Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 1069 | The C-Section Scam & America’s OBGYN Problem | Guest: Dr. Marty Makary

Episode Date: September 18, 2024

On today's Wellness Wednesday, we’re joined by Dr. Marty Makary, surgeon, health care expert, and public policy researcher at Johns Hopkins University, to discuss his new book, “Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health.” We start off with an explanation of the medical system’s disgraceful track record with chronic illnesses and speculate why the rates of cancer and autism, among other diagnoses, seem to be increasing more than ever. Are medical institutions incentivized to keep us sick? How have doctors gotten the science wrong on peanut allergies, skin-to-skin contact, and umbilical cord clamping? Dr. Makary explains how antibiotics might be destroying your gut and why that’s a bigger deal than you think.  Get Dr. Makary's book here: https://a.co/d/1Mh2Lvb Get your tickets for Share the Arrows: https://www.sharethearrows.com/ Pre-order Allie's new book: https://a.co/d/4COtBxy --- Timecodes: (01:13) Introduction to Dr. Makary's work (03:36) Medicine’s terrible track record (07:50) Why are we seeing more chronic illnesses now? (15:12) Are they incentivized to keep us sick? (23:00) Vax & masks (27:55) Peanut allergies (32:55) Hospital births (45:10) Antibiotics (49:48) Microbiomes (56:35) Inflammation & what can we do? (58:30) Hormone replacement therapy --- Today's Sponsors: Seven Weeks - Experience the best coffee while supporting the pro-life movement with Seven Weeks Coffee; use code ALLIE at https://www.sevenweekscoffee.com to save up to 25% and help save lives. CrowdHealth — get your first 6 months for just $99/month. Use promo code 'ALLIE' when you sign up at JoinCrowdHealth.com. Jase Medical — Go to Jase.com and enter code “ALLIE” at checkout for a discount on your order. Birch Gold — protect your future with gold. Text 'ALLIE' to 989898 for a free, zero obligation info kit on diversifying and protecting your savings with gold. --- Relevant Episodes: Ep 971 | Question Your Doctor, Save Your Life | Guest: Dr. Casey Means https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-971-question-your-doctor-save-your-life-guest-dr/id1359249098?i=1000649903503 Ep 741 | How to Realistically Live Toxin-Free | Guest: Taylor Dukes https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-741-how-functional-medicine-saved-my-life-guest/id1359249098?i=1000595318788 Ep 959 | Birth Control Is Making Women Bisexual | Guest: Emily Detrick https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-959-birth-control-is-making-women-bisexual-guest/id1359249098?i=1000647441400 Ep 951 | What Does the Bible Say About Our Diet? | Guest: Chelsea Blackbird https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-951-what-does-the-bible-say-about-our-diet-guest/id1359249098?i=1000645362061 Ep 987 | Healing Breast Implant Illness, Hypothyroidism & Infertility | Guest: Dr. Josh Axe https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-987-healing-breast-implant-illness-hypothyroidism/id1359249098?i=1000652773862 --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise – use promo code 'ALLIE10' for a discount: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Dr. Marty McCary is a Johns Hopkins School of Medicine professor. He is also a member of the National Academy of Medicine. You probably recognize his name from his New York Times bestselling books. He was also an outspoken critic of mask mandates for children during the COVID era. And he's just written a new book called Blind Spots when medicine gets it wrong in what it means for our health. This is a fascinating look at corruption in medicine and why this. the medical industry purposely overlooks the importance of the microbiome and how people can take care of their health and reverse the trend of chronic disease in this country by caring for our gut, by caring for ourselves, by paying attention to the things we are consuming and what we are doing to make ourselves more or less susceptible to disease. This episode is brought to you by our

friends at Good Ranchers. Go to Good Ranchers.com. use code Alley at checkout. That's goodwantures.com code Alley. Dr. McCarrey, thanks so much. Great to be with you, Alie. Yes, for taking the time to join us. A lot of people have been following you for a while, but just in case, can you tell everyone who you are and what you do? I'm a simple country doctor, blessed with many friends.

