Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan with this week's interview with Dr. Marty McCary.He is a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and New York Times bestselling author.
His latest book has been on the Times bestseller list for five weeks.It's called, Blind Spots, When Medicine Gets It Wrong and What It Means for Our Health.I have to tell you, I've been reading it.If I had hair, it would be standing on end.
It's a really fascinating book and it's, you know, one of the things that's exciting about it is it really digs into some of the things that are wrong with the medical profession without being an act of crack pottery.
In fact, it's the exact opposite of that.Dr. McCary, Marty, it's really nice of you to come on.I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me, Andrew.Great to be with you.
Well, you know, I want to get started with a big picture for a minute because you start out in the book telling certain detailed stories, but everything I'm hearing, I hear a lot online about big pharma and the corruption at the CDC and all the medical profession is corrupt.
Obviously, RFK is telling us that every vaccine that's ever made has been a
You know a terrible thing and I don't know I grew up with a lot more trust in medicine than that And it still seems to me that I take a lot of pills that have been very helpful to me over the years So give me if you can a sort of big picture of what the ordinary human being Going to his doctor should be looking for and hearing about medicine on in the news should be looking for
Well, first of all, I grew up with that same deep respect for this ancient craft of medicine.My dad was a doctor and practiced in a way that people in the community loved him, they trusted him.
And so I love it that we can practice this incredible profession with a sense of impartiality where people will trust us to put a knife to their skin or tell us secrets they've never told their spouse just because you're the doctor within a minute of meeting you.
That's an incredible tradition and so I'm proud of it.But the devil in American healthcare is not any one stakeholder group, as we're often told.
There's a blame game going around, and the reality is that everybody's getting rich, the system is expanding, and no one's talking about the root causes of all these chronic diseases that are going up.
No one's talking about the most powerful and dangerous force in medicine, which is group a psychology by which people just surrender to the conventional thinking without thinking independently.And that became epidemic during COVID.
We saw the danger of groupthink, of silencing civil discourse, even censoring doctors.And as a result, in our latest medical journal, in a study that just came out, trust in doctors and hospitals plummeted from 71% just before the pandemic to 40%.
That's a 31 point drop. People are hungry for humility, for honesty, and for civil discourse in medicine.
What do you think is the cause of that, though?I mean, I was just shocked during COVID.
Very, very talented, obviously, and intelligent doctors like Jay Bhattacharya, Stanford, I believe, came out with these incredibly sensible ideas about who should be isolated, who should be protected, and who shouldn't.
I know Jay and he told me stories of how he was hounded, his family was hounded, his career was threatened until he almost was ready to give up.When did that get started and where is that coming from?
Well, now we are seeing this incredible pride of the medical oligarchs.We've always had a priesthood, but never before have we had a few doctors at the top with so much centralized power.
And they just didn't like it when people would point out differences of opinions or even things that were true, but embarrassing, like the fact that the United States government was funding the Wuhan lab.
No one suggested that our dollars actually went to buy the test tubes that resulted in this virus leak, but it's embarrassing.Why weren't we funding research on school lunch programs or basic cooking?
instructions for patients with diabetes, basic things that address our chronic disease epidemic, we saw where the money was going.
And when people were pointing out things that were not false, but they were just a little embarrassing, natural immunity, the damage of putting cloth masks on toddlers for three years, Jay and many of us spoke to where blue in the face to say, look, we need an honest discussion
But it was, I think, the pride and hubris of the medical establishment that prevented these sensible opinions from being out there, even though they've been vindicated now with data.The data has caught up with public health officials.
We've heard no apologies.And it's not just COVID.We got the opioid epidemic.It was basically ignited by a dogma that opioids were not addictive for 22 years.The food pyramid, we got it wrong for 70 years.We still get it wrong.
Antibiotics won't hurt you.We got that wrong for 50 years.Separating babies from their mothers at birth, we got that wrong for about 50 to 60 years.
You don't see the humility that people are hungry for where people say, we got this wrong, we feel terrible, this is what people should know, and this is what's based on science.
The most dangerous thing you can do in the medical profession is to issue a strong recommendation with such absolutism and suggest that it's based on science when it's not.
We're seeing that now with transgenderism, you're seeing that with so many areas, you are not allowed to question their sacred cow topics.And I think it's a very dangerous thing.
You tell a story, you open the book actually with a story about peanut allergies was something which has always kind of haunted me.I grew up, I never saw a peanut allergy when I was a kid.
