After Hours: Dr. Marty Makary and Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets it Wrong and What it Means for our Health

Summary

Full Measure After Hours: Dr. Marty Makary and Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong and What it Means for Our Health

Release Date: March 6, 2025

Host: Cheryl Akeson
Guest: Dr. Martin Makary

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of Full Measure After Hours, host Cheryl Akeson engages in a thought-provoking conversation with Dr. Martin Makary, the FDA Commissioner nominee under Donald Trump and a renowned author. Dr. Makary delves into the critical issues facing modern healthcare, drawing from his latest book, Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong and What it Means for Our Health. The discussion unpacks the systemic flaws in the medical establishment, the repercussions of COVID-19 on public trust, and the perilous grip of groupthink in medical innovations.

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Dr. Martin Makary: Background and Insights

Dr. Martin Makary is a five-time Emmy award-winning investigative reporter, recipient of the Edward R. Murrow award, and author of two New York Times bestsellers: Stonewalled and The Smear. His extensive experience and unflinching critique of the healthcare system position him as a pivotal voice in advocating for meaningful reforms.

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Over-Medication and Misguided Healthcare Strategies

Dr. Makary opens the discussion by critiquing the current state of healthcare, emphasizing the over-reliance on medication and the delivery of ineffective treatments. He asserts, “We have too much healthcare and we're delivering the wrong type of healthcare” (02:00). This over-medication stems from entrenched dogmas and a failure to adapt to evolving scientific understandings.

Key Examples:

• Opioid Epidemic: “We created the opioid epidemic with a dogma that it was not addictive” (01:58).
• Low-Fat Diet: For 60 years, the low-fat diet was promoted, which was counterproductive as obesity rates soared.
• Peanut Allergies: Advising mothers to avoid peanut products inadvertently caused an increase in peanut allergies among children.
• Hormone Replacement Therapy: Despite evidence contradicting long-held beliefs, 90% of doctors still associate hormone replacement therapy with breast cancer, overlooking its potential benefits (02:52).

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Blind Spots in Modern Medicine

Dr. Makary highlights the concept of "blind spots" within the medical field—areas where outdated beliefs hinder progress and patient care. He advocates for a paradigm shift towards holistic and preventive measures.

Notable Points:

• Food as Medicine: Emphasizing the role of nutrition in treating diseases, such as diabetes, through cooking classes instead of solely relying on insulin.
• Stress Management: Addressing high blood pressure by improving sleep quality and managing stress, rather than just prescribing antihypertensive medications.
• Microbiome Research: Exploring how gut bacteria influence serotonin production and mental health, challenging traditional views on mental health treatment.
• Postmenopausal Health: Revisiting hormone replacement therapy’s benefits in extending lifespan, reducing heart attack risks, and preventing cognitive decline (04:50).

Dr. Makary underscores the necessity for the medical community to embrace new research and methodologies, moving beyond the constraints of an “elite establishment” that often resists change.

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Impact of COVID-19 on Public Trust

The COVID-19 pandemic served as a catalyst, exposing the vulnerabilities and arrogance within the medical establishment. Dr. Makary explains how the pandemic became a turning point for public perception and trust.

Key Insights:

• Government Missteps: The pandemic response was marred by misinformation and inconsistent messaging, such as the promotion of booster shots for low-risk individuals and the controversial stance on mask mandates (05:56).
• Authoritarian Control: The medical establishment's heavy-handed approach, discouraging questions and alternative viewpoints, led to increased public skepticism.
• Rise of Alternative Voices: With traditional channels faltering, more doctors and researchers began sharing divergent opinions on social media and other platforms, challenging the dominant narratives (06:25).

Dr. Makary emphasizes that this erosion of trust has lasting implications, rendering even effective treatments less reliable when public confidence wanes.

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Groupthink and mRNA Technology in Vaccines

A significant portion of the discussion centers on the dangers of groupthink within the medical community, particularly regarding the adoption of mRNA technology for vaccines.

Key Points:

• Herd Mentality: The medical establishment’s overwhelming preference for mRNA vaccines limits the exploration of alternative solutions, exemplifying dangerous conformity (09:00).
• Bird Flu Vaccine: Traditional inactivated virus vaccines for bird flu have proven effective in animals and are past phase one human trials. However, the focus remains on developing mRNA-based solutions due to existing contracts with companies like Moderna, sidelining potentially more effective traditional vaccines (09:33).
• Consequences of Groupthink: This rigidity stifles innovation and prevents the medical community from addressing health crises with the most appropriate tools, highlighting a critical blind spot in medical strategy (09:42).

