What Happened When I Stopped Following the Rules | Amy Bernhard
What Happened When I Stopped Following the Rules | Amy Bernhard  
Podcast: You’re the Cure w/ Dr. Ben Edwards
Published On: Mon Nov 09 2026
Description: Amy Bernhard has been listening to this podcast for four years. It gave her the courage to start asking questions. Those questions led her to Instagram, then to a book, and now to this conversation. Her book is called Unmasked, and it covers more ground than most health books dare to touch. It starts when she was 12 years old and her brother came home from college addicted to OxyContin. It ends with her second daughter turning four years old, never vaccinated, never on antibiotics, and rarely sick. In between, Amy walks through the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma’s deliberate lie that OxyContin was not addictive, the FDA conflict of interest that stamped it approved, the marketing machine that pushed it into every family practice office in the country, and what it did to small towns across America. Seven of eleven boys on her brother’s little league team are dead from overdose. Her brother spent 17 years in active addiction and is now nine years sober, running eight sober living homes with an 80% success rate. She also goes deep on six years on SSRIs, what it felt like to be emotionally numb during her own wedding dress fitting, and what nobody told her about getting off them. Her journey into somatic healing, letting Jesus meet her in the wounds from childhood, and discovering that trauma lives in the body not just the mind is one of the most honest accounts of real healing you’ll hear. And then there’s her daughters. The first followed the full CDC schedule and was in the emergency room three times before 15 months old, with eight ear infections, eczema, a speech delay, tonsils out, adenoids removed, and two sets of tubes before age four. The second has never been vaccinated and has had two ear infections in almost four years, both treated with garlic ear oil. Amy is not anti-medicine. She’s pro-truth. And this book is a tool for anyone who is starting to ask the same questions she did. https://www.amybernhard.com/