Guest: Dr. John Littell is a board certified family physician in Ocala, Florida, in practice since 1990. He served seven years as an Army physician, including a 1992 deployment to Guantanamo Bay caring for Haitian refugees picked up at sea, and he later served as chief of staff of a Florida hospital system. During the pandemic he was one of a very small number of American physicians treating COVID patients with early, off-label therapy, and he organized the meeting in San Juan that produced the Rome Declaration and the COVID summits that followed. He is the author of The Hidden Truth.
Key topics:
- Why he calls the exam room sacred ground, and the paper he wrote on the patient physician relationship for a group of Republican physician congressmen
- The Medicare annual wellness visit he demonstrated live on Congressman Pete Sessions, and why he calls it the Obamacare Medicare nightmare
- The hospital system that told its own doctors in 2021 they no longer needed to walk into a COVID patient's room
- The chief executive who disciplined him for walking a hallway without a mask and told him doctors needed to be lockstep on policy
- The nurse who cared for the county's first COVID fatality for twelve straight hours and was refused a test at the hospital where she had worked for twenty years
- The twelve doctors on the Zoom call, the Last Supper hanging behind one of them, and the mission he believes they were handed
- Respiratory therapists telling him patients were being put on ventilators too quickly, and what BiPAP did to brittle lungs
- The frontline protocol: ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, high dose steroids, blood thinners, montelukast, colchicine, inhaled budesonide, antihistamines
- Off label prescribing in plain English, from trazodone for insomnia to quinine from the cinchona tree
- Labor Day weekend 2020 in San Juan, the Rome Declaration, and the first COVID summit at the World Equestrian Center in Ocala
- The new mother, hypoxic with her baby in the crib beside her, and the ivermectin he carried into that room in his own pocket
- The mayor who got the full therapeutic dose from the hospital formulary and was duck hunting a week later
- His best friend, the priest who took off a glove to anoint him, and the security alert the hospital placed on the family
- Montana and Michigan in the 1990s: labeled an impaired provider, blackballed as a pro-life physician, and entered in the National Practitioner Data Bank
- Why he believes his children's generation will never sit still for it again
Timestamped breakdown:
00:00:00 — Cold open: thirty years in family medicine
00:00:30 — Why he was born to be a family doctor
00:04:05 — The sacred bond between a patient and a physician
00:08:45 — Personalized health care, and what Obamacare did to the exam room
00:09:33 — 2021: doctors told they no longer needed to enter the COVID ward
00:10:43 — The Medicare annual wellness visit, demonstrated on a congressman
00:12:11 — Guantanamo Bay, 1992, and the only triage that compares
00:13:10 — The nurse he pulled out of the emergency room
00:13:47 — Lockstep: disciplined for walking a hallway without a mask
00:15:23 — The first fatality in Ocala, and the nurse refused a test
00:16:36 — Twelve doctors on a Zoom call, and the Last Supper behind one of them
00:17:51 — Jenny Beth Martin on Bannon, Simone Gold, and the white coat event
00:24:00 — The letter to the White House and how the doctor networks were built
00:27:24 — Respiratory therapists in the hallway: they are going on ventilators too fast
00:27:50 — What BiPAP did to lungs that had gone brittle
00:28:37 — What the hospitals were paid per COVID patient
00:29:45 — Inflammation, microthrombosis, and the treatment cocktail
00:31:20 — Delta hits, and the scramble to change the protocol
00:32:03 — Pharmacies, prescriptions, and public enemy number one
00:32:20 — Labor Day weekend 2020: the meeting in San Juan
00:34:00 — No one size fits all, and the tenets of the declaration
00:36:00 — Off label prescribing, quinine, and where ivermectin came from
00:40:28 — Puerto Rico to Rome, and roughly ten thousand signatures
00:41:47 — The first COVID summit at the World Equestrian Center
00:44:29 — Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the calls about coming to Washington
00:46:15 — Two cities, six hospitals, and why he will not give up privileges
00:47:57 — Ivermectin in his pocket: the new mother who was turning blue
00:51:28 — The mayor who was duck hunting a week later
00:52:20 — His best friend, the priest, and the security alert
00:54:23 — This morning in the doctors' lounge
00:55:26 — The Giver, and who sees the red apple
00:56:04 — Jenny Beth Martin on her father the minister, and what COVID really cost
01:00:28 — The personal price: letters, a medical board, and an investigation
01:01:45 — Montana: labeled an impaired provider for being too zealous
01:02:53 — Hillsdale, Michigan, and being kicked off staff for making house calls
01:04:22 — Blackballed in two states, and the letters that got him to Florida
01:07:48 — Why he is an optimist about the next generation
01:08:30 — Closing
Links mentioned:
- Tea Party Patriots Action: teapartypatriots.org
- The Jenny Beth Show: jennybethshow.com