Latest / CareTalk: Healthcare. Unfiltered. / Overcoming Blind Spots in Modern Medicine w/ Dr. Marty Makary
Transcript
- 0:00Even intelligent, well -meaning people often have huge blind spots in their thinking.
- 0:04In medicine, that's led to severe problems, like the opioid crisis, overuse of antibiotics, and rejection of hormone replacement therapy.
- 0:14Where did these blind spots come from, and how can we erase them?
- 0:23As kids, we're always learning and growing, but as adults, we can sometimes lose that sense of curiosity that makes life exciting.
- 0:31It's easy to fall into a routine.
- 0:34Therapy can help you break out of it.
- 0:36If you've been considering starting therapy, now is the perfect time to give it a try.
- 0:41BetterHelp offers entirely online therapy that's designed to be convenient, flexible, and tailored to fit your schedule.
- 0:49Whether you're dealing with stress, anxiety, or seeking personal growth, BetterHelp connects you with licensed therapists who can support you on your journey to rediscovering your curiosity and becoming your best self.
- 1:02Don't miss out on therapy.
- 1:04Visit betterhelp .com slash care talk to get 10 % off your first month and take the first step toward enhancing your mental wellbeing.
- 1:13That's betterhelp, H -E -L -P dot com slash care talk.
- 1:18Welcome to care talk, America's home for incisive debate about healthcare business and policy.
- 1:23I'm David Williams, president of Health Business Group.
- 1:25And I'm John Driscoll, senior advisor at Walgreens.
- 1:28Well, today's guest is Dr.
- 1:29Marty McCary.
- 1:30He's author of Blind Spots, a deep dive into the human tendency to resist new ideas and a guide to improving objectivity.
- 1:39Join the vibrant Care Talk community on LinkedIn, where you can dig deep into healthcare business and policy topics, access Care Talk content, and interact with the host and our guests.
- 1:49And please be sure to leave us a rating on Apple or Spotify.
- 1:53while you're at it.
- 1:54Dr.
- 1:54McCary, welcome to Care Talk.
- 1:56Great to be with you, David and John.
- 1:58So Dr.
- 1:59McCary, if I could call you Marty, at least for the length of this podcast.
- 2:03Please.
- 2:03What got you interested in this super important topic of blind spots and how do you define it?
- 2:10Well, it's amazing the power of group think and medical dogma that we see in every specialty in medicine can take on a life of its own.
- 2:20And the purpose of science is really to challenge deeply held assumptions in the field.
- 2:25So what inspired me to write the book, Blind Spots, is the young generation of doctors right now that are coming up and think differently.
- 2:34They want to change the way we deliver healthcare.
- 2:38They don't want to accept, well, this is the way it is.
- 2:41You gotta see patients in quick 10 minute visits and bill in code and burn out yourself.
- 2:47they want to redesign the entire healthcare system.
- 2:52They wanna talk about treating diabetes with cooking classes instead of just throwing insulin at people.
- 2:57They wanna talk about school lunch programs, not just ozempic for children.
- 3:02They wanna talk about food as medicine and body inflammation and microbiome health.
- 3:09So these are all topics where there's incredible emerging research, but it's not quite prime time.
- 3:15It's just not accepted within the field in part.
- 3:20because we have an old guard oligarchy in Madison that controls the gates of what goes in the journals, what gets funded at the NIH.
- 3:29But this area of research is exciting and I thought the public deserves to know about it.
- 3:33If you look back, you mentioned in the book, you go into a number of blind spots.
- 3:38Can you mention some of those that are maybe the most interesting have had the biggest impact?
- 3:42Well, I think the one that blew me away the most, the one where I did some original investigative journalism.
- 3:49was looking into the dogma that hormone replacement therapy for women after menopause causes breast cancer.
- 3:57It's not true.
- 3:58And it overshadowed the incredible benefits of hormone replacement therapy.
- 4:04That is estrogen plus or minus progesterone for women.
- 4:09When a woman starts hormone replacement therapy within 10 years of menopause, the data are overwhelming.
