Now turning to medical news, negligent, reckless and wrong.

That's how a top Kentucky doctor characterizes recent claims by the Trump administration associating Tylenol use during pregnancy to an increased risk of neurological conditions like autism in children.

That announcement last week drew a strong rebuke from Dr.

Stephen Stark, the secretary of the state health cabinet who oversees health policy programs and services for Kentucky.

He says the administration's claims about acetaminophen, use and autism are unproven.

And what's worse, says Stack, he calls them dangerous.

I asked him yesterday about the origin of these claims and what the science really says.

Well, there's long been a subset of people who have their concerns or skepticism.

Right.

That's that's always the case.

There's a small percentage who will feel that for whatever reasons, they lack confidence in or certainty in the recommendations that are given by their health care providers or other experts.

That's always the case.

What's unique now is that there's a growing number of people who are becoming uncertain because the very basis of facts and reality is being distorted for them.

They're being told information that is objectively wrong.

It's objectively false.

Take, for example, the Tylenol issue that's recently come up.

Tylenol is one of the only medications felt to be generally safe for women with fever and pain who are pregnant.

Right.

One of the only things generally felt to be safe.

And now they've been told in no uncertain terms, don't take it, just tough it out.

That's negligent.

That's reckless.

It's wrong.

It's going to cause people to get hurt that don't need to get hurt or people to suffer that don't need to suffer.

And now when women who are pregnant go to see their physicians, some portion of them are going to be skeptical of their physician when they recommend what modern medical science has long said is one of the safest medications they can use to help control fever and pain and pregnancy, which is acetaminophen or Tylenol.

Is there a study or series of studies that point to the the suspect nature of receipt of vitamin use during pregnancy?

I mean, it had to have started from somewhere.

What is the origin story?

Articulation?

Yeah, there are lots of studies about acetaminophen in pregnancy.

One of the things in studies for pregnant women, because it's considered not to be ethical, to withhold treatment from one half of women in, you know, test one half and withhold from the other half.

And so there's not great research specifically on pregnant women because of liability and ethical reasons.

So we have to rely on what we call observational studies, where we look at large numbers of pregnant women who have made their own choices and then see how they responded differently to different choices.

Those raise other problems, though, because a lot of other variables can come into play that confuse or confound the interpretation.

There have been many observational studies for women who are pregnant using acetaminophen.

They have none of them showed a causal relationship for acetaminophen has in any way contributed to or caused autism.

And one of the largest ones with millions of women in Scandinavia showed absolutely no relationship whatsoever to the diagnosis of autism and the use of acetaminophen in pregnancy.

It is entirely irresponsible to suggest otherwise.

What we have now, Renee, it used to be that if you had 101 hundred scientific studies in 99 of them all lined up in a cluster and one was an outlier, you would say, well, that's the outlier.

But but scientific evidence says this is clearly the right choice.

We have a group of people now that are saying that one outlier, that's the truth.

All the other 99 are lying and hiding something.

This is the truth.

It's entirely backwards.

And like I said, it's going to cause people to get hurt.

All of this is consequential, not just to access, but to affordability, to vaccinations, to medications.

Talk about how this becomes an access issue if it keeps progressing the way we see this conversation progressing.

So if this keeps progressing, people who don't need to get sick get sick instead of paying pennies to, you know, relatively speaking, to immunize people or give simple and safe medications like acetaminophen and Tylenol and pregnant women, what we end up doing is having complications.

You have kids who get diseases that we had previously eliminated in they end up in the hospital, you know, with dehydration or pneumonia or problems they didn't need to have.

You get a small number of them who die.

And that's a real tragedy because the immunization could have prevented that entirely.

You have elderly folks who, if they become skeptical and they don't get recommended immunizations, things for COVID or the flu, end up in the hospital or end up in an ICU or end up on a ventilator or end up deceased because they get serious diseases that they might otherwise have been protected against.

Renee, I would say in human history, in all of our human history, and maybe there's 10,000 years of recorded human history one way or the other, the average human life expectancy as recently as 1900 worldwide was about 32 years of age in the United States.

It was probably in the late forties over the last one and a quarter century, 225 years or so, life expectancy has more than doubled globally and increased by 30 or more years in the United States.

That's all because of science.

It's all because of medicine.

If you want to see what it looks like to eat an organic diet, not see a doctor and have no medicines, all you have to do is go back to 1900 and we can all die under the age of 50 on average, because that's what we had before that antibiotics, penicillin first came around in 1948.

The first antihypertensive medication in the 1950s.

Immunizations.

We had some back at 1800.

You know, when George Washington immunized his troops against smallpox.

So that's not brand new.

But the more commonly used ones, really the 40, 5060s, is when those really started to emerge.

Modern medical science has been what has made it possible, along with sanitation and other things like that, to have longer, fuller, healthier lives.

Is there any benefit, in your view, of having this healthy skepticism about modern medicine, about vaccinations, about long policies that we've had and have adopted that have given way to this longer life expectancy and better health outcomes?

Is there some benefit to having a skeptical conversation about it?

I think there's always benefit for people asking questions.

I think there's a benefit for experts who analyze the same data and reach different conclusions to have an informed discussion and debate about where truth may most likely lie.

I think all of us need to be willing to revisit our conclusions when presented with evidence that suggests that our conclusion should be adjusted.

I think that's the scientific process.

I think that's just the hallmark of an enlightened, educated society.

So, yes, there's always a role for that kind of discussion that the challenge comes in is when you have real experts who have studied and devoted their entire lives to studying and trying to find truth.

And when they make recommendations based on a scientific method and do it in an open, transparent way.

What really gets alarming is when we now have our very public institutions deconstructed, when we have experts fired from panels and replaced sometimes with cranks, and we have people who are substituting quackery for real science and doing it all in a very opaque way where they're not consulting experts and not dealing in the open.

That stuff is a recipe for real harm for all of us.

If there is any advice you could give Secretary Kennedy and the Trump administration, what would it be?

Well, my advice would be more to our patients, to the Kentuckians that I serve.

It would be please get professional medical advice from qualified people.

That would be doctors and nurse practitioners and nurses and physician assistants and pharmacists.

Please go see people who are qualified licensed health care practitioners and get your guidance from them, not from a bunch of people who have other agendas telling other stories.

More interested in having you confuse and scared than they are about having you healthy and well.

So please seek medical advice from real professionals.

The Food and Drug Administration has initiated the process for a label change to products containing acetaminophen, most notably Tylenol.

It is the only over-the-counter medication approved for treating fever in pregnancy.

A study published last year by the Journal of the American Medical Association found no increased risk of autism, ADHD or intellectual disabilities If the children of women who used acetaminophen during pregnancy.