And now you just hear, they ask you in restaurants whether you have one and talk about how that came to pass.What is that?Is it real?Where did it come from?
Well, peanut allergies were very rare and they were mild when people had them.
But then the modern day peanut allergy epidemic in the United States was ignited in the year 2000 by the American Academy of Pediatrics, insisting that moms should avoid all peanut butter for children until they turn age three.No peanut products.
They thought peanut abstinence would prevent peanut allergies from developing.They got it backwards. peanut abstinence resulted in immune sensitivities that resulted in peanut allergies.So they got it backwards.
They ignored a basic principle in immunology called immune tolerance, or what people know as the dirt theory.And so you saw this rapid increase in peanut allergies after this dogma was put out there.
And by the way, this dogma has been dominant for most of the last 25 years. nine years ago where the official study was published proving it wrong, proving that it created peanut allergies, it didn't prevent it.
And again, you did not see a reckoning or an apology, you just saw sort of a quiet statement put out.But they don't have peanut allergies in Africa, in many parts of the world that did not adopt this dogma that young kids should avoid peanut butter.
That's amazing. You mentioned antibiotics.We're talking about Marty McCary's book, Blind Spots, when medicine gets it wrong and what it means for our health.It's been on the bestseller list for weeks.
You talk about antibiotics and there's all kinds of medications that come out.I mean, I've used antibiotics to great effect at times.It seems to me these are miracle drugs sometimes.Statins seem to me to be things that have
kept people from getting heart attacks.And yet, everything you take, everything you put in your body has other effects.What are some of the things that people should be thinking about when they are prescribed pills?
Well, one of the biggest blind spots of modern medicine is the microbiome.That is, the millions of different bacteria that normally reside in the gut.They line the GI tract.And they're not just sitting there.They're busy.
They are involved in absorption and digestion. They train the immune system.They make most of your body's serotonin involved in mood and mental health.They conjugate estrogen.They even make a little bit of ozempic at low levels naturally.
They make GLP-1.And we've ignored the microbiome in modern medicine.Now, antibiotics save lives.As you pointed out, I've seen it.But they're also massively overused.60% in most studies are unnecessary.
I think it's more like 80% from my clinical experience. And what are these antibiotics doing?They're carpet bombing the microbiome, the lining of the GI tract with all these different bacteria that normally live in a balance.
And so we alter the microbiome, it alters gut health, and it has been associated now with obesity and learning disabilities and asthma and celiac.
They've compared at the Mayo Clinic kids who took antibiotics in the first few years versus kids who did not. And in that matched study of 14,000 kids, they found a strong association with many of these chronic diseases that are going up.
And researchers that I talked to in this field actually believe autism is caused by alterations of the microbiome in the modern world.It's not just from antibiotics, it's from ultra processed foods, pesticides.Pesticides kill insects.
Well, what do we think they do to the bacterial lining of our GI tract?They are also contributing to altering that gut health.And final point is, we've assumed fluoride is good for us because it kills bacteria on teeth and slightly reduces cavities.
Well, if it's killing the bacteria on our teeth, what's it doing to the microbiome every single day when we drink fluoridated water? So we've got to challenge deeply held assumptions.That's always been a part of medicine.
Unfortunately, people don't like it sometimes, but there are a lot of medical dogmas that are not based on science, they're based on assumptions.They need to be challenged.
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So we do feel over time, right, that people live longer, they live healthier lives.I mean, when you look at, I mean, I've watched movies where guys who are supposed to be 50 come on and they look like a 70, 80 year old today.
So we're doing something right, right?I mean, there's some kind of progress that we're making.What is the difference between the progress and the problem?
Well, I think the progress is that for people who have, good access to care and who have become educated about health.
We can postpone, delay, or even avert many of these chronic conditions that were associated with frailty and aging, and people can feel great and live long.
But the other flip side is that we are watching a whole host of chronic diseases taking over our nation's children.We've converted a population of children in the United States to a generation of patients.20% of kids are now on medications.
Obesity and diabetes now affects half of our nation's children.Half of our nation's children are either overweight, obese, or pre-diabetic, that is.Two-thirds of adults are dealing with diabetes or pre-diabetes or are overweight.
Autoimmune diseases are skyrocketing.These are diseases increasing in our lifetime that cannot be because of genetics. It's now one in five women are affected by autoimmune diseases.Infertility is going up.