- 4:16And we never hear about this because of the, improper dogma that was put out that it causes breast cancer.
- 4:22Turns out the benefits include cutting the risk of heart attacks in half, reducing cognitive decline by up to 60%, reducing the risk of Alzheimer's by 35%, reducing the risk of bone fractures if a woman falls in half.
- 4:45The benefits are...
- 4:47overwhelming.
- 4:48Women live three and half years longer on average and feel better, not just alleviating the symptoms of menopause.
- 4:58And so there's probably nothing that has improved the health of a population more in terms of population level outcomes than estrogen for women.
- 5:07And yet 90 % of women to this day are still not offered estrogen.
- 5:13because of the dogma that it causes breast cancer.
- 5:15So I did a deep dive on it.
- 5:17Yeah, Marty, I actually think it's worse than that.
- 5:19I think because breast cancer is so common among women and because of just the fear of the big C, there are still a lot of oncologists, PAs, techs, people working in oncologist offices who are inappropriate or inappropriately basing their recommendations of sort of against HRT in a way that kind of terrifies women who are suffering from this disease, is breast cancer, which touches so many women.
- 5:52think it's an incredibly important call out.
- 5:54I think in your book, you actually suggest that HRT may actually be somewhat preventative.
- 6:00mean, actually it's not choosing one set of benefits against another.
- 6:05It's really you sort of unpack how weak the data is.
- 6:09that this is in some ways promotes breast cancer.
- 6:12That's right.
- 6:14About 1 % of postmenopausal women cannot take hormone replacement therapy for a number of reasons.
- 6:20But overwhelmingly, this has tremendous benefits to a population.
- 6:25And I'm glad you said what you said, because fear is what drove so many people away.
- 6:31And it's amazing when they had the initial deliberation within the study committee.
- 6:37I interviewed one guy at that meeting who said something, there was a shouting match before they released the results because many felt it was misleading.
- 6:46Turns out there was never any statistical significance that it increases breast cancer.
- 6:51And women who took estrogen alone had lower rates of breast cancer, ironically.
- 6:55That's wild.
- 6:58But one guy said, look, if you put this out there when it's not true, when there's no statistically significant increase in breast cancer.
- 7:05that you will never be able to put the genie back in the bottle with an issue as sensitive as breast cancer.
- 7:12And to this day, there's never been a study showing that it increases the death rate of breast cancer.
- 7:17But 90 % of doctors still do not prescribe it because that announcement made by an NIH researcher and researchers from Harvard and all the top regalia, it was so loud that people had...
- 7:32can't undo it in their mind and it's lived on as medical dogma.
- 7:36So here's another one.
- 7:37How about peanuts for kids?
- 7:40yeah, the modern day peanut allergy epidemic does not exist in many countries.
- 7:46There's no peanut allergies in Africa, according to the doctors there and people who live there.
- 7:51And so what happened was there was a slight increase in peanut allergies in the 1970s.
- 8:00The pediatrician community didn't know what to do, the American Academy of Pediatrics.
- 8:04So they decided they're going to issue a recommendation for all mothers and young children to avoid peanuts 100 % until age three to prevent peanut allergies from developing in those kids.
- 8:16Turns out they got it backwards.
- 8:18Peanut avoidance causes peanut allergies.
- 8:21They forgot about basic immune tolerance or what's been known as the Dirt Theory.
- 8:26So by and large, this Well, at that time when the recommendation went out in the year 2000, the peanut allergy rate in the United States soared.
- 8:37I mean, a massive surge.
- 8:39And we had a new type of peanut allergy, which is this severe allergy.
- 8:45can't even, a kid can't even be near peanuts.
- 8:48Just being close to a peanut without even ingesting it can put them into this severe anaphylactic reaction.
- 8:54And we saw ER visits go way up.
- 8:56I mean, this is a horrible epidemic.
- 8:59It's still dominating in the United States, but other countries don't have it because they didn't put out medical dogma that was wrong.
- 9:06Now, it came out, New England Journal papers is one as recent as a few months ago, proved this peanut avoidance idea wrong, that that's how you prevent peanut allergies.
