Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Dr. Marty Makary on the Hidden Blind Spots in Medicine EP 507

Episode Date: September 13, 2024

In this episode of Passion Struck, I had the privilege of speaking with Dr. Marty Makary, a renowned Johns Hopkins surgeon, health policy expert, and bestselling author. Together, we explored key insights from his latest book, Blind Spots, which has already made a significant impact by reaching #2 on Amazon before its release. Dr. Makary shared his personal journey from working within the medical establishment to becoming a vocal advocate for reform, questioning the deep flaws in American healthcare.Full show notes and resources: https://passionstruck.com/dr-marty-makary-on-the-hidden-blind-spots-in-medicine/SponsorsBabbel: Unlock the power of learning a new language with Babbel's innovative system. Passion Struck listeners can get 60% off their subscription at Babbel.com/PASSION.Hims: Regrow your hair before it's too late! Start your free online visit today at Hims.com/PASSIONSTRUCK.Quince: Experience luxury for less with Quince's premium products at radically low prices. Enjoy free shipping and 365-day returns at Quince.com/PASSION.For more information about our sponsors and promo codes, visit: passionstruck.com/dealsIn this episode, you will learn:Understanding the systemic flaws in modern healthcare, including the over-medicalization of everyday life.The importance of intentional behavior change in taking control of your own health.Insights into the rise of chronic diseases like childhood obesity, diabetes, and autism, and their root causes.How billing and coding have taken precedence over addressing root health issues in the medical system.The role of the microbiome in overall health and the dangers of antibiotic overuse.Why transparency and independent thinking are critical for medical professionals in challenging outdated norms.Real-world examples of medical dogmas that have caused harm, such as peanut allergy guidelines and hormone replacement therapy.How individuals can become the CEOs of their own healthcare journeys by adopting a more holistic approach.Connect with Dr. Marty Makary: https://www.martymd.com/Order Passion StruckUnlock the principles that will transform your life! Order my book, Passion Struck: Twelve Powerful Principles to Unlock Your Purpose and Ignite Your Most Intentional Life. Recognized as a 2024 must-read by the Next Big Idea Club, this book has earned accolades such as the Business Minds Best Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Award, and the Non-Fiction Book Awards Gold Medal. Order your copy today and ignite your journey toward intentional living!Catch More Passion StruckMy interview with Eric Edmeades on the essential Keys to Postdiabetic TransformationCan’t miss my episode withMorley Robbins on How You Reclaim Your Health and VitalityWatch my episode with Dr. Mark Hyman on How Personalized Medicine Is Revolutionizing HealthcareDiscover my interview with Dr. Chris Palmer on How Brain Energy Improves Mental HealthCatch my interview with Unlocking Limitless Health: Dr. Casey Means on Metabolism’s Key RoleIf you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review! Even one sentence helps. Be sure to include your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can personally thank you!

Coming up next on Passion Struck. The chronic diseases that have all shot up just when we started using antibiotics in mass might be a clue for us to go back and ask, are those antibiotics changing the microbiome? And maybe it's the change in the microbiome that is increasing the risk of some of these cancers. So that's what is sort of the reverse engineering by some of these really smart doctors now. Welcome to Passion Struck. Hi, I'm your host, John R. Miles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips,

and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to

authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now let's go out there and become Passion Struck. Hey, Passion Struck family. I am thrilled to welcome you back to episode 507. First off, a huge shout out to each and every one of you who tunes in every week, eager to grow, learn, and transform. You're the heartbeat of this community and your energy keeps us going strong.

If you're new here, welcome to the Passion Struck movement. We are so glad to have you. For those thinking about spreading the word, which we absolutely love, we've made it super easy with our episode starter packs. With over 500 episodes, I know it can be hard to know where to dive in. So we've curated playlists just for you.

Whether you're passionate about behavior science, mental health, leadership, or hearing from powerhouse women or astronauts. We've got a pack that's perfect for you. Check them out on Spotify or head to passionstruck.com slash starter packs. If you're looking for a powerful way to take the insights from the Passion Struck podcast and turn them into real growth,

then my weekly newsletter is for you. Each week, we feature a courage challenge, inspired by the previous episodes to help you strengthen your courage muscles and take bold steps in your life. It's not just about listening, it's about applying what you've learned in actionable ways. Head to passionstruck.com to sign up and start expanding your courage today. Earlier this week I had an eye-opening conversation with Lieutenant Commander Dan Knosson. If you missed it, you're missing out on one of the most inspiring stories that we've ever featured. Dan's journey from Navy SEAL to Paralympic Champion is a testament to the power of resilience and determination. His insights on overcoming adversity are sure to leave you

motivated to take on whatever challenges come your way. We also had the brilliant Alison Frugal on the show who completely shifted our understanding of power, status, and influence, providing actionable strategies to elevate both your career and personal life. If you haven't caught these episodes yet, I highly recommend going back to LISTEN. They're packed with insights that can make a real difference in your life. And as always, your ratings, reviews, and feedback mean everything to us. If today's episode resonates with you, please leave us a 5-star review and share it with your friends and family. All it takes is sharing it with one person to make a difference. Your support not only helps us, but also is incredible for our guests to receive as well. Now, on to today's episode where I am honored to be

joined by Dr. Marty McCary, a New York Times bestselling author, Johns Hopkins University professor, and one of the most respected voices in healthcare today. Dr. McCary's work has reshaped how we think about medicine, exposing dangerous myths and outdated practices that millions of people have unknowingly trusted with their lives. His latest book, Blindspots, tackles the group think that has dominated

the medical field for decades, leading to practices that have harmed countless individuals. In this conversation today, we'll be uncovering the hidden truths behind some of the most pressing health issues today. Dr. McCary will break down how commonly accepted practices, like the belief that opioids are non-addictive,

that fat is the enemy in our diets, or that antibiotics have no downsides, have actually contributed to crises in public health. But more importantly, this interview is a guide for you, the listener, to better understand how to navigate these medical blind spots in your own life, whether it's how you approach your health, your loved one's care,

or the questions you ask your doctors, this discussion will empower you to challenge assumptions, be more informed, and advocate for better healthcare practices. Dr. McCary's insights are critical, especially at a time when our 4.5 trillion healthcare system is facing unprecedented challenges. This episode will provide you with a new lens through which

to view modern medicine, giving you practical takeaways on everything from gut health to cancer prevention to navigating medical advice that may no longer serve us. Dr. McCary has served in leadership at the World Health Organization, published over 250 scientific articles, and is a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. Today, he's here to help us uncover the blind spots that could be affecting your health and well-being. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your

journey to creating an intentional life. Now let that journey begin. I am super honored and excited to bring you Dr. Marty McCary on Passion Struck. Welcome Marty. Great to be with you, John. Thanks for having me. And I'm going to say that as we're recording today's episode, we will be discussing your new book, Blind Spots, which I'm putting up here right at the beginning of this. And it's pretty incredible.

