From Heartland Daily News

Medicine has a huge “blind spot” that has led to an explosion of childhood obesity, diabetes, autism, peanut allergies, and autoimmune diseases in the United States, says Martin Makary, M.D., author of the bestselling book Blind Spots.

“We have the sickest population in the history of the world … right here in the United States, despite spending double what other wealthy countries spend on health care,” said Makary during a September 20 presentation at the Cato Institute, titled “Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health.” Also on the panel were Cato scholars Jeffrey A. Singer, M.D., and David A. Hyman, M.D.

Makary became well-known during the COVID-19 lockdowns as one of a small group of prominent physicians who publicly questioned the government’s response to the virus. Makary is a professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins Medicine, where he researches the underlying causes of disease and has written numerous scientific articles and two other bestselling books.

Chronic-Disease Epidemics

Makary said the rates of some diseases have reached epidemic proportions. Half of all children in the United States are obese or overweight, with 20 percent now diabetic or prediabetic. The rate of children being diagnosed with autism is up 14 percent every year for the last 23 years, one in five U.S. women have been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, and gastrointestinal cancers have doubled in the last two decades.

“We have got to ask the big questions,” said Makary said in his remarks. “We have developed blind spots not because we’re bad people but because the system has a groupthink, a herd mentality.”

Health care has become assembly-line medicine, with health professionals pressured to focus more on productivity and billing output than on improving overall health, says Makary.

“We need to look at gut health, the microbiome, our poisoned food supply; maybe we need to look at environmental exposures that cause cancer, not just the chemo to treat it; maybe treat diabetes with cooking classes instead of throwing meds at people; maybe we need to treat high blood pressure by talking about sleep quality,” said Makary.

Sticky Theories

Hyman says cognitive dissonance can cause blind spots, highlighting an example of a surgeon initially resistant to trying less-invasive antibiotics before surgically removing an appendix, as recounted in Makary’s book.

“Easy problems are already fixed, so how do we fix this hard problem?” said Hyman at the presentation, pointing out unjustified medical opinions can persist for decades.

Such opinions include the ideas that “opioids are not addictive, or antibiotics won’t hurt you, or hormone therapy causes breast cancer even though the data never supported it, the dogma of the food pyramid,” said Makary.

“We love to hold on to old ideas not because they’re better or more logical or [more] scientifically supported than new information, but just because we heard it first,” said Makary. “And it gets comfortable. It will nest in the brain, and subconsciously we will defend it.”

Peanut Allergy Mixup

Singer asked Makary about the peanut allergy dogma the American Academy of Pediatrics pushed in 2000, recommending children not eat peanuts before the age of three. It turned out to be wrong, said Singer.

“We have peanut allergies in the U.S. at epidemic proportions, [yet] they don’t have them in Africa and parts of Europe and Asia,” said Makary. The United States “got it perfectly backward,” said Makary. “Peanut abstinence results in a sensitization at the immune-system level.”

An early introduction of peanuts reduces the incidence of people identified with peanut allergies at a rate of 86 percent, Makary told the audience.

Makary said he confronted those who argued for peanut abstinence, noting there were no studies to back up the recommendation. They replied that they felt compelled to weigh in because the public wanted something done, said Makary.

‘Demonized’ HRT

The recommendation against hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for older women because of breast cancer risk is another example of misguided groupthink, Makary told the audience.

“It is probably the biggest screw-up in modern medicine,” said Makary.

“HRT replaces estrogen when the body stops producing it,” said Makary. “Women who start it within 10 years after the onset of menopause live on average three and a half years longer, have healthier blood vessels, they will have 50 to 60 percent less cognitive decline, the risk of Alzheimer’s goes down by 35 percent. Women feel better and live longer. The rate of heart attacks goes down by half. And their bones are stronger. There is probably no medication that has a greater impact on health outcomes in populations than hormone therapy.”

A demonization campaign against HRT began 22 years ago when a single scientist at the National Institutes of Health held a press conference saying HRT was linked to breast cancer, Makary told the audience.

“The incredible back story is that no data were released at that announcement,” said Makary. “And today there is no statistically significant increase [of breast cancer].”

Political Challenges

Among the broad range of topics in the 75-minute discussion, the panelists considered how medical groupthink affects government policy.

“Agencies make decisions in the shadows of how [they think] Congress will react,” said Hyman. “Congress can make your life really miserable if you’re a federal regulator. They can cut your budget, call you in, and yell at you because you haven’t taken aggressive steps to protect the American public.”

Makary said doctors must avoid making recommendations based on “gut feelings.”

“We spend a staggering amount of money on delivering health care, and very little money on what actually works,” said Hyman.

AnneMarie Schieber ([email protected]) is the managing editor of Health Care News.

From the Brownstone Institute

By Bruce W. Davidson 

The excessive medical response to the Covid pandemic made one thing abundantly clear: Medical consumers really ought to do their own research into the health issues that impact them. Furthermore, it is no longer enough simply to seek out a “second opinion” or even a “third opinion” from doctors. They may well all be misinformed or biased. Furthermore, this problem appears to predate the Covid phenomenon.