Dr. Makary warns that such adherence to a singular technological approach undermines the potential for comprehensive and effective healthcare solutions.

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Profit Motives in Healthcare Narratives

The conversation also delves into the intricate web of profit motives that influence medical recommendations and public health policies.

Critical Observations:

• Close Ties Between NIH, Big Pharma, and FDA: Dr. Makary points out the blurred lines and conflicts of interest between regulatory bodies and pharmaceutical companies, leading to biased health recommendations (11:06).
• Example of Paxlovid: Despite studies showing limited effectiveness for individuals under 65, the FDA and pharmaceutical companies continued aggressive promotion and distribution, prioritizing profits over transparent information dissemination (11:06).
• Suppression of Negative Findings: Favorable trial results are rapidly publicized, while unfavorable outcomes are often concealed or delayed, skewing public perception and trust in medical interventions.

Dr. Makary critiques the lack of accountability and transparency, urging for a more ethical and evidence-based approach in medical research and public health policies.

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Conclusion and Final Thoughts

In wrapping up the discussion, Dr. Makary underscores the critical need for humility and openness within the medical community. He advocates for empowering patients to ask informed questions and seek out diverse sources of information to navigate the complexities of modern healthcare.

Final Remarks: “There’s so much in healthcare where people are lost. They don’t know what to believe... they should ask good questions” (14:43).
Dr. Makary’s Blind Spots aims to illuminate these hidden flaws and equip individuals with the knowledge to make informed health decisions, challenging the medical establishment to evolve and prioritize genuine patient welfare over entrenched interests.

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Takeaways for Listeners

• Question Established Dogmas: Encourage critical thinking and skepticism towards long-held medical beliefs that may no longer be supported by current research.
• Embrace Holistic Health Approaches: Advocate for preventive measures and lifestyle changes as foundational pillars of healthcare.
• Demand Transparency: Call for greater accountability and honesty from pharmaceutical companies and regulatory bodies.
• Foster Public Trust: Recognize the importance of rebuilding trust through humility, open dialogue, and evidence-based practices.

Dr. Makary’s insights serve as a clarion call for reforming the healthcare system to better serve the public’s health and well-being, urging both medical professionals and patients to re-examine and challenge the status quo.

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Further Resources:

• Book: Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong and What it Means for Our Health by Dr. Martin Makary
• Podcast: Full Measure After Hours
• Author's Website: SharylAttkisson.com

Transcript

[Narrator]

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[Cheryl Akeson]

Hi everybody, Cheryl Akison here. Welcome to another edition of Full Measure After Hours. Today, Blind When Medicine Gets It Wrong and what It Means for our health Dr. Martin Makary is the FDA Commissioner nominee under Donald Trump, who would undoubtedly, based on his track record, serve as a major reformer of what many think of as the corrupt medical establishment. He's also author of the recent book called Blind Spots When Medicine Gets It Wrong and what It Means for Our Health Today. In this podcast, he discusses what's going on with health care, bird flu, and the public distrust that's been cultivated by the government's Covid missteps and misinformation.

[Dr. Martin Makary]

We have too much health care and we're delivering the wrong type of healthcare. And so we have this philosophy that oh, people are non compliant. We got to beat on them harder. Maybe we're giving them the wrong information. Maybe we have created or hastened many of our modern health crises. We created the opioid epidemic with a dogma that it was not addictive. We got the low fat diet wrong. For 60 years we were pounding it into people. It was counterproductive. As obesity rates soared, we got peanut allergies wrong. Telling moms to avoid peanut butter and peanut products for their kids. It turns out the avoidance causes allergies. It doesn't prevent it. Hormone replacement therapy for postmenopausal women? We got that wrong for 22 years. We still get it wrong. 90% of doctors still believe in old dogma that it causes breast cancer when it doesn't. We get so many things wrong when we follow the opinion of a small group of elite establishment doctors who rule over the entire healthcare system.

[Interviewer]

Is that the philosophy or sort of the point behind the book When Medicine Gets It Wrong what It Means for Our Health?