Even before its release, it's hit number two on Amazon, which is an incredible feat. Congratulations on that. Thanks so much, John. Really excited about the book. So I'm going to jump in here and ask you this question. You have spent the majority of your career at the heart of the medical establishment. You're a renowned Johns Hopkins surgeon, a health policy expert, a bestselling author.

You've been a leader in the World Health Organization, and on top of that, a Fox News public health analyst. What is leading your shift from being part of that very system to actively questioning it and exposing its flaws? Well, we're on a bad path in American medicine. We have all these chronic diseases going up and the medical field is focused on doing

what we're told to do as doctors and that is focus on billing and coding and throughput. We've really done a terrible thing to doctors by telling doctors in America to put their head down through the culture of medicine, you will be rewarded, this is your job. And so there's a revolution now in medicine of doctors that are saying, look, I don't want to have anything to do with this broken system.

I don't want to be on the hamster wheel. We're not addressing the root causes of illness. We're watching childhood obesity now encompass 50% of our nation's children are obese or overweight. A quarter have diabetes or pre-diabetes or fatty infiltration of the liver. Autism has been going up 14% each year for the last 23 years. What's causing that? And we're watching fertility rates go down, sperm counts are down 50% from what they were five years ago. And we have the earliest age of puberty of any country in the world, it

goes down each year, something macro is happening. And our country is getting sicker. We're watching autoimmune diseases, all sorts of chronic diseases. And even in my field of pancreatic cancer has doubled in the last two decades. So we've got to stop and zoom out and ask what is going on? What are the root causes of these issues? And it's not the traditional obesity and smoking that the medical establishment likes to blame. Obesity is a symptom of another problem. We've poisoned the food supply. We've engineered highly addictive food ingredients. We liberally dole out mental health diagnoses,

not addressing the underlying communities, loneliness, anxiety, and other issues, including the medicalization of ordinary life. And we have the most medicated population in the history of the world. So we can't keep going down this road. We've got to start thinking independently. And if you think about the purpose of science, it is to challenge

deeply held assumptions and that's what we need to do. I love that answer because what you're getting to you right there is one of the whole reasons I started this podcast. And people often ask your former business executive? How did you get into alternative health? Well, the way I got into it is I was having all kinds of issues myself from my experience with traumatic brain injuries, which were causing me long tail repercussions. And the medical system kept on trying to treat me through a list of protocols. And I eventually

was talking to a psychologist who said, John, the key to this whole system is you've got to be the CEO of your own healthcare journey and you need to understand and guide the journey. So you get the treatment that you need. And when I started doing that and I took control And when I started doing that and I took control and started doing all kinds of research on not only what care I should seek, but what were the things that I needed to do to treat it, my symptoms started to dissipate very rapidly. And I started to see a huge correlation between behavior changes that I was making in my life and my outcome completely shifting.

And I realized that I was onto something and it's the intentional behavior change and how it can make such a big difference between us getting type two diabetes or other chronic diseases or living a very healthy life How do you see intentional behavior change as a core component of what you're seeing with patients overall? Well gosh John, I love how you put that being the CEO of your own health. You're not gonna find traditional doctors and studies in the New England Journal of Medicine that are going

to really bring that message home. But I will tell you in the blind spots of modern medicine live these incredible stories that we can learn from. People who go to Europe for a summer and suddenly their chronic abdominal pain is gone or they feel better or they have more energy. What's happening there? They're switching their food supply. They are not exposed to things that we are routinely exposed to in the United States that we take for granted. We can learn from the new body of scientific evidence. Some of that evidence is sound, robust clinical trials, but some of that evidence is based on the experience of individuals who adopt an elimination diet, and they start over, they reset. And we've all seen incredible stories that blow us away in medicine. We've all seen research studies that come out that blow us away in medicine, but they live in the blind spots of medicine. For example, the microbiome is likely the central organ of health.

We are now recognizing for the first time that the bacteria that line the GI tract, the millions of different bacteria that live in a balance, they're involved in digestion, they produce vitamins, they make serotonin, which is involved in brain health, they have a connection to mood. Some of the bacteria make GLP-1, the active ingredient in ozempic, naturally in low levels. And some of the bacteria train the immune system,

which lines the GI tract. But we assault the microbiome in the United States a million different ways with added sugar and pesticides and ultra processed foods and toxins and antibiotics. Things we do in medicine with some medical dogma like the dogma that antibiotics won't hurt you or C-sections are no different from a vaginal delivery. I don't want to go to suggest an extreme where there's no role for C-sections or antibiotics. On the contrary, they can save lives and they have to be applied judiciously.

But they're massively overused. Over 60 percent of antibiotics are unnecessary, according to a big study. And 40 percent of C-sections may be unnecessary. What's happening when you take an antibiotic? It's carpet bombing the microbiome and throwing off that balance. What's happening when a kid has a c-section as opposed to a vaginal delivery? Instead of the gut having its microbiome seeded and formed from the bacteria initially in the birth canal and then through breast milk and skin and contact, a sterile baby is extracted from a sterile operative field and what may seed their microbiome are bacteria that normally live in the hospital. And so there's incredible new research

now that's telling us, hey, there's a big signal in the data here. A study just came out in our big JAMA surgery journal that the increase in colon cancer that we're seeing in young people in their 30s and 40s was associated with people having been born by C-section. Now, there's no one cause, but all of these studies in aggregate are pointing to the same thing. We are changing the microbiome in unhealthy ways. And that new composition of bacteria may result in an overgrowth of pro-inflammatory bacteria that make you more inflamed, more irritated, cause you to feel sick. And when we add all these foreign

chemicals in the GI tract when in our food supply, the body reacts with the immune system that's in the lining of the GI tract. It's not a fierce, robust, big immune response. It's a low level response and it's chronic. And it's a chronic inflammatory response that affects the entire body with inflammation. And when we talk about health in 50 years, we're probably gonna talk about how inflamed are you, what's your inflammatory state.