Sperm counts have gone down 50% in the last five decades.What's going on here?No one is willing to talk about the root causes, that is the food supply, what we are doing to the microbiome, how we're changing gut health.
And because it doesn't fit our billing and coding model in healthcare, where people come in and we see them in short visits, bill and code, send a bill, We collect the money.I think we've done a terrible thing in healthcare.
We've taken doctors who are bright and creative and we have not given them the time or resources to deal with the root causes of so many of these chronic diseases that are skyrocketing right in front of our eyes.
And we can't keep going down this path.We have the sickest population and the most medicated population in the history of the world.The answer is not more medications.You know, you'll hear politicians say, well, we gave
Medicare the power to negotiate drug prices.Okay, great.Congratulations.We're talking about tiny things in the periphery.These are shiny objects.These are not really addressing the health of the population.
The best way to lower drug costs in America is to stop taking drugs we don't need.
So much in here that I want to ask about.You talked about autism.Now, autism, there is famously this idea that vaccines cause autism.That's a fairly sweeping statement, and the people who sell vaccines say there's absolutely no connection.RFK Jr.
has made a crusade.I mean, basically, he has no good word for any vaccine.How do ordinary people, how do patients think about vaccines?
Well, vaccines save lives.There are vaccine-preventable diseases people need to respect because we live in an era where we don't see them because of vaccinations.
But at the same time, it is okay to question one or two vaccines or the timing of those vaccines.For example, I believe in many of the vaccines that are recommended, but do we need to be giving the hepatitis B shot at birth?
Hepatitis B is contracted from IV drug use and from sexual activity.Do we need to be giving it to newborn babies?Right, these are the sacred cow topics you're like not allowed to ask in medicine.
It's nuts that you're not allowed to ask them though.I mean, is there a connection between vaccines and autism and where is that a complete nonsense?
So there was a fraudulent study that was clearly shown to be fraud.And that study is what really generated a lot of momentum around this. You know, I always try to think of what truth is there in the people I disagree with.
And I think there is a shred of truth, and that is there are some environmental exposures.It may be showing up in our food.It may be something that alters the microbiome that then results in the increase of autism.
But you don't see these high rates of severe autism.
you know, when kids can't talk by the age of four or five, for example, in Amish communities where they're still living off of good soil and they are not exposed to some of these chemicals and ultra processed foods, much of the baby formula, the infant formula is loaded with some chemicals called seed oils that sound natural, but they're not.
They're denatured and they have a chemical solvent
And so when you see something that does not appear in nature, common in the food supply, I think it's worthy to say, let's do some proper research to see if there's an association, because we do have increasing rates of autism in the United States that don't make sense.
Some of it is the medicalization of ordinary life, let's be honest, and some of it is real.But one in 22 kids in California born today will be diagnosed with autism.We've got to stop and ask, are there some exposures?
Is it something in the food supply?Is it any one of the thousand chemicals that appear in our food system today that might be implicated?
You know, you've mentioned the food supply several times, and obviously this is another thing that has become a kind of politicized subject.
Recently, my son and I were in two different places in Europe at the same time, and we both came back and without speaking to one another, instantly said the same thing to one another, which was that we ate like animals.
We just like ate and ate and ate, and we came back and we had lost weight.And that was, and we thought like, if I had eaten like that at home, I would have ballooned up like 30 pounds. Is our food supply something wrong with the American food supply?
Look, I think food manufacturers in the United States, that is big food, big ag, they did what we asked them to do coming out of the World War II era.We asked them to address food insecurity and starvation and to mass produce foods.
We had a dogma that the only bad thing was natural fat.Turns out that was not true. And so as long as they avoided natural fat, it didn't matter how you got your calories.
And so they basically started producing ultra-processed foods, engineered highly addictive chemicals added to the foods, and really packed in the sugar in the form of things like high fructose corn syrup.
Well, that had some unintended consequences, and we're seeing it now today.60 to 70% of the calories the average American child gets now is through ultra-processed foods,
And so it's no wonder that people are coming in with inflammatory bowel disease conditions, irritable bowel, alterations to microbiome from bacterial overgrowth we don't fully appreciate and we underdiagnose.
We don't know what to do with these patients.And every now and then, somebody will come back from Italy and say, you know, for the first time in my life, I felt great living in Italy for the summer.