- 9:17They pointed out that early exposure of little bit of peanut butter when a kid's four or five months of age and in infancy.
- 9:25prevents painted allergies.
- 9:27But you didn't hear an apology.
- 9:30And I think right now we have a big trust problem in medicine.
- 9:33People deserve an apology when we get things wrong, when the oligarchs get things wrong.
- 9:38I'm not talking about rank and file docs.
- 9:40I'm talking about when the medical elites put out something with such absolutism.
- 9:45And the reality is they don't know.
- 9:47And look, I don't talk about COVID in the book, but there's a connection there.
- 9:50Many times during COVID, the right answer was we don't know.
- 9:53We don't know.
- 9:55Marty, think my 90 -year -old mother would most like to hear your insight on do eggs create heart attacks?
- 10:03Because she always serves everybody in the family eggs.
- 10:05obviously, there's been a demonization of eggs over time.
- 10:08Can you talk a little bit about what you found in terms of eggs and cholesterol?
- 10:13I love this topic.
- 10:15every family, there's some pro -egg member of the family, typically from a prior generation.
- 10:22And then there was this medical dogma that inserted itself starting about 50 years ago, that fat causes saturated fat, natural fats in food causes heart disease.
- 10:34It was dogma.
- 10:35It was based on a flawed study.
- 10:37I go through all the stuff in the book, Blindspots.
- 10:39Turns out they got it backwards.
- 10:41It's not the natural fats.
- 10:42It's the refined carbohydrates and other drivers of inflammation, ultra processed foods.
- 10:47And so it turns out that eggs are a great source of protein.
- 10:52which most Americans are deficient in protein.
- 10:55As long as you're not overeating with massive portions, which is a separate issue, it's a great source of food.
- 11:04And we don't talk about food as medicine enough, but it turns out that there's no evidence.
- 11:09They tried three different times in massive studies to prove that natural fat causes heart disease.
- 11:16All three giant studies did not prove it to be true.
- 11:20And yet, Again, humility.
- 11:22You did not see that lack, that humility to say, got this terribly wrong.
- 11:28mean, this is the number one health recommendation we as doctors put in front of patients, maybe second to smoking, not smoking, for the last 60 years.
- 11:39We got it wrong for about 60 years.
- 11:41And this is just to be clear, you're not just going after Paul Dudley White and Eisenhower and all that stuff.
- 11:46This is the recommendation that cholesterol, the dietary cholesterol.
- 11:50is kind of driving cardiac risk.
- 11:53And I think you point out that we don't absorb enough.
- 11:58There's a whole series of other things that create heart risk.
- 12:01It's just another endorsement of, I think you sort of underestimate, Marty, the insight that you're bringing to these really everyday health care issues.
- 12:12I mean, dietary cholesterol.
- 12:14is not even absorbed by the body.
- 12:17It's esterified, so it's too bulky to be absorbed.
- 12:20a very small proportion, 99 % of your cholesterol is made by your body, produced by your, not from dietary sources.
- 12:28So I still see low cholesterol foods out there.
- 12:31You still see low fat cookbooks put out by the American.
- 12:35massive industry.
- 12:36It's so big.
- 12:37And the medical establishment created this massive industry.
- 12:42And we created this low fat, high carbohydrate move over the last 60 years.
- 12:49So we have to do an honest reckoning, apologize and tell the public, we got this wrong.
- 12:57Opioids being non -addictive, we got it wrong.
- 13:00Penid avoidance, we got it wrong.
- 13:02Hormone replacement therapy causing breast cancer.
- 13:05I think on the opioids, you may have something to do with the Sacklers may have had something to do with.
- 13:11kind of creating, I don't think the opioids, think are pretty, that may have been shared a little bit by the research that was purloined by the folks who've been convicted on the issue who were pushing it.
- 13:25But maybe you could, so beyond apologies, Marty, what's the right way to start establishing, reestablishing trust?
- 13:34Because I do think, again, you don't go into COVID, that's obviously an open wound.
- 13:39But I think there's no question.