So we're recognizing that all of these things are important and central to health and may account for many of these chronic diseases that we're seeing. And there is an incredible Mayo Clinic study I go through in the book that details this incredible association. When I showed that study, by the way, to my colleagues, John, they were blown away by it. And yet it doesn't really belong in any one specialty. It's almost a unifying theory of what may be driving some chronic diseases or contributing.

Since you're such an expert around the pancreas and pancreatic cancer, as my sister was going through her pancreatic cancer journey and I was myself learning more and more about it, it was very interesting for me to see that while two of the most common forms of cancer, breast cancer and colon cancer, although are increasing in numbers, are decreasing in the number of people who are dying from it. Pancreatic cancer has not followed that same curve and is quickly if something doesn't change going to become over time, the number two leading cause of fatality with cancers.

If I have my research correct, what do you think is different about pancreatic cancer and why is it accelerating so quickly? So the cancers that are going up as other cancers are going down are the cancers that line the gastrointestinal system, the GI tract. And what that tells us from an empirical and deductive reasoning standpoint, is that what we're putting in our mouths, what we're drinking, what's going down the pipes, is doing something to either directly cause cancer

or indirectly cause cancer by changing the microbiome, that is the composition of those bacteria that normally live in harmony. For example, colon cancer is on the rise in young people. There was a recent study that found a bacterium that normally lives in the microbiome of the mouth, that is it's normally found in the mouth and not the colon. This bacteria, fusobacterium,

was found in 50% of colon cancers. Now, what is that bacteria doing in the colon? It likely has translocated, it's moved. And so when we look at the studies in animals, it's pretty clear that when you give antibiotics, when you give them ultra processed foods, when you give them toxins and pesticides, that garden is shifting. And so that's something we need to pay attention to. It's amazing, John, I have been doing pancreas

care and pancreas cancer work at Johns Hopkins my entire career 22 years now. We've got the best pancreatic specialists in the country. I love them. They're great doctors. They're my friends. But as the number one place for pancreatic disease in the country, never at any point in my career did anyone stop and ask why is pancreatic cancer doubled in the last two decades? It's as if it's not on our radar. And let me tell you, we've got good people in medicine, but we're working in a bad system.

The system does not reward asking those big questions. The system does not have research funding for that in the traditional NIH departments. The system for research is mostly captured by big pharma, which is why we're less likely to see research on environmental exposures that cause cancer and instead just on the chemo to treat it. So we've got to change our approach in medicine.

We are going down the wrong path. We're going backwards. We have more chronic disease than any country in the world. And we're watching these cancers go up and the GI cancers are leading the way right now. I want to use that Marty as a jumping point. I happened to read the transcript for a talk that you gave to Liberty University where you were talking to a bunch of healthcare professionals and you advocated for them to stay true to the science.

How can the medical community cultivate a culture where questioning established norms is encouraged rather than resisted? Well, we're in a scary time right now asking questions Can be one of the most dangerous things you can do in society and it's permeated the medical field as well We have a censorship industrial complex that took down my friends Jay Bhattacharya and others Scott Jansen in Minnesota. I've had major studies taken down from social media that I've conducted. We're talking about, for example,

a large national study of people who have natural immunity. We drew their blood, we looked at their antibody levels, we described the duration and prevalence of those antibodies up to two years after infection. And we published it in our number one medical journal, JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association. This was a large group of us with distinguished credentials from Johns Hopkins as co-authors.

When I posted that study, it was taken down. And when I asked public health officials, why don't you talk about this study? It's the second or third, I can that study, it was taken down. And when I asked public health officials, why don't you talk about this study? It's the second or third, I can't remember, most read study in all of JAMA for the year, according to JAMA's website. They said, well, we don't want anyone to read this study or we don't wanna talk about this

because we don't want people to then make this false conclusion that they should do something they shouldn't. And I thought, gosh, science is based on transparency, you can show good data and give your health recommendations at the same time. If you curate what the public is able to see, or what doctors are able to see by up or down throttling research, you will create a tremendous amount of mistrust because the public can be very forgiving when you're honest, transparent, and expeditious in apologizing.

But if you cover up and dethrottle and cancel and censor behind the scenes, you will create a massive distrust problem. And guess what? A study just came out in one of our big journals that 60% of the public now does not have trust in doctors or hospitals. That's down from 38% just four years ago.

So we're reeling in from a massive distrust epidemic that we have, in part because we've had a medical establishment that's been very paternalistic. If you look at the foundation of medical science, the father of modern medicine, Claude Bernard, he said, we all have our biases, it's part of the human condition,

but to be objective, you need to recognize those biases and temporarily suspend them as you consider new information and that's what defines someone with impeccable objectivity. And if you do that you'll not only be more affable, more successful in life, in any job, but also you're more likely in science to make discoveries. And I think those are probably very wise words that apply today, not just to medicine, but perhaps to politics and business and relationships and so many other areas where we need to be open-minded. I love that you brought up Claude Bernard. I just did a episode on a gentleman named Emil Bruno, who was a

cognitive neuroscientist at UPenn. And he studied the anatomy and science of conflict. And what he was talking about is the same thing that you just brought up, how it's our biases that lead to so much of this symphony of conflict that we find ourselves in and whether it's in a health setting, Gaza or in our own interpersonal relationships, it's understanding those biases and being sympathetic to the other side, which can lead to true breakthroughs. So thank you for bringing that up. I want to jump to your book Blindspots. You have it behind you. On the video, I'll just put it up here one more time. You start the book out by talking about AI, and you emphasize that what we need in health care

isn't artificial intelligence, but rather independent thinking, which gets me back to my whole spiel about being the CEO of my own health. rather independent thinking, which gets me back to my whole spiel about being the CEO of my own health. Can you share why this distinction is so crucial and how it forms the foundation of the book's message? Well, we've developed such tunnel vision in medicine with this hyper specialized culture where you just get passed around between specialists and no one oftentimes is in charge of the whole person. No one's talking about the underlying root causes of the illnesses only medicating and operating on those illnesses. Maybe it's time that we talk about treating more diabetes with cooking classes instead of just

