Link to the Facebook group: The Root to Rx Lab - where discussion, collaboration, and questions can be worked through as a team.

The Root Room is the story track of Root to Rx, where recurring characters work through each week’s evidence so you can see the thinking in practice. If this is your first one, read these three first, in order:

Issue 004: Debby’s first encounter with the Skeptic’s Toolkit

Issue 005: Debby sitting in her brother-in-law’s living room, when he claims there’s a cure for cancer being suppressed.

Issue 006: Debby’s being steered by her algorithm down a path curated by Dr. Anecdote when Sam and Rooty try showing her the correct facts.

Issue 007: When Sam and Rooty’s facts didn’t work, they needed a mutual friend, Cora, to teach everyone how to be OPEN.

Issue 008: Debby Learns to Listen First, leading with heart, thanks to Cora. She has every answer and is the least helpful person in the room.

Issue 009: Debby practices OPEN and PAUSE, and learns that being right was never the hard part.

At the end of Issue 010, one number sat in the Facebook Root to Rx Lab group with no explanation. Gleevec launched at $2,200 a month.

Sam the Skeptic had said it belonged to Issue 011. Debby the Denier (in recovery) had typed the number and stopped. Rooty the Researcher had posted nothing after it. The Lab had gone quiet. Nobody came back to it that night.

Debby did not go back to the Lab right away. She went to her internet browser.

She looked up what Gleevec costs now. The price history. The climb from a few thousand a month into six figures a year. The patient assistance program. The generic.

And then she found something she was not expecting. A paper, in a serious medical journal, where more than 100 of the top leukemia doctors in the world said the price of their own field’s miracle drug was too high. Not activists. The doctors. The ones who prescribe it. The same one you can find in the references for issue 011’s Plain Talk.

She read it twice. Then she sat back further than she meant to.

There was a post she had shared, two years ago. A slick graphic that said your doctor makes more when you stay sick. 600 shares, 200 comments, thousands of people that saw it and believed. She remembered being proud of those numbers. She hadn’t thought about it once since. Now she couldn’t stop picturing the leukemia specialist somewhere who had spent a decade learning to keep people alive, scrolling past a stranger telling the internet he wanted them sick.

She didn’t like all of what she found this week. She didn’t dismiss any of it. She sent the access information, the assistance program and the generic, to someone in her life who needed it. Not the outrage. The help.

Then she came back to the Lab and typed the post she had been composing in her head since Issue 001.

She posted it on a Saturday morning. She did not announce it. She just posted.

“I have been in this group since Issue 001. I shared things in here that I never checked. There is one in particular I wish I could pull back, and I cannot. What I can do is tell you that I looked at everything Sam and Rooty put in front of me. I went looking for the flaw. I didn’t find what I expected to find. I’m not saying I am certain about everything. However, I am saying I am going to ask the question before I share. That is the commitment. That is the one I can actually keep.”

She posted it and closed her laptop. Then she opened it again, ten minutes later, just to look. Old habit. She closed it a second time and made herself walk away.

By the time she came back an hour later, the post had 47 reactions.

Sam the Skeptic was first.

Sam: That is not a small thing to say in public. Welcome to the Skeptic’s side of the table. You’re part of the #SkepticalRevolution now, and the door stays open.

Rooty posted the Skeptic’s Toolkit. All 10 questions.

Members she had never spoken to left responses. Some said they had been where she was. Some said they were still there. Some said that watching her say it out loud made them think they could say it too.

Will one of you readers be the next brave Debby the Recovered Denier, Debby the Skeptic, Sam the Skeptic, posting on the Root to Rx Lab group page something you used to believe but have since plugged into the toolkit and found a different truth?

Vera had been reading the whole exchange from her phone. She was at the trial site for a monitoring visit. She posted from the waiting room.

“I signed that consent form for myself. But lately I think about it differently. Every person who reads this newsletter and asks one better question, or shares it with someone who is scared to enroll, that is part of why I said yes. The trial does not end when the data locks. The work is longer than that.”

Debby replied immediately.

Debby: Vera. Thank you for letting us follow you through this.

Vera: Thank you for staying.

Much later, after the thread had gone quiet, Auntie Nani came back one more time, the name the Lab regulars had given her. She did not address anyone in particular.

“Every Debby who becomes a Skeptic is a patient who might one day say yes.”

She did not add anything after that. Nobody did.

Nurse Nani had mostly stayed quiet. She is a nurse and a clinical research coordinator, and she has read a thousand medication lists. She knows what is almost always missing from them.

Nani: Since we are talking about being good patients, one practical thing. In a trial we write down every medication and every supplement a person takes, every vitamin, every powder, every herb. Out here, almost nobody mentions the supplements to their doctor. People don’t think a supplement counts. It does. A supplement can change how a medicine works, or how you heal after a surgery, and your doctor cannot account for what they never hear about.

Nani: So we keep a free log for exactly this. Medications and supplements on one page. Fill it once, bring it every time. It is how you give your own doctor what a trial would never go without. shop.roottorx.com, and should you ever participate in a clinical trial, you’ll help that clinical trial coordinator immensely! Even better if you come with your medical history laid out with a symptoms log.

Debby’s first real test as a Skeptic. A post in the Lab about something she found in the supplement aisle. Her instinct is to share it. She runs Q1 first and talks with a Pharmacist. The answer surprises her.

Disclosure: Root to Rx is an independent publication of Open Label Media, LLC · openlabelmedia.com. Views expressed are personal views of Justin Yamashita and do not represent his employer or any affiliated organization. No employer resources or proprietary information are used. Every claim is sourced from publicly available materials.

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