019: Graham Phillips – The Pharmacist That Gave Up Drugs

Graham Phillips

 Graham Phillips BPharm FRPharmS is a second generation community pharmacist. He describes himself as “The Pharmacist who Gave Up Drugs! “

Having played a very senior leadership role in the pharmacy profession he became disillusioned with the NHS one-size-fits-all approach to healthcare with its emphasis on waiting for symptoms to arise before treating (suppressing?) them with drugs. He pioneered a new approach using his scientific knowledge, clinical expertise and new technology which resulted in the ProLongevity service. 

The ProLongevity programme helps people who want to lose weight, improve wellbeing and avoid/reverse diabetes, by using new technology to monitor real-time blood sugar  levels.  We provide personalised advice based on your data to help you make changes to your diet and lifestyle. We avoid traditional approaches that treat symptoms after the damage has been done.  Prevention is better than cure.

Graham has two sons, one is also a pharmacist and the other a corporate lawyer. He lives with his partner, Karen (a GP also passionate about lifestyle medicine) in North London.

Like Jackie Fletcher,  Graham is also an ambassador for the Public Health Collaboration. He believes that the world has become dominated by Big Food on the one hand (makes you sick) and  Big Pharma on the other (makes you 10% better). In the end the science must prevail.

Community pharmacies are part of the Public Health network and they see 1,600,000 people per day for health related reasons, which is more contacts than the rest of the NHS put together.

As a pharmacist he had the fundamental scientific knowledge to go back and look at the science.

Graham calls it the “Tyranny of Food” he would be starving at breakfast, as he finished breakfast he would be thinking “What's for lunch?”. He would be ravenous at lunch and at the end of lunch he would be thinking “What’s for supper?”. He was hungry the whole time. Now he isn’t hungry.

Having won many awards in the pharmaceutical industry Graham ended up frustrated because he felt they were locking the door after the horse has bolted. If you stop taking your hypertensive medication or diabetes medication you are still hypertensive or diabetic. Medication isn’t curing people it is suppressing the symptoms. People are ending up with more and more medication.

Graham understood the hormonal response to food and energy balance and the importance of the gut microbiome combined with a Freestyle Libre constant glucose monitor (CGM) he started to help people change diet and lifestyle to make lasting changes. He was having great results which was more exciting than spooning tablets into people.

Graham thinks pharmacies should be remunerated for not dispensing medication. He talks about a prevention program would ensure we would be in a better place to avoid getting COVID-19 or getting less symptoms in addition to the other benefit of being that the vaccine would work better.

Graham believes we have to debate the science because that’s how things change.

Sleep is also very important. Did you you know if you have 2-3 nights of bad sleep and then have a flu jab it halves the effectiveness?

We go on to talk about seed oils and its history, as well as the history of Corn Flakes.

We are very fortunate to be able to have Graham back on the show to follow up with other topics. 

Look up the PHC (Public Health Collaboration) https://phcuk.org - a great place to start especially for their resources or being able to access one of their Ambassadors.