throwing insulin at people. Maybe we need to treat more high blood pressure by talking about the sleep quality of an individual and the stress in their lives instead of just throwing anti-hypertensives at folks. Maybe we need to talk about school lunch programs instead of just putting every six-year-old on Ozempic as the American Academy of Pediatrics is trying to push for now. Maybe we need to talk about food as medicine and general body inflammation and the environmental exposures that cause cancer, not just the chemotherapy to treat it. We are witnessing a tremendous decline in American health, one of the sickest, most medicated populations in the history of the world. And we can keep going down this road with a four point five trillion dollar price tag that's burdening every business

and everyone who pays for health insurance. Or we can stop and recognize the tremendous value. To getting back to a whole food, organic, non contaminated, non pestic non-contaminated, non-pesticide-laced food supply. We can talk about exercise and how we can encourage good behaviors. We can stop inserting highly addictive,

engineered food additives into the food of children. And if we can do these things, if we can recognize what is best clinical advice, what is the truth when it comes to health? We can actually improve the health of a population by reducing the amount of medications. One of the biggest things in politics right now is lowering drug prices.

Well, the best way to lower drug prices is to stop taking drugs we don't need. We have had such a pharma based culture, even in at the NIH and FDA, people have forgotten that the H and NIH stands for health and the F and FDA stands for food. We've got to get back to these basic principles. We can provide gold-plated health insurance to everyone in America. But if we continue to ignore clinical excellence, scientific truth, and recognize what the best practices are in health, then we're going to continue to struggle and squander billions.

Many of us now as physicians who have done everything you can do in academics and get all the accolades and tenure and realize, hey, we're not having an impact. We're not getting outside the walls of the hospital. Many of us are going directly to the public now to educate them directly on the microbiome and how to prevent allergies and hormone replacement therapy for women

and heart disease prevention and cancer prevention and so many other things that have amazing new research but they have tragically lived in these dark blind spots of traditional modern medicine. Thank you for bringing up that introduction. And I just wanna mention, I am more and more convinced as this show goes on, than what you're talking about is at the core of all of this.

I have had, as we discussed before you came on, Mark Hyman, Rhonda Patrick, Terry Walls, Chris Kenobi, Gabrielle Lyons, Cynthia Thurman. I mean, the list goes on and on. Morley Robbins. I mean, the list goes on and on Morley Robbins. I just interviewed Eric Edmeads again about post diabetic and the causes for that. And at the core of what everyone is saying, all these experts, it's food and not only food, it's ancestral diet. If you want to go to the core of it, We have so altered the way that we have historically eaten when we were hunter

gatherers to the world we live in now that we're putting ourselves in many cases in a constant state of food coma because of all these artificial ingredients, instead of eating when we need to eat, not because of emotional eating and the other causes, and then eating the junk that we're putting in our bodies. So I think what you're saying is absolutely backed by at least 20 of your peers that I've had on this show. I love it.

John, thank you for having those medical experts on. I mean, Mark Hyman is our godfather. He took a bold step early on and carved out this field of functional medicine. But a lot of the folks you mentioned have taken that bold step and it's exciting now. We've got a revolution because these are folks who are asking the big questions who were in the past. You would just instantly be excommunicated or excoriated from the medical establishment. But Mark Hyman has impeccable credentials. He's at the Cleveland Clinic.

I mentioned I've gone as far as I can go in academic medicine at Johns Hopkins. And so many of us realized, why are we playing this game? Why are we going to the medical conferences and putting up a PowerPoint and reading off some dream ideas that we would like as some fantasy for better health in America? We need to be active and get out there

and talk to the public. And that's what you're doing, John, and that's what I appreciate. The other thing I was going to mention is I appreciate that you're from Pennsylvania. I grew up in Danville, Pennsylvania, and I remember my mom driving me to the mall. And I might have been six years old or something. And I noticed smoke coming out of the ground in several places along the highway. And I asked my mom,

why is there smoke coming out of the ground? And she said, oh, that's the Centralia Minefire. It's been burning for a long time and it's gonna burn for hundreds of years. They're never gonna put it out. And it's an old coal minefire. And that's what it is. And it's an old coal mine fire. And that's what it is. And I was like, hmm, okay.

I guess every kid grows up with a mine fire next to their home. I didn't know, right? We're in the middle of nowhere. My dad, who was a hematologist at Geisinger, saw all these rare cases of leukemia, a lot of the same types of leukemia. And he said none of his other colleagues around the country had seen this proportion of these rare leukemia cases.

And I asked him why and he said he believes it was because of the coal mine region we were in in the Centralia mine fire. I assumed somebody would put this together, and if somebody was on it. And I somebody was on it. And I get to med school and I remember bringing it up or telling people the story and it's no one has, it's not on anyone's radar. I'm not talking about the Centrelia mind fart, any of these big questions,

why is puberty going down each year? Why is cancer going up? Why? And you realize these giant questions, nobody's asking, but the list of doctors you mentioned are asking those questions now. Well, speaking of studies and trials, you open up blind spots with a story about peanut allergies.

Can you tell us about the Salem peanut trial and how experts may have contributed to creating an epidemic? This was a fun chapter to write, but a sad story really. We've all heard of these peanut allergies now that are epidemic in the United States. You can't bring peanuts to school

and we have a new type of allergy that really didn't exist a generation ago and that is the kid can be near a peanut and they can have trouble breathing. These are real problems in society. We shouldn't mock them or make light of them. The modern day peanut allergy epidemic is a new and by and large a uniquely American phenomena. And that is because it was ignited by a medical dogma from the medical establishment 24 years ago where the American Academy of Pediatrics told the public avoid all peanuts for kids zero through three years of age in order to prevent peanut allergies from developing later in life. It turns out

they got it perfectly backwards. They forgot about a basic principle in immunology called oral tolerance. That is, when you're exposed to an allergen early in the first few years of life when the immune system is developing, you are more likely to be tolerant to it. And if you have total abstinence in the first few years of life, you're more likely to develop an allergy to it.