Okay, that's it. That's all. I think you've written a few books, right? I've had a great career at Johns Hopkins, where I've been a surgeon and public health researcher. I've written a lot of articles in the scientific literature. I'm a researcher primarily. And I've written a couple books on the health care system and the medical establishment, trying to challenge them and push the field a little bit. And you have two New York, New York bestsellers, New York Times bestsellers, right? You've got Unaccountable and the price we

pay. Tell us a little bit about those books and why you read them. So Unaccountable was kind of my stories from residency in my early days of being a doctor that I would tell my dad, and he was a doc. And he said, write these down because people forget what it's like, and it perpetuates a cycle of abuse. So that was a fun book to write, and it was turned into the TV series called The Resident, which ran six seasons on Fox. And then the second book was, the first book was really quality, the issue of quality in medicine. The second book was Price. And so it was called The Price We pay and it called for price transparency in health care and identified this practice of price gouging patients and hospitals doing predatory billing and the advocacy we did to stop that and try to

address it. So hospitals need to be accountable to their communities and a lot of good stuff came out of that book, namely the executive order on price transparency that Trump signed and that the Biden administration kept when they came into power. It's bipartisan. I mean, most things in health care are bipartisan. We're all against corruption, and we want better health, and we want to address the big topics we're not talking about. So you've cared about health care corruption and what you've seen within the health care bureaucracy long before the days of COVID. You were writing books about this, caring about this. But I'm sure a lot of doctors who see what you saw decide, you know what, it's better if I just

don't talk about it. I don't want there to be any retribution. I don't want to put the energy into that. So why did you decide to start writing about corruption in the healthcare industry? I think we've done a terrible thing to doctors in this country. We've told them to put their head down and do your job and you have one hammer and, you know, here's the late fix that you're going to do in the journey of chronic disease. You're going to medicate or operate at late stages. And we haven't given doctors the time to address these problems, the resources to get into

the root causes of disease. And we evaluate doctors on this hamster wheel of work units. And so it's all about throughput. And it's atrocious because doctors are very creative, bright people who go into the field out of a sense of compassion. I mean, they're amazing people. And we have this broken system where they're just basically told, keep your head down and don't look around what's going on. But if you look around at what's going on, we have a terrible track record. We are watching rates of autism go up by 14% every year. Half of children are obese or overweight. A quarter have diabetes or pre-diabetes now.

Cancer rates have doubled in some areas like my field of pancreatic cancer. Rates have doubled in the last two years. No one in our research group at Johns Hopkins or our pancreas center, which is a the biggest pancreas center in the country has ever stopped to ask why. Why is cancer, this cancer doubling? So we've got to zoom out and ask, what are we doing? We've got the most over-medicated generation in human history. We've got mental illness diagnoses being assigned liberally. And in some cases, it's the medicalization of ordinary life. We've got opposition defiant disorder is one of our diagnoses. I mean, what is that? A kid disagrees or doesn't agree with

an adult and that we give them a medical diagnosis and medicate them. So we've got to take a step back. And I think it's a natural instinct of anybody who's intellectually curious who goes into medicine to say, hey, well, wait a minute. Sperm counts have been 50% lower today than what they were just 50 years ago, wait a minute, who's working on this? Who's talking about this? And as you get deep in the belly of the beast in medicine, as, you know, I've gone as far as you can go in academic medicine, you realize no one is talking about this stuff because it's, the agenda is driven by group think and pharma and the food industry and big ag, all sort of keeping us in our lane where we just keep our heads down and do our billing and coding and throughput. And just,

just playing whack them all at the end of chronic disease. So a group of us are now saying we want to go directly to the public and teach them about health. It's Casey means, Peter Tiav and I, Prasad, Zuban Damania. We're all going out there and we're saying enough is enough. The system is broken. We're good at emergency care. We're terrible at chronic diseases. Okay. And we're saying let's talk to the public directly about the big topics in medicine that we are not talking about that we need to talk about, where new scientific research is showing us amazing things, but the medical establishment has it in their blind spots. So you're saying most doctors are really disincentivized from asking why, and that most of their

time is spent with the billing and the coding. And so even if they are curious, even if they do want to ask why they really don't have a whole lot of time or energy or reason to. So you said that you have gone as far as you can go in academic medicine and now you really have the ability to kind of push this why that people should be asking out into the public. So I know that you listed a lot of different things, a lot of chronic illnesses and problems that the American people are dealing with, but I guess just from a broad view, why? Why do we see sperm counts going down? Why do we see, it seems like, increased rates of infertility in both men and women? Why do we see this childhood, obesity epidemic, all of these mental health disorders that didn't seem to be as big of an issue