And that's what you're talking about, getting back to whole foods. I mean, these are almost biblical principles, whole foods, clean meats, fasting, meditation.
The medical field feels like they are discovering these things for the first time every now and then in some study.
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We're talking to Dr. Marty Makary about his bestselling new book, Blind Spots, when medicine gets it wrong and what it means for our health.
And I'm serious that it is the absolute opposite of crack pottery, which is almost what we hear all the time about medicine.And it's much more expert and targeted than that.
Let's talk about this idea of big pharma, because this is another thing that's easy to throw these phrases around.
You know, I kind of like an industry that produces medicines that keep people alive and solve problems that have never been solved before, so I'm kind of in favor of pharma, but there is such a thing as big pharma.
When you see something like Ozempic, you mentioned that before, it comes out and all of a sudden it's everywhere.And I walk down the streets in Manhattan and women are shaped differently than they used to be.It's a really strange, strange thing.
I mean, I feel a little bit of reluctance on that.It seems to me that there must be, I hope this has been thought through, and I doubt that it has.
Is there such a thing as big pharma in the sense that a group of people who want to sell you pills, whether they've been tested or not, whether they're good or not?I guess that's my first question.Let me start there.
Is there such a thing as that kind of big pharma?
tend to see the best in everybody.And I think we've got good people working in a bad system.
At Pharma, they're doing what they're supposed to be doing, and that is developing medications that have a market and generating revenue for their shareholders.
I think, though, we need to keep it in check and just make sure it doesn't dominate our research enterprise in the United States, because the NIH appears to be asleep at the wheel when it comes to many important health topics.
Are they spending their money studying and many of these chemicals that appear in food.No, their study, where did they spend their money?What we learned during COVID, they were sending money to Wuhan, China to study bat coronaviruses.
Maybe we need to talk about school lunch programs, not just putting every overweight child on Ozempic.And maybe we need to talk about treating diabetes with cooking classes and a coach and a helper to help them manage the chronic disease.
The hard part of chronic disease is not telling people what to do, it's helping them do it.Maybe we need to talk about environmental exposures that cause cancer, not the chemo to treat it.And so I think we get very myopic in medicine.
You saw this during COVID.And I didn't write much about COVID in the book.I just felt like it's too tribal and people are sick of it.But you had this myopic single intervention solution
where it was only vaccinate and if it didn't work, keep vaccinating.They only discussed one intervention.
It's not to say there wasn't value to the vaccine in high-risk individuals, but no one talked about obesity, the number one modifiable risk factor of COVID mortality.And I think it's a little snapshot of what's going on in our medical establishment.
People just tend to get tunnel vision and the group think, becomes a herd mentality and sometimes a mob mentality that doesn't want to hear a different approach to the same problem we've been hammering at for years.
You know, when you talk about obesity, which is obviously a huge problem, and there's this body positivity movement that is selling obesity as healthy.I mean, they put this on the cover of magazines, obesity is healthy. and it's obviously a killer.
On the other hand, I do understand that it's a hard, food is a hard addiction to break because you can't go cold turkey on it, and so it makes it tough to get off.When something like ozempic comes along, what is your response as a doctor?
Do you think like, okay, this has a use, but it's being overused, or it can't possibly be overused, they should have as much of it as possible?What is your first reaction to that?
Well, I think in the modern world, in the echo chambers of social media and cable news.People want to take a pro or against view on everything and dig into that position, even if new information comes out.
That's not the way we should be doing medical science.Ozempic is GLP-1, which is a molecule that is normally in the body.So by increasing this hormone in one's body, they get the benefits of feeling full, slowing down GI motility,
and that can help with reducing excess body fat.By the same token, you've gotta change your lifestyle or you're gonna be on it for life and there are side effects of being on it for life.
I have yet to hear of someone who's used Ozempic to bridge their weight loss, then gets off Ozempic, switches their lifestyle, starts eating healthy food and exercising and stays thin.I've not seen that.Instead what I've seen is simply
put it in the water supply or demonize it by exaggerating the complications.I think it's neither.Okay.
Yeah.I mean, cause I feel the same way about antidepressants.I mean, exactly the same way.
I think a lot of people get on the antidepressants, but they don't get rid of the, you know, you can, you can literally go to a psychiatrist and say, my wife left me and I'm sad and he will drug you.
And I think that that is, you know, that's, I think that's criminal.You know what I mean?People do have emotions and things that go wrong.