Well, that basic principle was ignored. They went ahead and made the recommendation with such absolutism. By the way, that's the worst thing you can do in medicine. If you don't know, say, I don't know. They put out the recommendation with such absolutism. They got every pediatrician to recite the catechism, most pediatricians to recite the catechism, most pediatricians to recite the catechism, and the whole country moved to total peanut absence in the first

three years of life. Well, guess what happened? And within a couple years, peanut allergies soared, the numbers went way up, the experts, so called experts in the medical establishment thought, hmm, now we're watching this massive increase in peanut allergies. What's going on here? And they figured there are noncompliant parents who are not following our recommendations, we need to double down and stop these anti-science mothers from introducing a little peanut butter in infancy.

Well, 15 years later, just about seven and a half years ago, the definitive study got done. It was done in England. And someone there who was brave enough to challenge this assumption randomized 640 children to early peanut butter exposure in four or five, six months of age in infancy, a little bit of peanut butter once the kid starts taking food in infancy versus total peanut abstinence as had been recommended. And what he found were radically different rates of peanut allergies later and the severity of those allergies over an eightfold difference. So by and large, the

modern day American peanut allergy epidemic was ignited by this bad medical dogma that was put out by experts, as everyone must comply. Here's the recommendation. And to this day, we're still dealing with this problem, which does not exist in Africa, does not exist in many parts of Europe. It is a uniquely American consequence of the hubris of the medical establishment. It leads to a number of broader questions,

meaning what do you think are the lessons that we can learn from this in terms of medical experts approach to handling emerging health issues, not just this but the more consequential ones. be educated about truth. They need to know that it's important to introduce a little bit of peanut butter early in a child's life as soon as they can take oral intake five months, six months. Studies have even shown that five months is better than six months. That's how powerful early introduction is. And four months is better than five months as soon as a kid can take some intake. And so we want parents to know it's good to introduce a little bit of peanut butter, milk, eggs, some pediatricians say it's good for them to be

around cats and dogs a little bit at that age, whatever the recommendation might be individualized to an it to a child. People need to know the truth. Now, so you can either just tell them like a textbook and it's boring, or you can tell them the backstory and then they're more likely to remember it. And that's why I tell these backstories and not just peanut allergies. We said opioids were not addictive for 30 years. Turns out that dogma ignited the modern day 30 years. It turns out that dogma ignited the modern day epidemic of opioids. We said the food pyramid was the way to eat that ignited the modern day obesity epidemic. So medical

dogma can do a tremendous amount of damage and people need to know the truth and the backstory. Another topic and you don't need to comment on it. I haven't publicly talked about this, but for the past six to eight months, I have stopped using fluoride because of all the studies I have started looking at where fluoride in excess can increase the risk of everything from bone fractures, cancer, brain damage, impairment in learning, memory problems, neurobehavior deficits, and the list goes on and on.

your deficits and the list goes on and on. And we treat all these things as 100% accurate when we're on the patient side of it. But when you start looking at it, and just applying some critical thinking to it and research, it's amazing what you can find out on the other side. So I don't need you to comment on fluoride, but I just wanted to use it as another example. I'll say one sentence about fluoride. If fluoride is killing bacteria in the mouth, which is why it's believed to reduce cavity rates, and that's why it's added to drinking water, what is it doing to the bacteria in the microbiome?

It's likely altering it as well. So we are playing with mother nature sometimes when we issue these broad recommendations, not recognizing the potential impact. I want to move on to a topic that's at the top of a lot of people's minds, which is hormone replacement therapy. And it's been a controversial topic for years. In your book, you reveal the myth that HRT is causing breast cancer, which led to widespread suffering. Where did this myth originate and why did it persist for so long? So hormone replacement therapy is amazing and there's probably no medication in the modern era, arguably with the exception of antibiotics, that has improved the health of a population

more than taking estrogen or estrogen plus progesterone, what we call hormone replacement therapy, around the time of menopause and taking it for life. Women live on average three and a half years longer. The rate of heart attacks goes down by about 50%. They have a 50 to 60% lower rate of cognitive decline. In one study, it prevents Alzheimer's reducing the risk by 35%. Women feel better in addition to the long term benefits. They it alleviates the short term symptoms of menopause. That is the when I say short term, they they on average last eight years starting at the time of menopause, hot flashes, night sweats, mood swings, weight gain, there's probably 50 different symptoms of menopause.

Tragically, a woman's more likely to get an antidepressant than they are hormone therapy when they go through menopause. Hormone therapy is massively under prescribed because a guy 22 years ago at the NIH, one of the top scientists there, announced that he had just done a large study and found that hormone therapy after menopause causes breast cancer.

I tracked him down. I met with him and challenged him on that study because it turns out there was no statistically significant increase in breast cancer in the study that he cites. So 80% of doctors roughly today will not prescribe hormone therapy causing all this needless suffering, as you mentioned. 99% of women probably at the time of menopause are good candidates, something in that ballpark,

but they will not prescribe it because they fear it can cause breast cancer. If you ask them why, they will cite this researcher in this study that he released in 2002. Now he made the announcement to the media before he released his data. And so the media ran with the story. Hey, researchers from the NIH and Stanford

and Harvard and everywhere came out with this big study, the largest study in the history of medicine, a billion dollars of taxpayer money. And it found, according to him, in his press conference, quote, increases the rate of breast cancer by 2426% I think he said, well, it was never statistically significant. Ironically, in the women who took estrogen alone, they ended up having a 25% lower rate of breast cancer. And all the other

long term health benefits would have far eclipsed any risk of breast cancer had it actually been supported by the data. So it is a very sad story, probably one of the biggest screw ups of modern medicine. Fifty million American women and probably 200 million worldwide have been denied this incredible opportunity to replace their body's own natural hormone by taking it either through a patch or gel or a pill or something like that. And so that is the true story of hormone replacement therapy. And I shared my interview with the guy who made the declaration and all the journalism

I did around it in the book, Blindspot, so people can know the truth. So another person that you covered in that chapter, and I am probably butchering his last name, is Dr. Phillips Serrell, who's an expert on estrogen. And he gave you graciously hours of his time. And in the end, he said hormones may also be good for neurons. And he explained how research on estrogen comes from the octopus, an emotionally intelligent animal that thrives on estrogen.