20, 30, 50 years ago? Why is all that happening if we are so over-medicated and the medical industry has a lot of money? Well, there's actually a big body of medical. research on this that the medical establishment has overlooked. So when they make their guidelines, they're cherry-picking research or they're making stuff up sometimes, as we saw during COVID. The body of research out there is pretty clear that the five billion gallons of pesticides plus that we pour on our food supply has estrogen-like binding properties. These pesticides have hormonal effects. They're altering the bacteria in the gut called the microbiome that's important in health and mood. Some of those bacteria produce serotonin, making a connection between mental health

and the gut. And the ultra-processed food is essentially now chemicals that don't appear in nature. You just look at seed oil derivatives. They are reacting with the immune system because the body doesn't recognize it. So the gut has an immune system along its lining. It's a big concentration of the body's immune system. And when you are ingesting, microplastics, for example, which have estrogen binding properties. And what does estrogen binding property mean? So the substances, the glycopacets, the carbamates, the carbamates, these ingredients in the pesticides, for example, have partial, they can partially bind to the estrogen receptors.

And of course, estrogen is one of the sex hormones in the body. So when we see the age of puberty going down, where it's now 10 to 13 years of age, it used to be around 16, it's still in Europe. You'll hear commonly 13 to 16 as the age of puberty. When you have these massive titanic sort of level changes in the natural physiology of a human being, you want to say, well, look, here we have all these studies that are making these connections. Why is no one talking about this? So organic foods are important of minimizing heavy metals, microplastics whenever possible. Ultra-processed foods are a big one. In microplastics, that's like you're talking about anything that's like a plastic container, right?

For the most part, you're talking about plastic water bottles, things like that. Those are the microplastics with the ingredients that you listed that have estrogen binding properties. So they increase estrogen in the body, which obviously, as you said, can be deleterious. not just for young people, but increased estrogen can also lead to certain kinds of cancers, right? Yeah. So it may not increase the estrogen levels intrinsically, but bind to those receptors, so the receptors sense that it's estrogen and then react as if it's estrogen in someone who may not have those high levels of estrogen, normally pre-puberty. It's been implicated with the rise in breast cancer. It's like one in eight, one in nine women today will develop breast cancer. We didn't see this

100 years ago, right? What's going on? So it's so obvious that we've got some pieces of the puzzle that fit together. The medical establishment is not interested. The NIH is more focused on chemical pathways they can block with drugs. And so you have this sort of massive blind spot where a bunch of us have just realized we can't leave it up to big pharma and the NIH to educate and do the research we need to put these pieces together. We got to go directly to the public. When people ask for organic foods, when they want to buy food that's not prepared in plastic, for example, that helps move markets. And we're starting to see demand for that stuff. The NIH needs to realize the H and NIH stands for health. It's not just drugs and things that

increase the throughput of the medical industrial complex. Yeah, that's right. And Francis Collins has been the head of the NIH for a long time. I had Megan Basham on my podcast. And he's an evangelical. He's been hoisted up by a lot of Christian leaders. But I've been surprised to find over the past few years that he's headed up a lot of initiatives that really aren't synonymous with health. The NIH has had a disgraceful track record. If you look at their study on transgender treatments and young people with no control group, where a few of the children died in the study population.