[Dr. Martin Makary]

Yeah, we in medicine have to start Talking about these giant blind spots, We've got to talk about food as medicine. We can't just fund chemotherapy drugs and let pharma control the healthcare field and all of research and discovery. We've got to ask big questions we've never asked before. Can we treat more diabetes with cooking classes than just throwing insulin at people? Can we treat more high blood pressure by talking about sleep quality and stress management, not just more antihypertensive medications? We have the most medicated generation in the history of the world and we can keep throwing more meds at people, or we can actually take a step back and talk about general body inflammation and the microbiome and environmental exposures that cause cancer, not just the chemotherapy to treat it. So these are the big questions that a new generation of doctors are asking. They don't get funding or support from the government and the NIH and the traditional academic oligarchy, but they are doing work now and making discoveries that are turning modern medicine upside down. Our entire understanding of obesity and learning disabilities is all being challenged now by the microbiome and the research around it. Even our understanding of mental health is now being challenged by the fact that some bacteria in the microbiome produce serotonin that interacts with the brain. Our understanding of the health of a woman after menopause is now radically changing because people have had the courage to challenge this dogma that hormone therapy causes breast cancer. And actually look at the data, it turns out that a post menopausal woman on hormone replacement therapy lives years longer, feels better, has lower rates of heart attacks, it prevents Alzheimer's in many studies and stops the cognitive decline. And up to up to half of women who take it. These are the tremendous health benefits that we have not appreciated. Cause they've lived in this blind spot of modern medicine. And right now we have a massive problem with the public not trusting us. We can have a cure for pancreas cancer that works 100% of the time, but now half the public won't even come in and doesn't trust us. So now that pill is only 50% effective in a population. We've gotta have the humility to simply say, I don't know when. That's the right answer. And Covid was a little peek into that lack of humility. This sort of paternalism in healthcare that came out and said, stop asking questions, just take the vaccine, even though you're low risk and you've had three doses already and you recently recovered from COVID stop asking questions. People got a little peek into that arrogance.

[Interviewer]

Well, it seems like Covid was also created a dividing line because a lot of very esteemed mainstream published researchers and doctors broke away from the establishment. It seems they didn't like what they saw. They did some critical thinking and they were kind of cast out for that. But they seem to be developing their own. I don't know what you would call micro community that's looking at things the way that you describe. What would you say was the impact of COVID on this?

[Dr. Martin Makary]

Covid was the first time the medical establishment was rattled by different opinions, getting some airtime because in the past it was, well, we went on the Sunday morning talk shows and we told everyone what to do and we got the CDC and the White House to make a statement. And now it was like, oh my gosh, people are listening to other doctors on television or social media. And it was this sort of anger by this authoritarian central control of medicine. Francis Collins, the head of the nih, famously called the Washington Post and said, people are spreading misinformation and they need to be brought to justice. Well, it turns out the greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the COVID pandemic was the United States government ignoring natural immunity, pushing Covid boosters in young people, promoting cloth masks and toddlers. A tremendous amount of bad information where a lot of the public finally got fed up and said, you know, I'm hearing two different opinions and the one I'm hearing from the government does not sound scientifically sound.

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[Interviewer]

How does the bird flu problem that we're starting to hear about factor into what you're talking about?

[Dr. Martin Makary]

We have a herd mentality in medicine. Not the rank and file doctors, but the establishment, the small group of people that decide what everybody should be recommending. And they are right now intoxicated with the concept of MRNA technology. Now, MRNA technology has promise, could be beneficial, has had some success. But the idea that we can only address bird flu with this one MRNA technology approach is the current thinking of the United States government.

[Interviewer]

When you say MRNA technology approach, to be clear, we're talking about a type of what we call vaccine that they used for Covid for the first time. Is that right?

[Dr. Martin Makary]

That's right. A gene gets manipulated in a laboratory and it creates a certain code for a protein. It gets put into your body and then your body translates that gene into a protein for the spike protein or something to create immunity. And the concept is intriguing and it is a step forward in medicine. But the idea that we have to now treat everything with MRNA technology is an example of groupthink, it's herd mentality. There's a bird flu vaccine that I write about in the book Blind Spots that is a traditional vaccine. It's an inactivated virus and it is very effective in animals and is now past phase one human trials. It has essentially been shut down even though it's effective against bird flu, because people are intoxicated with MRNA technology to the point where they have signed a cozy contract with moderna to say go make an MRNA vaccine for bird flu. Forget about the traditional vaccine. That shows promise. That is dangerous groupthink and it's medical dogma. That MRNA is gonna rescue us from every problem in healthcare. And dogma takes on a life of its own sometimes.