And after about a year or two of its life, estrogen levels drop. It stops eating, and it dies. And what was interesting about this is that its estrogen-rich body is majestically coordinated and smart. What did this science about the octopus and Dr. Serrell's work overall lead you to believe about HRT and why was he not shut down by the establishment but didn't want to participate in many of its tests? So Dr. Sorelle is really one of the nation's foremost leading experts, not just scientifically, but clinically.

He has incredible expertise treating women with hormones. And because he's an OB-GYN who is focused in this area, and he's also a professor of psychiatry at Yale. Now, Dr. Sorrell shared with me a lot of data that is so overwhelming on the health benefits of estradiol, of hormone replacement therapy after menopause, that you're almost like, okay, I get it, I get it.

And it's just when you're blown away and you're so convinced that it lowers the risk of cardiovascular disease and heart attacks, if you start it within 10 years of the beginning of menopause, there's another study that comes. For example, it makes your bone stronger. So a woman if the woman falls later in life or is in a car accident, they're far less likely to need surgery or break a bone because your bones are stronger. And you can take all the vitamin D and calcium in the world. If you don't have estrogen postmenopause, then it's not going to help your bone strength. So of all the data

that he shared, one of the most memorable examples was that from the octopus. It's more of an image. Here is an animal that only lives a year to a year and a half in terms of its lifespan, but it's incredibly intelligent, emotionally intelligent, mathematically intelligent. The animal can do math problems, solve all kinds of dilemmas. If you've ever watched the incredible Netflix show called My Octopus Teacher, you've seen how an octopus can do different tasks independently with its eight arms. And so here's an incredibly intelligent organism that has a very complex neurological system,

very complicated and high levels of estradiol, which is believed to keep those nerves sharp, intact, functioning. And then after a year or so that its estrogen levels go down it essentially goes through a menopause and it withers away and dies and it does make you think about in terms of over the history of mankind has the estradiol level gone down at the time of menopause because there's some evolutionary reason for it or lack of a reason for it. So it was very intriguing.

And I thought, let me just share the story directly with the public and they can make their own conclusions as they see fit. I just thought it was an interesting thing to bring up. So thank you for sharing that. It is interesting. I now want to go into your chapter three, which is all about no downsides to antibiotics, how we've been carpet bombing the microbiome

and antibiotics have been hailed as a miracle drug, but we're finding that there are serious downsides to their overuse. And in the book, you have a section on reverse engineering, where you bring up the work of Dr. Mary Claire King, who discovered the Breca genes. And she published a study in 2003, that showed that the rates of breast cancer are higher for women born after 1940 compared to women born before 1940, even when they were under the same genetic predisposition. What did her study and work show

and what have we learned about the overuse of antibiotics playing a greater role in the rise of breast cancer and other things like that? Well, what I find fascinating about researchers like hers, they've actually looked epidemiologically at history and said, okay, the chronic diseases that have all shot up just when we started using antibiotics in mass might be a clue for us to go back and ask, are those antibiotics changing the microbiome? And maybe it's the change in the microbiome that is increasing the risk of some of these cancers.

So that's what is reverse engineering by some of these really smart doctors now to say, hey, we've had no idea how to deal with Alzheimer's and it's a relatively new phenomenon. We haven't seen this in history anywhere near the rates. It's rising, it's increasing like crazy, it's two-thirds among women, maybe we can go back and say, when did it start to go up and what changed in society? Now, it's confounded by the fact that ultra-processed foods and pesticides also were introduced around the same time as the broad use of antibiotics in the 50s and 60s. And pesticides have some estrogen binding-like properties, which may explain the earlier age of puberty that we're seeing in the United States each year. That's why I recommend organic

foods, especially with certain foods when you're eating the surface, the peel, the surface of a fruit or vegetable, you really want to make sure you're eating organic foods there, especially in children. So there's an interest now to say, hey could this rise in breast cancer be actually associated with some of these new, what we'll call new, new, newly introduced things in society that parallel its increase. And in this same chapter, you talk about bacteria therapy, which is something that before I read through your book, I didn't really understand and someone dear to me has colitis. So I was hoping maybe you could share what the science is showing,

especially with colitis and beyond and how this therapy can help people in the future. So recognizing that we've altered the microbiome in the modern era from C-sections, antibiotics, ultra-processed foods, pesticides, and toxins, and food additives, which are really just chemicals now, and don't be fooled by seed oils sounding like they're natural. They're not. They're denatured, and they're changed with chemicals and solvents. So these are really chemicals that do not appear in nature. And so what's maybe happening is that we're altering the microbiome and it's

causing many of these chronic diseases, suggesting that if we can restore that bacterial garden, maybe we can treat some of these chronic diseases. And as a matter of fact, one of those chronic diseases is bipolar. We talked about how some of those bacteria make serotonin involved in mood. Well, at Shepherd Pratt Medical Center, they actually gave probiotics to people with bipolar and found an improvement. There are ongoing studies right now giving probiotics to children with autism, which is also another condition where there's a suspicion or

a hypothesis that there may be an association with the microbiome. And we've known the stool of children with autism is different than children without autism. Now, the problem is there's so many antibiotics, it's hard to know which one to take. Most of them go right through your system. And the research is in its infancy. So we're starting to learn about the role of probiotics. I tell some patients who want to try something, sure, go ahead and try different antibiotics. Do your own sort of clinical trial. See if something is helping. You can also consider healthy yogurts and other things with probiotics. But this is where we're going to learn more.