Is that a success when a couple kids die in the two-year period where they're getting these puberty blockers? In the UK, they've banned puberty blockers. The American Plastic Surgery Society, which is the largest society of plastic surgeons, just came out with a very impressive statement saying, hey, we don't have good research to support this stuff. We're flying blind, and we can't be put, the worst thing you can do in medicine is to put something in front of parents and scare them and do it with such absolutism when it's really just

an opinion of some people. And we got a little peek of that during COVID. But I agree. The NIH has been a disappointment. They just came out with Lucky Charms is healthier than steak. I mean, that was a multi-million dollar study. And they took all this bad research and summarized it. And of course, you get bad conclusions. Right. So when you look at in the last, in the modern era, one of the greatest perpetrators of misinformation has been the United States government on health. First sponsor for the day is seven weeks coffee. Seven weeks coffee is America's pro-life coffee company. They chose the name seven weeks coffee because at seven weeks, that baby inside the womb is the size of a coffee bean. And they believe that every life

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Would you say that it is fair to state, as I've seen people, as I've seen people assert before, that the healthcare industry, we're talking even, you know, in coordination with big pharma, big food, that they are actually profit-driven, incentivized to keep us sick. because it's hard for me to hear the conclusions of that kind of research that lucky charms are healthier for you than steak and eggs and not think that there's some malintent behind that because that so defies common sense. I think a lot of it's just group think. Now, certainly there's no incentive to look into highly engineered foods that are

addictive and bad for you. The food scientists are laughing at the American public. They've engineered food. They've added these ingredients that are banned in other countries. They don't occur in nature. They go down the GI tract and the immune system responds, not with a big inflammatory response, but with a low-level inflammatory response

that makes you feel blah, makes you feel sick. And we've got all these kids and people with low energy and sickness and they can't pay attention after lunch. Maybe we need to look at the school lunch programs and not just put every kid on Ozzympic. Maybe we need to talk about treating high blood pressure with addressing sleep quality and stress management, not just putting people on anti-hypertensives. Right.

We need to look at the environmental exposures that cause cancer, not just the chemo to treat it. Right. So we've got to talk about foodist medicine and general body inflammation. And these toxins, which are the pesticides and the food additives that don't appear in nature that trigger the immune system that make us sick and that have ushered in a thing. whole host of chronic diseases that we just didn't see before the modern era. So I think, I think there's a lot of group think. When you have at the top of the NIH these old dinosaur professors that are funding research, guess what they're funding, things that support their legacy

ideas, these same broken ideas where we've made essentially very little to no progress on cancer, despite spending $300 billion a year. And so we keep funding these small, incremental, tiny discoveries on these legacy ideas that sometimes are not proving to be, you know, worthwhile. Right. So let's say you're a smart medical student and you go in and you've got big ideas. Let's say you think like a Ben Franklin thinker, you want to think about the food supply and all these chronic diseases and how we fund research.

and you're a big thinker. When you get to the academics, they tell you, put your head down, you've got to get an NIH grant, and they fund these small, incremental little studies over the course of several years. And that's why we're not really looking into these big topics. So my research team at Johns Hopkins is funded by philanthropists. We study whatever we think is important is going to make an impact. And that's why we've been able to address natural immunity during COVID. and the opioid epidemic in real time.

We don't have to wait for the NIH to pivot. Right. You know, my husband and I were talking about the other day, you know, we're 90s kids. He was born in 90. I was born in 92. Some of the things that we ate for breakfast that I guess we just, I don't know, we just didn't think about it. We didn't know, like, the Reese's puff cereal, the Lucky Charms, the I would have, like,

rice, crispy cereal and then just put like, I don't know, a whole tablespoon. of sugar in there and mix it up. Not every morning. I know my mom is listening to this. Not every morning, but sometimes. And I do see an improvement in what we know as moms, like our kids really need, that a lot of us are trying to move away from food dyes, trying to move away from refined sugar and from seed oils. It can be really hard, especially, you know, unless you're making all of your own snacks, it can be really difficult. But I do think that we're a lot more educated and empowered than maybe a few decades ago. And I do see that as kind of a positive development that seemed to come out of COVID.

Like the distrust that people gain in COVID of the public health apparatus kind of encouraged us to, okay, let me at least take charge of the things that I know that I don't need a medical degree for, what foods are good for me, what foods are bad for me. Is that something you've seen? Yeah. And ironically, the medical establishment is sort of discovering. as if it's a new finding some basic biblical principles about health, that fasting can be beneficial, that meditating has health benefits, that we should be eating whole foods and clean meats.