[Interviewer]

Well, this stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum. How does profit motive factor into the narratives that we hear and the choices that are made?

[Dr. Martin Makary]

Well, the NIH and big pharma and the fda, honestly, I can't tell the difference. Sometimes when I hear who's talking have this incredible cozy relationship. Many of the vaccine scientists at NIH are now regulators of the vaccine industry at the fda they've switched over. And so it's not healthy when you have a health emergency in the United States and our public health leaders who are supposed to lead us take a back seat and say, well, let's see what pharma says. What should we be doing? Oh, they said that a vaccine booster for this new variant is highly effective. Well, why don't you do that research? The NIH has all these virus laboratories across the country. Why don't you do the research instead of blindly following what pharma says? Because I'll tell you something about big pharma. They're not always honest and they're not forthcoming. Take for example Paxlovid, the antiviral therapy for Covid. It was one of the biggest public health campaigns of the White House. Ashish Jha, telling everyone you must take it. Running announcements at your CVS pharmacy over the overhead system. It was a giant public health campaign. New England Journal of Medicine studies just came out showing they don't work for people under 65. And the study was done a year and nine months before it was published. Why didn't we get the results a year and nine months ago in the middle of that big government push? They withheld the results until that point because of likely a profit motive. And then when they get a vaccine booster that they think every kid in America, every six month year old in America should take five of these boosters, they announce the results before the trial is even public. So you're not dealing with honest people in big pharma. Many of the times you're seeing these announcements, if a trial doesn't go their way, they don't release it. If a trial happens to show a positive result, they shut down future studies that could then reverse those findings. Look, in modern medicine we develop blind spots just like in any other area of society. In politics and business and relationships, people don't see things that are apparent that they should be seeing. And in blind spots, it struck me that we've got two levels of medical recommendations. One from the rank and file good local doctor who uses good scientific principles and the other from a small group of elite medical establishment priesthoods. And these high up doctors are running unchecked right now. So people need to ask good questions. They need to learn about the truth about health. And so I wrote blind spots so people could learn the truth about so many of the major health recommendations in the United States that have been reversed or proven incorrect. But you don't hear a public announcement about it. You just see a fading out because of the embarrassment by the medical establishment for putting it out for so long.

[Interviewer]

Anything else you'd like to add?

[Dr. Martin Makary]

There's so much in healthcare where people are lost. They don't know what to believe, and it turns out that sometimes it's the arrogance or the hubris of the medical establishment that is failing them. They're not correcting their old wrong positions, and it turns out there's a lot of them. When it comes to food and what you should do about your health and how to live long, there's a lot of misinformation out there put out by the medical establishment. I don't want people to be cynical, but they should ask good questions. And I wrote Blind Spots to correct the record on how we got a peanut allergy epidemic. And what is the most amazing thing for postmenopausal women they can do to extend their life? Live healthier, feel better, reduce the brain fog and cognitive decline of that postmenopausal period. How to reduce the risk of heart attack? How to prevent cancer. Many times it's not what you hear. There's a flurry of new research now that is challenging deeply held assumptions in medicine. That research a lot of times doesn't get airtime. I wanted to give those researchers the airtime so people can learn the truth about so many areas of health.

[Cheryl Akeson]

I hope you enjoyed today's podcast and that if you did, you will take time to leave us a great review and share this episode with your friends. Check out my other podcast, the Cheryl Akeson Podcast, and if you like topics like the one we talked about today, you're sure to love my new bestseller, follow the How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails. This would make a great gift for somebody who's an independent thinker and wants to know more about why our health has been so compromised in America, even as we've spent record amounts on health care, medicine, doctors, insurance, pills, and so on. A lot of that has to do with the corrupt medical establishment. From medical school to the continuing medical education classes that our doctors are educated in, turns out they are hugely conflicted along with the medical associations. Follow the Science exposes with anecdotes, inside media stories and hard documents and citations, exposes how bad this has become and how this is impacting all of our health, and also has great advice on how you can take back control of your family's health. Do your own research, make up your own mind, think for.