And by the way, this is where we need to be spending our research money. Instead of funding bat coronaviruses in Wuhan, we need to study what actually relates to these blind spots of American health. Thank you for sharing that. And the next area I wanted to jump into was cholesterol. And in the book, you talk about how President Eisenhower and our perception about his cholesterol levels might have led us down the path

to how we're perceiving cholesterol as a whole today. This was a fun story. So when Eisenhower had his heart attack and survived, the country wanted to know what is a heart attack and what causes it. So this politician doctor at the time named Ansel Keys rose up and said, I know it's my fat heart disease hypothesis. The president was eating too much natural saturated fats and too much cholesterol and we need to put them on a strict no fat no cholesterol diet and that became the medical dogma and for 70 years plus this has been the basis of school lunch programs of food that you find in cafes and restaurants to this day. And the American Heart Association built an entire business on this by selling low fat, low cholesterol cookbooks and licensing out their little healthy heart seal

to diners and restaurants across the country. Well, it turns out that the cholesterol we consume is not even absorbed in the body. That's the great irony. 90% of it goes right through your system. And the cholesterol in your body and every cell in your body is made by your body. It's not from the dietary source. So there's a great irony there. But

it's almost as if the new science didn't matter. They'd already made up their mind. And this is the power of medical dogma. Food pyramid became ingrained, the government put that out there. And so people need to know that the medical establishment since Eisenhower had his heart attack, tried to prove in three gigantic studies that saturated fat causes heart disease, all three failed to show the association. And the one of the earliest of those studies actually found the opposite the low fat diet resulted in higher rates of fatal heart attacks. And that's probably because we now recognize that it's the refined carbohydrates and added sugar in the diets of people who are avoiding fat.

As a matter of fact, flour bread in the modern American diet is basically sugar. modern American diet is basically sugar. And that's because it's stripped of its fiber, chopped up and it functions like sugar. When it hits your body, the pancreas produces a lot of insulin. And this has been one of the great blind spots of American medicine. So earlier I was talking about confirmation biases,

but you also talk about other biases in the book. Some of that is why people become so resistant to new ideas in medicine. What are the psychological and cultural factors that can contribute to this resistance? So Dr. Leon Festinger is probably the doctor who has studied cognitive dissonance the most. In fact, he created the term.

That is, he was describing that we tend to get very comfortable in what we hear first. We believe whatever we hear first. And when new information comes in, we reject it immediately or reframe it to fit what we already believe because our brains, he argues, are naturally lazy. Subconsciously, we don't want to let go of what we've already established in our brain, our beliefs become comfortable sitting in the brain. And so replacing them is very stressful and uncomfortable, uncomfortable in a subconscious way. So we

will just naturally reject or reframe new information. And so when I and he's done all sorts of amazing experiments, including embedding himself in a cult that thought aliens were going to pick them up. And when the aliens didn't pick them up, they became, they, most of them who believed grew deeper in their beliefs, proving his idea of cognitive dissonance. And when I had met with one of the authors of the government's food pyramid recommendation. I showed her all the evidence that natural fat and cholesterol does not cause heart disease as they thought it did. And she responded by saying, well, wait a minute.

Do you mean to tell me that everyone's wrong? The American Heart Association is wrong. Ansel Keys is wrong. All these professors, the surgeon general, the government's committee. Do you mean to tell me everyone is wrong. Ancel Keys is wrong. All these professors that surgeon general, the government's committee. You mean to tell me everyone is wrong? I don't think so. She told me. In other words, everyone believes that therefore

it must be scientifically based. And that is the pitfall. That is where we've got to recognize that we have a bandwagon effect in group think. And if we just jump on a bandwagon effect in group think. And if we just jump on the bandwagon, we're gonna continue to propagate some deeply held assumptions that we should be challenging.

And that's something you explore in chapter nine, where you look at the connections between things that would be pretty much unrelatable, breast implants, autoimmune diseases and the opioid crisis, but they have one thing in common and that's groupthink among other elements. So I think that's a great thing to highlight. So one of the things that I really appreciated about the latter chapters of the book is you go into civil discourse and how our culture of obedience within medicine is stifling innovation and

conversation. And I wanted to ask you, how do you think beyond the people that I mentioned who are on the show who are trying to advocate for this, how in an even broader way can we foster more constructive dialogue around controversy on medical topics? foster more constructive dialogue around controversy on medical topics. Well, I think you're doing it, John. That's exactly part of your mission on your podcast and so many others. It used to be that the medical establishment really controlled what everyone thought and what everyone was thinking. They controlled what messages got to doctors. But now it's very different. Now we've got a bunch of us, Mark Hyman, Peter Atiyah,

Casey Means, Vinay Prasad, a whole host of folks, including the folks you mentioned, who are now out there talking directly and we're having an open dialogue. And it's on social media, it's on podcasts, it's on networks that are interested in hearing a different point of view. And so in the past, the medical establishment controlled the medical journals.

They could get the White House and the government to make official statements. And they controlled the academic elites. But now it's different. Now we've got an open discourse. And it's not just in medicine, it's in with government. It used to be the government would say, there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, or we're on the brink of winning the Afghanistan war

for 20 years. And now there's more ways in which people get information. They have to filter it more, but people are realizing the governments have been lying to them for many years. So I don't think we have bad people in medicine. In fact, every doctor I know is doing the right thing or trying their best.

But we've got good people working in a bad system with perverse incentives and massive blind spots. And so this is an opportunity to talk about these issues so we can have a healthy discussion and hopefully reroute research funding to focus on the issues that actually matter to health, not just the issues that matter to pharma and big ag and big food.

Thank you for that, Marty. And I have just two questions left for you. And one of these is aimed with listeners who have kids. We live, as you have described throughout in this era of over-medication. What steps can parents who are listening or watching this show take to reduce over-medication of their children? Well, first of all, beware of the over-medicalization of ordinary life. If a kid is diagnosed with mild attention deficit disorder, could it be that it's unfair to ask a kid to sit

sedentary at a desk for seven hours a day every day? We've got to recognize that maybe we can change the schools to fit the children and not always just need to put a kid on medication. If a kid disagrees with an adult, we don't have to give them a diagnosis of what we call oppositional defiant disorder, perhaps one of the most bogus diagnoses in the entire diagnosis book of medicine. Maybe we can talk to the child. Maybe children are lonely. Maybe they need better communities. So we can address the underlying problems that where we are losing a human connection, the screen time overuse, the added sugar and additives in a child's diet, and the overdiagnosing and overmedicating. Now look, there are,

I don't want to push people to either extreme, there are real diagnoses in psychiatry and children, schizophrenia, bipolar, attention deficit disorders that where there's an extreme that can only be best managed by medication. So we don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water, so to speak. We want to be objective and evaluate each case on a case by case basis. When it comes to a child presenting to a pediatrician, or a primary care center, where you hear the dogma, hey, the antibiotic probably won't help what they have, but it won't hurt. So I would

just take it anyway. That is dangerous. That's medical dogma. The Mayo Clinic published an incredible study comparing kids who took an antibiotic in the first couple years of life compared to those who did not. And in that 14,000 child study, they found that kids who took an antibiotic in the first couple years of life compared to those who did not. And in that 14,000 child study, they found that kids who took an antibiotic in the first couple years of life had higher rates of obesity, 20% higher, a 32% higher rate of attention deficit disorder.