- 13:41We've had Dr.
- 13:42Peter Hotez on the show.
- 13:46trust is a big issue because it both is the foundation of how patients engage with the system.
- 13:54And without that, I worry that the important clinical impact of doctors is sort of lost.
- 14:01How do we rebuild that?
- 14:03Well, civil discourse.
- 14:06And I'm glad you had Dr.
- 14:07Hotez on.
- 14:08People should hear from multiple different medical points of view, but in the medical establishment right now, that is seen as, no, no, we cannot share multiple medical opinions with the public.
- 14:20They're too stupid to handle it.
- 14:22It could result in them following the wrong thing.
- 14:26Well, we don't know what the right thing is sometimes.
- 14:29Now, Peter Hotez and I have a different opinion.
- 14:32recently said that he thinks the Department of Homeland Security needs to get involved in fighting misinformation.
- 14:39I tend to think you fight bad ideas with more ideas, with good ideas.
- 14:44And if we're going to rebuild trust, I think it is inviting dissenting ideas to a civil discourse, just like you do on your podcast.
- 14:54It's avoiding intimidation, creating a culture where people feel comfortable speaking up.
- 15:00That's what I do as a surgeon in my operating room.
- 15:03I want every medical student and nurse tech to speak up if they see something that doesn't look right.
- 15:09And if I mock them or intimidate them after they say something, then I'm not creating a culture of a civil discourse.
- 15:17We need to recognize our biases.
- 15:19The father of modern medicine, Claude Bernard, said we all have our biases.
- 15:24We need to recognize them.
- 15:26It's an active process.
- 15:27And then temporarily suspend them.
- 15:30as we hear new ideas to try to be impeccably objective.
- 15:35If you remember, Obama said when he first ran for president, when asked, what's your favorite book?
- 15:40He said, Team of Rivals, because he believes in a group, a sort of robust discussion of different ideas that would spar.
- 15:49And that is the essence of science.
- 15:51We've lost it.
- 15:52We've sort of developed this cancel culture in medicine like the rest of society.
- 15:57I wonder if looking back at some of these historical blind spots, if some of it has to do with the fact that a negative, something that's scary will overwhelm positive ones.
- 16:08So if there's one study that says something is bad or scary, does that overwhelm, do you need some ratio three or four to one to cancel that out?
- 16:17Or is it just, hear one thing that's big and loud enough and bad enough that it actually just keeps you away from it in the first place?
- 16:25Well, I'm glad you raised that, David, because we live in a scary time, and that is if a study supports a foregone conclusion that somebody wants to believe, it's held up as the great scientific evidence.
- 16:38And if they don't like the results, they ignore it or downplay it or find some way to nitpick, which you can do with any study.
- 16:45And so we've lost this ability to critically appraise research based very objectively on the research methodology.
- 16:55So I'm concerned about that.
- 16:57Now, that's a skill set that we don't actively promote.
- 17:02But people need to understand when there's a study that shows that a multivitamin helps you live longer.
- 17:09Was it just an observational study where healthier people tended to take a multivitamin?
- 17:14That is the critical appraisal of research.
- 17:17That is what we're missing.
- 17:19Most of my frustration with COVID was that Almost all these controversies during COVID could have been resolved with randomized control trials that were run expeditiously on everything from how it spreads from surfaces to airborne.
- 17:33You know, there was a recommendation for teachers to wear goggles and gloves during COVID in the middle of the summer in July of 2020.
- 17:42Now, why did it take six months for us to realize, no, it's spread airborne?
- 17:47Those are studies that could have been done rapidly.
- 17:50And we've sort of lost this allegiance to the scientific process itself.
- 17:56Well, and I think one of the important points, Dr.
- 17:59Michael, is you're not suggesting that an idea is a bad idea.
- 18:04You're saying that all ideas need to run through a rapid fire, real clinical trial.
- 18:10And if the idea is wrong, you change it.
- 18:11But I am reminded of a wise man once told me that science tended to advance one funeral at a time, that arrogance in in fields is not uncommon.