Meats are not bad for you. It's how the meat is prepared or raised. And so it's almost as if the medical field is now curious and slowly rediscovering some basic ancient principles about eating food that comes from the soil and living off the land without all these added toxins that we've inserted into foods with the guise that they are, they're fine for you. Yeah. I mean, I remember in med school, one of the first days in anatomy, we dissected the cadaver, and you would see in some the cadavers the lung is black. It just looks black.

And it's so appalling, you know, we would ask, like, why is it black? I wasn't expecting that. It's not black in the anatomy books. And I remember the professor said, oh, that's common among people who live in cities. But don't worry, it's not bad for anyone. And I thought, how quickly did you dismiss that? Same thing with fertility rates going down, sperm counts going down, age of puberty going down, cancer rates going up, autism going up.

One in 22 kids now in California has autism. Has anyone, you know, why are we so disqualify? dismissive about these potential causes when they might be right in front of us. It seems that trying to go to the root cause of anything is almost billed as a conspiracy theory. Even if you're just asking questions about why do we do things the way that we do. And of course, it's extremely verboten or has been in the past to ask about vaccines. I remember during COVID, that was the first time. I had never been skeptical about vaccines at all.

And, you know, I was already a mom. I had no problem with it. And then COVID happened. And I started hearing my pediatrician saying, you know, as soon as she turned six months, and they tell us that they're good to go for the COVID vaccine, then we can see about that. And I'm like thinking, what? What in the world? And so I started asking him questions just about the different vaccines and how they're coupled

and why we do it a certain way. And our relationship, our doctor-patient relationship became very adversarial. And I felt like, oh, I definitely can't trust you now because I am genuinely curious. This is a person I had trusted. I genuinely wanted answers. I didn't think that I was, you know, educated about them. I thought, surely, as someone who went to medical school, he would know. And yet, I was brushed off. I was treated very aggressively. And if that's my story, I think that's probably the the story of a lot of moms, whether they are completely anti-vaccine or not, our trust of doctors and the medical system during COVID, especially when it came to vaccines, just completely eroded. And I don't think it's our fault. I think it's the establishment's fault. And honestly, I'm not sure what moms are supposed to do about that now. I think doctors are important. They're needed, but a lot of them feel like they don't even have one they can rely on to

answer their questions. Well, the medical establishment has done a lot of damage, and it's not just during COVID where people got a little peek into how they work with their medical dogma when there's no scientific evidence, and they put out a recommendation that might be their opinion, but they put out there, put it out there with such absolutism. And that is very damaging because people are smart, and eventually, in the case of COVID, they got curious and they asked very deep and nuanced questions that expose the medical establishment, like natural immunity. Why does a toddler need to wear a cloth mask for nearly two years? Does it really have no impact on development?

A study just came out of Brown University that the average IQ among a child born just prior to COVID or during COVID was 12 points lower, including reduced motor function. So when they said, oh, there's absolutely no downside to it, which was the response to the medical establishment when I wrote a piece, piece titled The Case Against Masking Children in the Wall Street Journal. Yes, I remember that. We talked about that on the show. It's so good.

Yeah, I mean, it's like you're not allowed to have this discussion. The medical establishment has made up their mind, and they've issued their decrees, and they get the White House to make an announcement, and they get the medical establishment to endorse it, and the journals to publish an article. And then, hey, there's other doctors who are speaking up, and they have platforms, and they're getting out there on their on television and they're talking on podcasts and they're writing articles. And it was like they got infuriated. And how do we stop this out? And then they moved to the censorship step. So you actually had a government here that fired two of its top vaccine experts at

the FDA because they opposed the COVID vaccine for young healthy children in the booster form. And then after reaming it through the regulators, they then get the CDC and Big Pharma to engage in one of the largest public health campaigns in modern history for young people to take COVID boosters every year. And then they censor the doctors through big tech who oppose this recommendation. That is a very dangerous thing when you're dealing with a new medication that you're requiring every person in America take through mandates. And then you're You're silencing the opposition. So it's all coming to light now.

