Health
Medical Groupthink Makes People Sicker, Analysts Argue
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
The only way to restore public trust in vaccination – which has taken a big hit since the lies attending the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine – is to put a well-known vaccine skeptic in charge of the vaccine research agenda. The ideal person for this is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has been nominated to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
At the same time, we must put rigorous scientists with a proven track record of evidence-based medicine in charge of determining the type of study designs to use. Two ideal scientists for this are Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Marty Makary, who have been nominated to lead the NIH and FDA, respectively.
Vaccines are – along with antibiotics, anesthesia, and sanitation – one of the most significant health inventions in history. First conceived in 1774 by Benjamin Jesty, a farmer in Dorsetshire, England, the smallpox vaccine alone has saved millions of lives. Operation Warp Speed, which rapidly developed the Covid vaccines, saved many older Americans. Despite this, we have seen a sharp increase in general vaccine hesitancy. Vaccine scientists and public health officials who did not conduct properly randomized trials made false claims about vaccine efficacy and safety and established vaccine mandates for people who did not need the vaccines, sowing suspicion and damaging public trust in vaccination.
What went wrong? The purpose of the Covid vaccines was to reduce mortality and hospitalization, but the randomized trials were only designed to demonstrate short-term reduction in Covid symptoms, which is not of great public health importance. Since the placebo groups were promptly vaccinated after the emergency approval, they also failed to provide reliable information about adverse reactions. Despite these flaws, it was falsely claimed that vaccine-induced immunity is superior to natural infection-acquired immunity and that the vaccines would prevent infection and transmission.
Governments and universities then mandated the vaccines for people with superior natural immunity and for young people with very low mortality risk. These mandates were not only unscientific but with a limited vaccine supply, it was unethical to vaccinate low-mortality-risk people when the vaccines were needed by older high-risk people around the world.
Since government and pharmaceutical companies lied about the Covid vaccine, are they also lying about other vaccines? Skepticism has now spread to tried-and-true vaccines that are proven to work.
And there are real, unanswered vaccine safety questions. Seminal work from Denmark has shown that vaccines can have both positive and negative non-specific effects on non-targeted diseases, and that is something that must be explored in greater depth. Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) scientists studying asthma and aluminum-containing vaccines concluded that while their “findings do not constitute strong evidence for questioning the safety of aluminum in vaccines…additional examination of this hypothesis appears warranted.”
While VSD and other scientists should continue to do observational studies, we should also conduct randomized placebo-controlled vaccine trials, as RFK has advocated. Since we have herd immunity for many diseases, such as measles, trials can be ethically conducted by randomizing the age of vaccination to, for example, one versus three years old, while spreading the trial over a large geographical area so that the unvaccinated are not all living close to each other.
I am confident that most vaccines will continue to be found safe and effective. While some problems may be found, that is more likely to increase rather than decrease vaccine confidence. For instance, it was found that the measles-mumps-rubella-varicella (MMRV) vaccine causes excess febrile seizures in 12- to 23-month-old children. MMRV is now only given as a second dose to older children, while the younger kids get separate MMR and varicella vaccines, resulting in fewer vaccine-induced seizures that scare parents. Although safety studies were inconclusive, it was also wise to remove mercury from vaccines. Even if we end up with fewer vaccines in the recommended vaccine schedule, that’s not necessarily a terrible thing. Scandinavia has a very healthy population with fewer vaccines in their schedules.
We won’t restore vaccine confidence by preaching to the choir. After the Covid debacle, Kennedy’s stated goal is to return to evidence-based medicine free from conflicts of interest. Letting him do that is the only way that skeptics will trust vaccines again, and those of us who trust vaccines have no reason to be afraid of that.
Attempts by the public health and pharma establishments to derail the nominations of RFK, Bhattacharya, and Makary are the surest way to further increase vaccine hesitancy in America. The choice is stark. We cannot let lopsided “pro-vaccine scientists” who clamp their hands over their ears at the mildest questions do any more harm to vaccine confidence. As a pro-vaccine scientist, and in fact, the only person ever being fired by the CDC for being too pro-vaccine, the choice is clear in my mind. To restore vaccine confidence to previous levels, we must support the nominations of Kennedy, Bhattacharya, and Makary.
Republished from RealClearPolitics
Author
On Christmas Eve, during his final year of high school, Justin Schneider’s friend handed him his first bowl of weed.
Schneider says he remembers it being an especially stressful evening and thinking, ‘Oh my God, they were lying to us about this.’
“Here I was this ‘good kid,’ staying away from alcohol and drugs, but this stuff is the best thing I’ve ever had,” he said. “But that reaction was brought on because it was the first time I’d ever taken any type of medication for anxiety.”
At first, Schneider used cannabis to cope with generalized anxiety, depression and insomnia. By his late twenties, he had become a heavy user.
In 2018, after more than 20 years of daily cannabis use, he was finally able to overcome his cannabis dependency with the help of a psychiatrist and addictions counselor.
Canadians’ relationship with cannabis has shifted dramatically since it was first legalized for non-medical use in 2018, a new survey shows.
The 2024 Canadian Cannabis Survey, released by Health Canada Dec. 6, reveals cannabis use has become increasingly normalized, driven by broader legal access and growing social acceptance. It also suggests legalization has achieved many of policymakers’ key goals.
