Connect with us

Health

Medical Groupthink Makes People Sicker, Analysts Argue

Published

7 minute read

From Heartland Daily News

AnneMarie Schieber

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.

Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.

Follow Author

Health

WHO member states agree on draft of ‘pandemic treaty’ that could be adopted in May

Published on

From LifeSiteNews

By Andreas Wailzer

The WHO draft ‘pandemic accord’ includes data sharing between governments and pharmaceutical companies to develop ‘pandemic-related health products,’ though it would not apply to the US.

Representatives of WHO member states have agreed on a draft of the “pandemic accord” that is scheduled to be voted on next month.

“The nations of the world made history in Geneva today,” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the WHO, said after the member states agreed on the draft of the pandemic treaty on Wednesday.

“In reaching consensus on the Pandemic Agreement, not only did they put in place a generational accord to make the world safer, they have also demonstrated that multilateralism is alive and well, and that in our divided world, nations can still work together to find common ground, and a shared response to shared threats. I thank WHO’s Member States, and their negotiating teams, for their foresight, commitment and tireless work. We look forward to the World Health Assembly’s consideration of the agreement and – we hope – its adoption,” the WHO leader continued.

The agreement was reached by the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB), the committee set up by the WHO to negotiate the treaty, after more than three years of negotiations.

According to the WHO’s press release, the core pandemic treaty draft includes the establishment of “a pathogen access and benefit sharing system,” allowing the sharing of data between governments and pharmaceutical companies aimed at quickly developing and supplying “pandemic-related health products” during a pandemic. These “health products” could be dangerous mRNA injections, similar to those rolled out and imposed on large parts of the world population during the COVID-19 crisis.

The WHO claims that the “proposal affirms the sovereignty of countries to address public health matters within their borders, and provides that nothing in the draft agreement shall be interpreted as providing WHO any authority to direct, order, alter or prescribe national laws or policies, or mandate States to take specific actions, such as ban or accept travellers, impose vaccination mandates or therapeutic or diagnostic measures or implement lockdowns.”

The WHO seems to be responding to critics of the Pandemic Treaty, who have argued it is a power grab by the WHO. It would give the global organization unchecked power whenever it declares that any health risk is a “pandemic.” However, the new draft has not yet been made public, making a thorough assessment impossible.

WHO director-general Ghebreyesus engaged in his typical fear-mongering, stating, “Virus is the worst enemy. (It) could be worse than a war.”

READ: WHO director Tedros calls for ‘more aggressive’ action against COVID shot critics

While the WHO pandemic treaty and the amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) failed to pass last year, the new version of the agreement could be passed by a two-thirds majority at the annual World Health Assembly (May 19-27, 2025) next month.

However, the U.S. was not part of the negotiations and would not be bound by the agreement since President Donald Trump withdrew the country from the international body in January 2025 after taking office for his second term. Argentine President Javier Milei announced in February that his country will also leave the WHO, following Trump’s example. If more countries were to leave the WHO, the pandemic agreement could be ineffective in practice, even if it were to pass in May.

Continue Reading

Autism

RFK Jr. Exposes a Chilling New Autism Reality

Published on

The Vigilant Fox's avatar The Vigilant Fox

Autism rates are exploding. The “experts” say they’re clueless. But Kennedy believes he knows exactly where to look.

HHS Secretary RFK Jr. just held a press conference to respond to the CDC’s latest numbers on autism rates in the United States.

The findings were impossible to ignore, and Kennedy didn’t sugarcoat just how dire the situation had become.

He revealed that 1 in 31 American children are now diagnosed with autism.

For boys, the numbers are even worse—1 in 20.

And in California, where data tracking is considered the most thorough in the country, the rate may be as high as 1 in 12.5 boys. According to Kennedy, that figure likely reflects a national trend.

Just two years ago, the national rate was 1 in 36. Now, it’s jumped dramatically—and Kennedy says he’s determined to find out why.

“The ASD prevalence rate in 8-year-olds is now 1 in 31. Shocking. There is an extreme risk for boys. Overall, the risk for boys of getting an autism diagnosis in this country is now 1 in 20.