- 18:23And I think in your book, you talk about Dr.
- 18:26Semmelweis, who's really revolutionary recommendation that just washing your hands when delivering babies would deliver more healthy babies.
- 18:39I believe the medical establishment so rejected that his recommendations that he ended up being mentally ill.
- 18:45mean, This has been a problem for hundreds of years.
- 18:49And I just welcome the fact that you're reminding science of how science can move forward through classic randomized control, the trial where you actually test every idea.
- 19:02think what embedded in your recommendations is that we have to do this a lot faster in order to be a lot smarter.
- 19:09Have you seen any examples where that's happened?
- 19:11It happens well.
- 19:13with pharmaceutical related products.
- 19:15So when there's a question, does a cancer drug help?
- 19:20We see the pharma industry rush to run their tests and they do it with all the might of modern day sophistication and financing.
- 19:30But when it comes to assessing whether or not cutting the frenulum under the tongue of babies actually helps or hurts a child.
- 19:40Now, this is a rampant practice that's taking off like crazy.
- 19:44I write about it in the book, Blindspots.
- 19:47It is a classic thing where no one knows the real answer.
- 19:51Now, many of us have a hypothesis that it has a net harm to children.
- 19:56But taking kids routinely, cutting the frenulum under their tongue with the argument that, it's going to help them with their sleep and latching and breastfeeding and maybe with their speech in the future and maybe prevent sleep apnea.
- 20:10It's dogma, we don't know.
- 20:12It needs a randomized controlled trial.
- 20:14Who's gonna fund that study?
- 20:16Pharma?
- 20:17No, no way.
- 20:19The American Academy of Pediatrics?
- 20:21I don't think so.
- 20:22NIH?
- 20:24Not in one of their siloed organ system centers.
- 20:30And so this is the Bermuda Triangle of research.
- 20:33Practices take off like wildfire that desperately need scientific study.
- 20:38They desperately need a randomized trial and we don't have the infrastructure to do that.
- 20:44That's why we have to look at where our tax dollars are going.
- 20:48The NIH is sort of latched onto these old guard ideas and they're ignoring the microbiome.
- 20:56Now they actually have a tiny microbiome center.
- 20:59The microbiome is the lining of the gut with millions of different bacteria that's involved in digestion and the immune system and mental health.
- 21:08some of the bacteria produce serotonin.
- 21:10What we're learning about antibiotics and the microbiome is revolutionizing medicine.
- 21:16We may even have some clues as to what's causing cancer.
- 21:19If you've seen cancers increasing in young people, colon cancer in particular, there are incredible new studies that are telling us, hey, alert, here's a signal in the data.
- 21:30Look at this.
- 21:31This is unbelievable.
- 21:32We've had no progress in addressing learning disabilities and Celiac disease.
- 21:38And we may have an underlying unifying theory here with the microbiome, but there's no department of the microbiome.
- 21:45There's no microbiome center at the NIH.
- 21:48There's no journal.
- 21:49What specialty is the microbiome?
- 21:51Infectious diseases, GI, primary care?
- 21:54It doesn't have a specialty.
- 21:56And this is the broader story in healthcare.
- 21:58We've got to pursue what matters to patients, not what matters to our NIH funding centers.
- 22:05So Marty, maybe one of the advantages of the calling for the grand unifying theory on the microbiome is gut.
- 22:12So maybe that'll be some of the branding for that.
- 22:15When you look ahead at some of the blind spots, it's interesting to look back and see where the blind spots have been and what have we learned from them.
- 22:23I would argue that some of these are maybe slowly being changed now, being addressed, the peanut allergies, the HRT, silicone implants you mentioned in the book as well, fats and cholesterol.
- 22:32Looking ahead, some of the ones you cite have some of the same characteristics, but also maybe relate to social movements or political side.
- 22:41And I'm thinking about in particular, cannabis and gender affirming care for children, are a couple that you talk about.
- 22:49I wonder what your perspective is.
- 22:51Are they just new blind spots that are very similar to what we had in the past?
- 22:54Is there something different?
- 22:55And what does that mean in terms of what you do about it?