A striking example of that can be found in the recent history of prostate cancer testing and treatment, which, for personal reasons, has become a subject of interest to me. In many ways, it strongly resembles the Covid calamity, where misuse of the PCR test resulted in harming the supposedly Covid-infected with destructive treatments.

Two excellent books on the subject illuminate the issues involved in prostate cancer. One is Invasion of the Prostate Snatchers by Dr. Mark Scholz and Ralph Blum. Dr. Scholtz is executive director of the Prostate Cancer Research Institute in California. The other is The Great Prostate Hoax by Richard Ablin and Ronald Piana. Richard Ablin is a pathologist who invented the PSA test but has become a vociferous critic of its widespread use as a diagnostic tool for prostate cancer.

Mandatory yearly PSA testing at many institutions opened up a gold mine for urologists, who were able to perform lucrative biopsies and prostatectomies on patients who had PSA test numbers above a certain level. However, Ablin has insisted that “routine PSA screening does far more harm to men than good.” Moreover, he maintains that the medical people involved in prostate screening and treatment represent “a self-perpetuating industry that has maimed millions of American men.”

Even during approval hearings for the PSA test, the FDA was well aware of the problems and dangers. For one thing, the test has a 78% false positive rate. An elevated PSA level can be caused by various factors besides cancer, so it is not really a test for prostate cancer. Moreover, a PSA test score can spur frightened men into getting unnecessary biopsies and harmful surgical procedures.

One person who understood the potential dangers of the test well was the chairman of the FDA’s committee, Dr. Harold Markovitz, who decided whether to approve it. He declared, “I’m afraid of this test. If it is approved, it comes out with the imprimatur of the committee…as pointed out, you can’t wash your hands of guilt. . .all this does is threaten a whole lot of men with prostate biopsy…it’s dangerous.”

In the end, the committee did not give unqualified approval to the PSA test but only approved it “with conditions.” However, subsequently, the conditions were ignored.

Nevertheless, the PSA test became celebrated as the route to salvation from prostate cancer. The Postal Service even circulated a stamp promoting yearly PSA tests in 1999. Quite a few people became wealthy and well-known at the Hybritech company, thanks to the Tandem-R PSA test, their most lucrative product.

In those days, the corrupting influence of the pharmaceutical companies on the medical device and drug approval process was already apparent. In an editorial for the Journal of the American Medical Association (quoted in Albin and Piana’s book), Dr. Marcia Angell wrote, “The pharmaceutical industry has gained unprecedented control over the evaluation of its products…there’s mounting evidence that they skew the research they sponsor to make their drugs look better and safer.” She also authored the book The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It.

A cancer diagnosis often causes great anxiety, but in actuality, prostate cancer develops very slowly compared to other cancers and does not often pose an imminent threat to life. A chart featured in Scholz and Blum’s book compares the average length of life of people whose cancer returns after surgery. In the case of colon cancer, they live on average two more years, but prostate cancer patients live another 18.5 years.

In the overwhelming majority of cases, prostate cancer patients do not die from it but rather from something else, whether they are treated for it or not. In a 2023 article about this issue titled “To Treat or Not to Treat,” the author reports the results of a 15-year study of prostate cancer patients in the New England Journal of Medicine. Only 3% of the men in the study died of prostate cancer, and getting radiation or surgery for it did not seem to offer much statistical benefit over “active surveillance.”

Dr. Scholz confirms this, writing that “studies indicate that these treatments [radiation and surgery] reduce mortality in men with Low and Intermediate-Risk disease by only 1% to 2% and by less than 10% in men with High-Risk disease.”

Nowadays prostate surgery is a dangerous treatment choice, but it is still widely recommended by doctors, especially in Japan. Sadly, it also seems to be unnecessary. One study cited in Ablin and Piana’s book concluded that “PSA mass screening resulted in a huge increase in the number of radical prostatectomies. There is little evidence for improved survival outcomes in the recent years…”

However, a number of urologists urge their patients not to wait to get prostate surgery, threatening them with imminent death if they do not. Ralph Blum, a prostate cancer patient, was told by one urologist, “Without surgery you’ll be dead in two years.” Many will recall that similar death threats were also a common feature of Covid mRNA-injection promotion.

Weighing against prostate surgery are various risks, including death and long-term impairment, since it is a very difficult procedure, even with newer robotic technology. According to Dr. Scholz, about 1 in 600 prostate surgeries result in the death of the patient. Much higher percentages suffer from incontinence (15% to 20%) and impotence after surgery. The psychological impact of these side effects is not a minor problem for many men.

In light of the significant risks and little proven benefit of treatment, Dr. Scholz censures “the urology world’s persistent overtreatment mindset.” Clearly, excessive PSA screening led to inflicting unnecessary suffering on many men. More recently, the Covid phenomenon has been an even more dramatic case of medical overkill.

Ablin and Piana’s book makes an observation that also sheds a harsh light on the Covid medical response: “Isn’t cutting edge innovation that brings new medical technology to the market a good thing for health-care consumers? The answer is yes, but only if new technologies entering the market have proven benefit over the ones they replace.”

That last point especially applies to Japan right now, where people are being urged to receive the next-generation mRNA innovation–the self-amplifying mRNA Covid vaccine. Thankfully, a number seem to be resisting this time.