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 Heartland Daily News

Despite dropping out of the race for president in August, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is turning up the volume on reforming national health care and drug policy and attracting attention to what role he might play in an administration depending on the outcome of the November election.

Kennedy has endorsed former president Donald Trump, and Trump has hinted that there could be a role in his second Trump administration.

Kennedy, who founded the safety advocacy group Children’s Health Defense, recently revealed the scope of his health care recommendations through his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda. Trump named Kennedy to his transition team and pledged to establish a panel of experts to work with Kennedy to investigate the increase of chronic health problems and childhood diseases in the United States (see related articles, pages 8,9).

In a September 5 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Kennedy laid out his 12-point Make America Healthy Again plan. Some of the ideas include reducing conflicts of interest at federal health agencies, implementing drug price caps, setting chemical and pesticide standards, requiring nutrition classes in medical school, redirecting money toward preventative care, rereleasing a presidential fitness standard, and expanding health savings accounts.

Boundary Crossing

Over the years, Kennedy has not hesitated to express his opinions, many of which have challenged long-held positions of the public health establishment on issues from vaccines and childhood obesity to the role of big pharmaceutical companies.

Kennedy’s stances cross ideological boundaries. His support of a single-payer national health care system conflicts with free-market opinions on the right, and his criticism of big-government bullying alienates the left. The nation’s painful experience with the measures taken to stem the spread of COVID-19 has attracted attention to Kennedy’s health care opinions in the wake of his forceful criticisms of those policies.

In a wide-ranging interview with Preferred Health magazine in June, Kennedy lambasted the lockdowns and the people he says profited from them.

“The people who came into the pandemic with a billion dollars, the Bill Gates, the Mark Zuckerbergs, the Bloombergs, the Jeffery Bezos, increased their wealth on average by 30 percent,” Kennedy told the publication.

“The lockdowns were a gift to them, the super-rich,” said Kennedy. “Jeffery Bezos, the richest or second-richest man in the world, was able to close down all of his competitors, 3.3 million businesses, and then give us a two-year training course about how to never use a retail outlet again in our lives. Forty-one percent of the black-owned businesses will never reopen. And he was instrumental because he was censoring the books that were critical of the lockdowns, including one that I wrote.”

Insider Advantage

Kennedy’s criticisms appeal to Craig Rucker, president of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).

“Kennedy, by virtue of his family name, is an insider, but his unorthodox views make him a provocative outsider,” said Rucker. “The public-health establishment, against which he has railed for years, failed miserably during the coronavirus pandemic. The ties between HHS and Big Pharma are far too cozy, and we have good reason to believe public health suffers as a consequence. A free spirit like his could be just what the doctor ordered.”

NIH Reform Call

Echoing his criticisms of the pandemic response, Kennedy says he wants to overhaul federal health care agencies, beginning with the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The NIH suppressed the use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine during the early stages of the pandemic, in favor of, first, remdesivir and later the COVID vaccines through emergency use authorization, Kennedy argues. Saying the NIH “has been transformed into an incubator for the pharmaceutical industry,” Kennedy recommends removing much of the NIH’s funding for virology.

“It has stepped away from rigorous, evidence-based science, evidence-based medicine, into kind of a magical world,” Kennedy told Preferred Health. “It needs to have scientific discipline reimposed on the entire field of virology. We ought to be funding the study of the etiology of chronic diseases in our universities.”

Focus Shift

Kennedy has also spoken widely on chronic childhood diseases, some of which he has attributed to vaccines. Kennedy has called for public health authorities to shift their focus from infectious diseases such as COVID and influenza to devote more attention to diabetes, obesity, environmental toxins, and other longer-term concerns.

Kennedy has also cited large-scale factory farming and processed food as contributing to the nation’s health problems.

Peter Pitts, president and co-founder of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, says Kennedy brings a fresh perspective to public health debates.

“RFK Jr.’s penchant for not taking things at face value could go a long way toward forcing government public-health agencies to argue on behalf of their beliefs rather than simply relying on a ‘because I said so’ defense,” said Pitts.

Surprising Endorsements

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, a Republican, praised Kennedy’s efforts in a September 26 op-ed for Fox News.

“The role of Big Food, much like Big Pharma, is to prioritize their profits over our health,” wrote Miller. “I enthusiastically support RFK Jr.’s campaign to hold these industries accountable by reforming our food and medicine approval and patenting systems. In this he is uniquely qualified: the $1.7 trillion pharmaceutical industry has unfairly maligned him for decades, and he’s still standing strong.”

In a move that raised eyebrows, Robert Redfield, who headed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) under Trump from 2018 to 2021, endorsed Kennedy’s reform efforts in a Newsweek op-ed in September.

“If the next president prioritizes the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to identify which exposures are contributing to the spike in chronic disease in children, we will finally find out and end what is slowly destroying our children,” wrote Redfield.

Bonner Russell Cohen, Ph.D., ([email protected]) is a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research.