- 22:58So the modern day application of all of these lessons of modern medicine where I go through the blind spots of the last 20 years or so of medical recommendations from the establishment, including many that are still out there today that are wrong.
- 23:14And I write about them so people can know the truth.
- 23:17It does beg the question, if we got all of these things wrong in the last 20 years, what are we doing right now that may not be correct or in the best interest of patients?
- 23:26And I get concerned when I see a community and medical community, a specialist community, an activist community in the general population speak about a scientific question with such absolutism when the reality is it's never been properly studied.
- 23:43So if we are truly objective and if we're true scientists, are we open to what a future study might tell us about marijuana, for example?
- 23:55The marijuana of today is not the marijuana of hippies 50 years ago.
- 24:00It's 10 to 20 times more potent.
- 24:02And it appears to have a different effect on an adolescent developing mind than it does on an older adult.
- 24:10So are we open to these nuances?
- 24:12Are we open to results that may show our deeply held assumptions were wrong?
- 24:18Or are we absolutely certain marijuana is totally safe and we're closed to the scientific process?
- 24:25Marty, maybe we could tie it back to how does a patient approach medicine?
- 24:31You identified the blind spots.
- 24:33We've talked a little bit about what the NIH should do.
- 24:37OK, you're a patient, and you've got some members of your family that are healthy and those that are chronically ill.
- 24:46How should a patient start to think about navigating health care?
- 24:50without sort of a specialist's view.
- 24:52What is your recommendation to your neighbors and your friends?
- 24:55Well, I find that people who love their doctors often love their doctors because their doctors are reasonable.
- 25:03They show humility.
- 25:05They know their limits.
- 25:06When I see a surgical trainee come through our residency at Johns Hopkins and get so frustrated by how they are placing a stitch and it's not the perfect way they want to place it, I tell them, look.
- 25:19What's gonna define you as a great doctor is learning from your own actions, listening to the patients and knowing your limits, knowing when to call for help.
- 25:30It's not, you know, I put in 76 stitches, I could have done it with 75.
- 25:37It is understanding your limits and the humility of being honest with patients.
- 25:43People are very forgiving with the medical establishment and their doctors.
- 25:48If they're being...
- 25:50talk to in an honest way.
- 25:52So I don't want people to be cynical about physicians.
- 25:55Most rank -and -file physicians are thinking independently.
- 25:58But we're living in a new era now where organized medicine with a small oligarchy at the top are making centralized decisions.
- 26:07And they're out of touch sometimes with everyday folks and docs.
- 26:11And so I encourage people to Look for doctors that they connect with, the doctors that listen to them and demonstrate humility, who will say, don't know, and they don't know, who will have conversations, who will spend time with them.
- 26:24This is what the new generation of medical students and residents want to do.
- 26:28They want to spend time with people.
- 26:30They don't want to be billing and coding on some hamster wheel their whole lives.
- 26:35so that's what I encourage.
- 26:37And then there are certain truths from the scientific literature people should know.
- 26:42Antibiotics are not totally safe, the dogma that, you might as well just take an antibiotic.
- 26:48probably won't help, but it won't hurt.
- 26:50Well, let me show you some incredible data.
- 26:53Now, antibiotics and C -sections save lives.
- 26:57Absolutely.
- 26:57But they're massively overused.
- 26:59And sometimes you got to take an issue straight to the public and say, here's some health information that's good for everyone to know.
- 27:07Well, that's it for yet another episode of Care Talk.
- 27:10We've been speaking today with Dr.
- 27:12Marty McCurry.
- 27:12He's author of Blind Spots, which is a deep dive into the human tendency to resist new ideas and a guide to improving objectivity.
- 27:20I'm David Williams, president of Health Business Group.
- 27:23And I'm John Driscoll, senior advisor at Walgreens.
- 27:25If you like what you heard or you didn't, we'd love it if you'd subscribe on your favorite service.
- 27:29And thank you so much, Marty.
- 27:31Great to be with you guys.
- 27:32Enjoyed it.
- 27:32Thanks.