But Schneider and others warn cannabis is not without its risks, and say better public education is required to address some of cannabis’ lesser known risks.
Our content is always free. Subscribe to get Break The Needle’s latest news and analysis, or donate to our journalism fund.
‘Some sketchy guy’
Health Canada’s annual survey, which collected responses from more than 1,600 Canadians aged 16 and older, reveals a thriving legal cannabis market in Canada.
The number of users purchasing cannabis through legal channels has nearly doubled since legalization, rising from 37 per cent in 2019 to 72 per cent today.
“I imagine if I was just starting out [with cannabis] now, I wouldn’t ever have to interact with some sketchy guy, and that would have been easier growing up,” said Jesse Cohen, a 34-year-old daily cannabis user from Montreal.
Cohen uses cannabis to unwind after work or while performing menial tasks at home. Today, he picks up his supply from a sleek, well-lit government-regulated dispensary. He feels this interaction is safer than buying it on the black market.
Cohen says he has also seen the quality and variety of products on the market improve — accompanied by an increase in price.
In the survey, just over one-quarter of all respondents said they used cannabis for non-medical purposes in the past year, up from 22 per cent in 2018. Among youth, that number was 41 per cent.
The number of youth using cannabis has remained stable since 2018, a finding that challenges some critics’ claims that legalization would lead to higher rates of youth consumption.
“For youth, I do think that the whole legalization de-stigmatized and took the risk out of it — it wasn’t a taboo subject or a taboo activity anymore — so there wasn’t the same draw,” said Ian Culbert, executive director of the Canadian Public Health Association, a non-profit that promotes public health.
“Let’s face it, youth experiment, and if it’s something your grandmother is doing, you don’t necessarily want to be doing it too.”
Another positive trend, Culbert says, is that cannabis users now seem to be better informed about the risks of driving while high.
Only 18 per cent of people who had used cannabis in the past year reported getting behind the wheel after cannabis use, down from 27 per cent in 2018.
Culbert interviewed cannabis users when cannabis was legalized. At that time, many said they thought their driving abilities improved when under the influence of cannabis.
“Of course, that’s just not the truth … They felt that their video game experience was so much better when they were consuming, therefore why wouldn’t driving a car be better?” Culbert said.
“I think [because of] education efforts, and the fact that police across the country have put in programs to identify and prosecute people who are driving impaired, that message has gotten through, and people are now equating it to drinking alcohol and driving.”
Public health campaigns also seem to have raised awareness of cannabis’ risks to physical health. Successive Health Canada cannabis surveys have shown a growing understanding of cannabis’ effects on lung health and youth brain development.
Schneider believes public health campaigns now need to focus more on the mental health risks associated with heavy cannabis use.
“I think there’s a responsibility to say that, for a small proportion of people, it can be very psychologically addictive and very, very risky to mental health.”
According to Health Canada, regular cannabis users can experience psychological and mild physical dependence, with withdrawal symptoms that include irritability, anxiety, upset stomach and disturbed sleep.
“You don’t actually have anxiety,” said Schneider about his own withdrawal symptoms. “But your brain creates it anyway, driving you to use cannabis to relieve it.”
Research also shows frequent use of high-THC cannabis is linked to an increased risk of psychosis, a mental condition marked by a disconnection from reality. Individuals with mental disorders or a family history of schizophrenia are at particular risk.
In the survey, only 70 per cent of respondents said they had enough reliable information to make informed decisions about cannabis use. And the number of respondents saying they have not seen any education campaigns or public health messages about cannabis has increased, from 24 per cent in 2019 to 50 per cent today.
Culbert says the revenue that the government generates from cannabis creates a disincentive for it to issue strong health warnings.
“There’s no coherence in our regulatory and legal frameworks with respect to health harms and the level of regulation,” he said.
“Governments are addicted to their sin taxes,” he said.
This article was produced through the Breaking Needles Fellowship Program, which provided a grant to Canadian Affairs, a digital media outlet, to fund journalism exploring addiction and crime in Canada. Articles produced through the Fellowship are co-published by Break The Needle and Canadian Affairs.
Our content is always free – but if you want to help us commission more high-quality journalism, consider getting a voluntary paid subscription.
Nanaimo syringe stabbing reignites calls for involuntary care
5 things to keep in mind before playing at an online casino
Fixing the Trudeau – Guilbeault Policy Mess May Take Longer Than We’d Like – Here’s Why
50,000 Students Missing: Trudeau’s Immigration Circus Hits New Low
-
National1 day agoTrudeau not seeking re-election as MP following resignation as prime minister
-
Carbon Tax2 days agoTaxpayers Federation calling on BC Government to scrap failed Carbon Tax
-
Business2 days agoConservatives demand Brookfield Asset Management reveal Mark Carney’s compensation
-
Daily Caller2 days agoUS Ally’s Approach To Handling Drones Over Military Bases Is Vastly Different From Biden Admin
-
Business2 days agoReport: Chinese government considering sale of TikTok to Elon Musk, possible X merger
-
Daily Caller2 days agoTrump Could Put An End To Biden’s Offshore Wind Vanity Projects
-
Bruce Dowbiggin1 day agoNo, Really. Carney Is An Outsider. And Libs Are Done
-
Alberta1 day agoTrudeau’s Tariff Retaliation Plan: Alberta Says “No Thanks”