TrendMacro conversation with Marty Makary on "Blind Spots" in health and medicine

Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins argues that medicine is beset by blind spots, willful blindness and worse. New evidence is conclusive that the majority of cases of appendicitis can be treated with antibiotics instead of surgery, yet the medical establishment still treats surgery as automatic. That said, pervasive use of antibiotics in children is likely contributing to the obesity epidemic, fattening children the same way antibiotics fatten cattle. The peanut allergy crisis was man-made, set in motion by early-childhood peanut-avoidance protocols that originated with no evidence that they would help. The standard recommendation that menopausal women forgo estrogen replacement therapy to avoid the risk of breast cancer was promulgated by an NIH researcher who knew full well there was no evidentiary basis for it, and tricked 40 colleagues into signing on as co-authors of his seminal paper. The Covid pandemic was likely the result of US funding of Chinese research that brought bat-borne viruses into the lab, and then made them deadlier. The public health reaction to the outbreak suppressed the initial opportunities to ameliorate it, and then forced draconian one-size-fits all lockdowns even on populations not at risk. For the future, blind spots that may need illumination include side effects of fluoridation of water; the potentially dangerous belief that marijuana is harmless; the fear based on no evidence that testosterone replacement for men risks prostate cancer; the unintuitive fact that early cancer screening hurts, rather than improves, long-term outcomes; the false belief that so-called gender-affirming care lowers youth suicide rates; and the belief that weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic are the best way to treat obesity, rather than controlling the sources of obesity to begin with.