“And as high in California, which has the best data collection.

“So it probably also reflects the national trend—1 in 12.5 boys. This is part of an unrelenting upward trend. The prevalence two years ago was 1 in 36,” Kennedy lamented.

He didn’t hold back in calling out the media and powerful industries, accusing them of covering up environmental factors that are contributing to the crisis.

Kennedy blasted the “epidemic denialists,” pointing to a 1992 ADDM report as proof that autism rates have exploded nearly fivefold in just three decades. Back then, the rate was 1 in 150. Today, it’s 1 in 31.

“It’s clear that the rates are real,” Kennedy stressed.

“Year by year there is a steady, relentless increase. I want it because this epidemic denial has become a feature in the mainstream media and it’s based on an industry canard.

“Obviously there are people who don’t want us to look at environmental exposures,” he said.

He also took direct aim at the claim that today’s rising autism rates are simply the result of better awareness or improved diagnosis.

To prove his point, Kennedy cited a peer-reviewed 1987 study from North Dakota, where researchers attempted to identify every child in the state with a developmental disorder.

They didn’t cut corners. They analyzed medical records, confirmed diagnoses, and even conducted in-person evaluations across a population of 180,000 children. Then, they followed that same group for 12 years.

If you still believe autism rates are only rising because doctors are “getting better at diagnosing it,” Kennedy said, you’d have to believe that the original researchers somehow missed nearly all the cases—98.8 percent of them.

But that’s not what happened.

“They went back in 2000 and found that they had missed exactly one child,” he said.

“They weren’t missing all these cases. The epidemic is real.”

Then came one of the most infuriating parts of the press conference: Kennedy revealed how autism research funding has been misdirected for years.

He said the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has pumped 10 to 20 times more money into studying genetic causes of autism than into researching environmental ones.

That, Kennedy said, is a dead end.

“This is a preventable disease. We know it’s an environmental exposure. It has to be. Genes do not cause epidemics,” he argued.

That’s why Kennedy says he’s redirecting resources toward the kind of research that’s long been neglected—into environmental factors.

“And that’s where we’re going to find the answer,” he added.

The most emotional moment came at the end, when Kennedy spoke from the heart about what this epidemic is doing to children—and to families.

“These are children who should not be suffering like this,” he said.

“These are kids who, many of them, were fully functional and regressed because of some environmental exposure into autism when they’re two years old. These are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date.

Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”

“We have to recognize we are doing this to our children and we need to put an end to it,” Kennedy declared.


Thanks for reading! This post took time and care to put together, and I did my best to give this story the coverage it deserved.

If you like my work and want to support me and my family and help keep this page going strong,

the most powerful thing you can do is sign up for the email list and become a paid subscriber.

Your monthly subscription goes further than you think. Thank you so much for your support.

A little bit about me: I spent over a decade working as a licensed healthcare professional. But when the Biden administration rolled out its vaccine mandates, I couldn’t stay silent. My conscience simply wouldn’t let me.

That’s when I started this page.

Since then, I’ve shared thousands of clips featuring doctors and scientists who were brave enough to question the official COVID narrative. Along the way, we’ve reached billions of views and helped millions of people see the side of the story the government didn’t want out.

These days, I’m going even deeper—breaking down interviews with dissenting experts and revisiting forgotten science to uncover what you haven’t been told about cancer, cholesterol, fasting, sunlight, and more.

If you’re looking for clear, honest information without corporate spin, you’re in the right place. Follow me for straight-to-the-point clips and threads that challenge the narrative—featuring credible experts you rarely hear from in the mainstream.

Follow on 𝕏@VigilantFox

Telegram: t.me/VigilantFox

Rumble: rumble.com/c/VigilantFox

Email List: vigilantfox.com

The Vigilant Fox is a reader-supported Substack publication.

To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Invite your friends and earn rewards

If you enjoy The Vigilant Fox, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe.

Invite Friends

Continue Reading

Trending

X