Remember again, the connection between gut microbes and serotonin production that affects mood, a 90% higher rate of asthma, and a nearly 300% higher rate of celiac disease later in life. So that's a real signal in the data. And there was a dose dependent relationship, what we refer to in epidemiology as dose dependence.

And that is the more courses of antibiotics a child took, the greater the risk of all those chronic diseases. And by the way, farmers have noticed it for a long time. If you give an animal antibiotics, when you raise them, they're going to be fatter. Okay, what's happening there? We are altering their microbiome. It's not the antibiotic itself. It's the altered microbiome.

So the world expert in the microbiome who I interviewed in the book Blind Spots thought, hey if antibiotics are making animals more obese what are they doing to children? And that ushered in a an amazing body of literature that really gives us instructions on being judicious about antibiotics. Sometimes they're important, we don't want kids to suffer with the bacterial ear infection, you want to treat them early or some other infections. But when we know they probably won't help and we know it's likely viral and we know it's just with a dogma that it won't hurt you, that we could do a better job.

Well, thank you for bringing up the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and disinformation. I told you before, when I was doing my research on TBIs that I remember telling my doctor at the VA that I feel like I have a PhD in this because I've done so much research, including I was talking to Chris Palmer and we were having a talk about the link between gut health and mental health disorders. And I told him, I read the whole DSM five, because they kept spouting these things off at me. And the more I read about it, even the people

who wrote the document don't believe in it. It's incredible. Well, enough on that. So if you could offer one piece of advice to listeners about how they could better advocate for their own health? What would it be? Well, I would say it's first of all, if you are in a medical emergency, do whatever the doctors say. That is not a time to question or shop. But when it comes to elective things or chronic problems, when it comes to starting a new medication every day for your life or having an elective operation, ask about the alternatives. Get a second opinion. I do my best to educate people in my books about health, but there's a lot of folks out there that have done

a deep dive in each issue in healthcare and medicine. The doctor that you want is a doctor who can show signs of humility, is willing to say, I don't know when that's the right answer, who listens to you and is willing to discuss alternatives, including alternatives they may not be aware of that you present to them. I have patients who ask me about things I know nothing about or I've never heard of. Now, most of them sound outlandish, to be honest with you. But if I reject it immediately, I affect the rapport. And I may on some rare occasion miss out on something that's actually important for me to know.

So it's important to just tell a patient, I haven't heard of this, but I'm happy to look into it for you or ask somebody that may know about it more. That's the learning relationship that you want with a physician as you think about your health. And it's okay to challenge deeply held assumptions. You want to hear from experts who have different opinions, not some rando out there, but some expert who may have a legitimate idea of another solution. I've had some neck pain from being a surgeon most of my life. As you can imagine, I've had doctors recommend neck surgery, I've had doctors recommend physical therapy, and I've had doctors that recommend medication. And I've gone down the physical therapy road and that's what helped me

get better. So it is good to explore your options and do some research and get some different opinions. Marty it's been such an honor to have you today. If the listeners want to know more about you, where's the best place for them to go? Great thank you John. First of all I really enjoyed it. Fun conversation. I hope this is helpful to your listeners. I am on social media, LinkedIn, Twitter. I think I'm on Instagram and some of the other platforms, but welcome any conversations to the best of my ability and hope that people will enjoy reading the book

Blindspot as much as I enjoyed writing it, because I really learned so much and I'm so excited about this new book. Well, thank you again. And I highly encourage the listeners to read the book. I enjoyed it very much. Thank you so much again. Great, John, great to be with you.

Thank you so much for joining us today on Passion Struck. And a special thank you goes out to Dr. Marty McCary for sharing such eye-opening insights. This episode gives us a rare behind-the-scenes look into the inner workings of modern medicine. And more importantly, it's equipped us with the tools to question and to better understand the advice and the treatments that we receive. Dr. McCary has shown us that sometimes the most trusted practices in healthcare are not backed by sound data. And by challenging these assumptions,

we can all become better equipped advocates for our health and wellbeing, whether it's rethinking the use of antibiotics, questioning the role of diet and obesity, or navigating hormone replacement therapy. The key takeaway today is that you can take control over your health by asking better questions and making more informed decisions. Remember, everything related to Dr. McCary will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our web links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show. You can also find videos on YouTube at both our main channel at John R. Miles and our clips channel at PassionStruckClips. Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals.

Please consider supporting those who support the show. If you're looking for daily doses of inspiration, then join me on all the social platforms at John R. Miles. If you're curious to understand how I bring such amazing talent onto the show, it's because of my network. That's why it's so important to build strong relationships before you ever need them.

Most of our guests are not just interviewees, but also subscribers who contribute topics for future episodes. So come join our community. You'll be in strong company. And now I am excited to share a sneak peek of our next episode featuring my friend, Corey Allen. Corey is a master of

mindfulness and self-development. And in our conversation, we explore how to cultivate deeper self-awareness and presence in our everyday life. If you're looking to elevate your mental clarity, reduce stress, and truly live in the moment, this is an episode you do not want to miss. Corey's insights will leave you with practical tools to elevate your life and find peace in the chaos. The more that we recognize that each of those decisions that we make in the present, what we say, what we do, how we're being in the world, like how are we showing up even how, what is the feeling that we're bringing into the space that we're in? Those things have a huge impact on us, on who we are, on the people around us.

And the more that we're in tune and conscious of those things, the more that we can craft who we are and who we're becoming. Remember that we rise by lifting others. So if you found Dr. McCary's story insightful, or if you're excited about what's coming up with Horry Allen, share the show with someone you know who could benefit from it. All we need is you to share it with one person. The greatest compliment that you can give us is to share the show with those that you care about. And as always, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what

you listen. We'll see you next time. Live life, passion strut.