoimmunity,
Speaker 1: meaning you developed a disease later on and the day
Speaker 1: you hear about that with COVID all the time was
Speaker 1: really initially discovered following scarlet fever and rheumatic fever. You
Speaker 1: got a sore throat, you had a step to caucus infection,
Speaker 1: and then later on the step of coco infection turned
Speaker 1: into developed antibodies or autoimmune toxic substances in the body
Speaker 1: that caused the kidney disease and heart disease and death.
Speaker 1: So he managed to survive that. He was never given
Speaker 1: the last rice for it or anything. He got that later.
Speaker 1: But we could summarize his whole problem and infantry in
Speaker 1: childhood as he was born without the normal resistance of
Speaker 1: the body to infections. And also I think it starts
Speaker 1: in infancy, right I have to go back and look
Speaker 1: at my notes, but where right away there was a
Speaker 1: nourishment problem. Yes, this is the other thing that the
Speaker 1: fractory until I really got into studying his records and everything,
Speaker 1: and it was one of the things that the family
Speaker 1: didn't like to talk about it. John F. Kennedy didn't
Speaker 1: like to talk about it. But he was born with
Speaker 1: this autoimmune prout. And now let me define autoimmenity real
Speaker 1: simple for the audience, because people hear that tournament, they're
Speaker 1: not certain of what I mean autoimmunity. Immunity means you're
Speaker 1: resistant to something. You're resistant or organisms, bacteria, toxins, poisons.
Speaker 1: So you would think that autoimmunity means it's automatic immunity, right,
Speaker 1: It doesn't mean that at all. What it means is
Speaker 1: that you've got a destructive element in the body that
Speaker 1: is slowly attacking and eating away any rootage in collagen
Speaker 1: in tissues. Now, that destructive substance can be a toxin,
Speaker 1: a enzyme, an infectious agents, a poison, or it can
Speaker 1: be an antibody. And so John F. Kennedy from birth
Speaker 1: had some toxic element in his body. We think it
Speaker 1: was an antibody, but nobody knows that he had a
Speaker 1: toxic element in his body from birth that started eating
Speaker 1: away some of his tissues. And the one that caused
Speaker 1: him the most problem during his lifetime was an attack
Speaker 1: on his intestine. And he started in childhood developing all
Speaker 1: kinds of bowel and intestinal problems that he'd have alternating
Speaker 1: constipation one day, then diarrhea and floating pain, indigestion, and
Speaker 1: he actually carried his intestinal problems until until death. In
Speaker 1: other words, from from day from year one to year
Speaker 1: forty six he had the intestinal problems. Now to day
Speaker 1: we would probably call that celiac disease. It was not
Speaker 1: that name was not applied at that time. His doctors
Speaker 1: call to do it unitus or just colitis. But that
Speaker 1: began in his child and during childhood, so he had
Speaker 1: to fight the battle of the bathroom literally his entire
Speaker 1: life and the and then it also irritable bowel syndrome,
Speaker 1: so people with that overlap with that, so those those
Speaker 1: very sempstoms would be part of it. In other words,
Speaker 1: it would be called a mega irritable bowel. How about that? Yeah, no, no, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's fair. Again, we're talking about the strange medical saga
Speaker 1: of John F. Kennedy and we're not even out of
Speaker 1: his infancy yet with the doctor Forrest Tenants. So here's
Speaker 1: how I understand autoimmune. This is how it's always been
Speaker 1: explained to me. Is um that auto meaning self and
Speaker 1: immune in this case meaning you're not even immune to yourself,
Speaker 1: and that you're attacking what you're thinking about it. That's
Speaker 1: an excellent description, right, and so we are. That's how
Speaker 1: people who are autoimmune their their first line of defense
Speaker 1: is actually the first line of offense to their body.
Speaker 1: You got it, Okay, So that's that in itself. Again,
Speaker 1: were it not for the financial resources for the experimental treatments,
Speaker 1: that in itself could have killed John F. Kennedy as
Speaker 1: a baby. But he survives past the two year mark
Speaker 1: of infancy into childhood and at some point then we
Speaker 1: get into this whole adrenal gland thing. Can you explain
Speaker 1: that that when going into the next phase of his
Speaker 1: health problems? Yes, we mentioned autoimmunity. And incidentally, what are
Speaker 1: the reasons for I wrote this book is that from
Speaker 1: what I can tell, this whole concept of autoimmunity may
Speaker 1: be the plague of all of humans in this century.
Speaker 1: I can't think of anything. It's a bigger public health
Speaker 1: or issue. And COVID is only making people realize as
Speaker 1: they're calling it long COVID and trying to apply other names,
Speaker 1: and what it really is his post viral autoimmunity, meaning
Speaker 1: that you've got destructive elements in your body eating away
Speaker 1: at some of your tissues, and so his the interocnologists
Speaker 1: years after Kennedy's birth described a condition in which autoimmunity
Speaker 1: or destructive elements from birth started destroying glands, and Kennedy's
Speaker 1: the big target of his autoimmune gland over disease was
Speaker 1: his adrenal glands, but he also had his thyroid attacked
Speaker 1: and his testicles attacked in later life. And so people
Speaker 1: who have this rare condition will have their pancreas attack
Speaker 1: that gives you the diabetes. Thyroid will be attacked, your
Speaker 1: testicles or ovary can be attacked, and certainly the addre
Speaker 1: glands can be attacked. What it looks like historically is
Speaker 1: that his adrenal glands probably were attacked and would detrior rates,
Speaker 1: and then it probably regrow and then detriorate. And so
Speaker 1: it was kind of an up and down thing over
Speaker 1: a period of years until he was finally diagnosed with
Speaker 1: Addison's disease when he was right after World War Two,
Speaker 1: when he was right about thirty years of age. So
Speaker 1: between birth and age thirty, his adrenal glands slowly started
Speaker 1: to fail. Okay, explain the role of adrenal glands in
Speaker 1: the humanoity. Adrenal glands. First off, they were adrenal glands.
Speaker 1: You have two of them. They're so valuable through the
Speaker 1: body that the Good Lord gives us two and the
Speaker 1: one sitting on top of the kidney. And they used
Speaker 1: to be called superrenal glands, meaning on top of the kidney,
Speaker 1: but just for short they call them adrenal glands. And
Speaker 1: in eighteen fifty five a pathologist in Britain with the
Speaker 1: name of Thomas Addison discovered that some people had their
Speaker 1: adrenal glands that were eaten away and they died. Listen
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