And I worry with Ozempic that people will not, it teaches people not to have the discipline that they're going to need.So what are the systemic adjustments?You're talking in very big terms about a very big problem, a kind of profession-wide problem.
If you had to list, make a list of systemic adjustments, I know you're not running for office, but still, if you had to make a list of systemic adjustments, what would they be?
Well, number one, a bunch of us as physicians, with credentials are going directly to the public to try to educate people about health, the types of foods to eat, the decisions, the exercise programs.
There's a bunch of us now, Casey Means, Peter Atiyah, Mark Hyman.And so that's step one, educate the public to dispel the misinformation that has been put out on health.
And you know who the number one propagator of misinformation has been over the last 60 years?It's been the United States government, the food pyramid.
ignoring the giant blind spots of the poison food supply and seed oils, microplastics, heavy metals, ultra processed foods that include addictive food chemicals.No one talks about it.I got zero education on it in med school.It's a real thing.
Number two, I would say we need to address corruption in our government health agencies.They take millions of dollars from each of these giant stakeholder groups that they're supposed to regulate.
There are conflicts of interest in committees that say, write the food pyramid, nutrition guidelines, 90 plus percent of them are being paid by the food industry.So we can address corporate corruption in government.
And finally, we've got to change what we fund research on.We need to start studying the root causes of these chronic diseases, not just the medications and the surgery operations to treat them.Take for example, atrazine.It is a weed killer.
It shows up almost in everything in trace amounts.It's in corn and soybean and everything that's a staple of the American diet.Well, atrazine, the chemical atrazine is a hormone disruptor. that can convert a female tadpole to a male tadpole.
I mean, it is a powerful chemical.And we don't study it.Who's interested in studying that?Is pharma gonna study it?No.Is the NIH studying it?No, they're too busy studying bat coronaviruses or some other stuff.
These are like central issues in health that we have to study when the age of puberty is going down every year. and sperm counts are going down and infertility rates are going way up.
We have got to look in our blind spots and see what should we be doing differently.
Okay, those are good systemic, that was a good answer to my question.And my next question, probably my last, is what about the ordinary person?
You go to your doctor, you trust your doctor, you like your doctor, he knows your body, he knows your history. What are the kinds of questions you should be asking?
What should you be thinking about if you don't want to be a fanatic, but you want to stay healthy?
Yeah, first of all, most rank and file doctors in America are amazing people who are trying their best.And my beef is not with them.
My beef is with a small group of medical leaders at the top who issue broad and bold recommendations with no scientific support.That's when we get into big trouble in medicine.So when it comes to emergencies, do whatever the doctor tells you.
But when it comes to chronic diseases and other ways that you can approach a chronic disease, ask around, get a second opinion, read up on things from respected physicians, from respected institutions like the ones I named.
I don't think many doctors even know that you can successfully treat rosacea, a skin rash, by changing what one eats or even reduce the risk of acne
or cure diabetes when it comes to type 2 diabetes, 90% of the time it can be cured with a radical change in what one eats.
But when we have a system where we are seeing patients in short visits and we're being measured by our throughput, you don't have time to get into all the details of how you actually prevent heartburn.
Instead, it's much easier to prescribe the heartburn medication and that's why it's good for the public to be educated.And when it comes to heart disease prevention, most of what we've heard is wrong.
Tiptoeing around cholesterol in your diet is a great paradox since the cholesterol in our body is made by our body.It doesn't come from our dietary sources.
We tend to order HDL and LDL, but you really wanna get a lipoprotein A test and an APOB test, all tests that I explain in the book, But most of what we've heard of heart disease prevention in terms of just avoid natural fat really is not held up.
And unfortunately, these dogmas still loom large today in American society.
The author is Dr. Marty Makary, M-A-K-A-R-Y.The book is Blind Spots When Medicine Gets It Wrong and What It Means for Our Health.
Marty, I don't know if you've ever been called refreshingly sane before, but I find this conversation refreshingly sane and very interesting.Thank you for coming on.I hope you will come back and talk to me again.Great to be with you, Andrew.
Thanks so much.Thanks a lot. Well, that was really interesting.And just as I say, refreshingly saying, nice to hear somebody talking in grays and complexities instead of screaming and yelling about conspiracies.
If you want to hear screaming and yelling about conspiracies, though, you can come to The Andrew Klavan Show on Friday.I'll be there.I hope you will be there too.
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