And I think people are seeing through it. They're seeing through this establishment and the illusion of consensus because 40% of pediatricians in the United States in rural communities did not recommend the COVID vaccine for their children. Wow. 40%. Now, you would have thought that's 1% and they're spreading misinformation. But no, there's actually a large group of doctors who went to medical school and they're

smart and they have enough questions to say, I don't recommend this. So people are seeing through this. Okay. So as we're talking about the craziness of the health care industry and we're thinking about just all of the complexities that have been heaped on patients, you want to try to alleviate that stress as much as possible. And that might mean for you opting out of health insurance altogether. and then joining the crowd at crowd health. Crowd health is not health insurance. It is a way for you to cover your health care needs within a community of people that are paying every month for telemedicine visits and for discounted prescriptions and so much more without any discounted, without any doctor's networks getting in the way. The group of members are people just like you who want to

help pay for each other's unexpected medical events. It's $175 for an individual, $575 for a family of four or more. But if you use my link, join crowdhealth.com slash alley, you get your first month for just $99 a month for your first three months. When you use my link, join crowdhealth.com slash alley. Crowdhealth is not insurance. Learn more at join crowdhout.com. That's join crowdhealth.com slash Allie. It's not just COVID. The medical establishment got the opioid epidemic wrong. They said opioids were non-addictive, igniting the opioid crisis for 30 years. They got that wrong. They got peanut allergies wrong for 15 years, igniting the modern day peanut allergy epidemic. Can you explain that one? Yeah. So, pause on that. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the same group that

has been pushing the annual COVID boosters for young healthy children, even if they have natural immunity to And transgender nonsense too. A lot of stuff. Yeah. Masking, all that. Yeah. Masking toddlers, except for two hours when they're napping. They said that's okay.

Yeah. COVID pauses then for some reason. Yeah. I mean, it's almost like a political badge, right? We stand with the maskers. But they issued a recommendation in the year 2000 in response to parents asking, how do I prevent my kid from getting a peanut allergy? they said all mothers pregnant lactating or you have kids zero through three years of age total peanut

abstinence is the way to prevent peanut allergies no peanut butter don't introduce it keep them away from peanut butter and so this idea of peanut abstinence early in life would prevent peanut allergies was something they put out there with such absolutism it was an opinion they ignored a giant body of research on immune tolerance, what we call oral tolerance, or the dirt theory, when you're exposed to something early in life, your immune system tolerates it later. They got it perfectly backwards. And what happened was a couple of years into that recommendation, peanut allergies went from rare and mild, which is what it was, you know, a generation prior, to more and more common.

And we saw a new type of allergy, the severe anaphylactic reaction. A kid can stop breathing just being near a peanut butter, even if they're not consuming it. It was that sensitive. That's how much we sensitize the immune system in these kids who did peanut abstinence. So as peanut allergies went up and this epidemic unfolded in the 2000s, the medical establishment looked at these numbers and they thought, my gosh, what are we going to do? We need to get more compliance. We need to double down. We have anti-science mothers out there.

We need to make sure no kid has peanut exposure early. Fast forward 15 years and the randomized trial, the official study gets done showing they got it perfectly backwards. You want to introduce a little peanut butter at five months, six months of age. As soon as a kid can eat, a little bit eggs, milk, the same, to prevent allergies. In the study, they found that kids who did the abstinence of peanut butter in the first three years of life had an eightfold higher rate of peanut allergies, including some severe. Wow. So they got it perfectly backwards.

Did they apologize eight years ago when the trial got done? No. Did they say, hey, we should have done that study ourselves before we issued that recommendation? No. Did they say this recommendation is just opinion? No, they didn't. They enabled medical dogma to permeate across the entire field of medicine where every pediatrician had told moms from 2000 to 2015, at age one, you can introduce little milk.

At age two, you can introduce little eggs. And at age three, you can introduce a little bit of peanut butter that was known as the one, two, three. Wow. It was misinformation. It ignited the modern day peanut allergy epidemic. Wow. You know, it makes me think I have a family member who was told, you know, he was allergic

to peanut butter when he was a baby. Of course, you avoid peanut butter after that, because you don't want to be the, parent, after your pediatrician tells you, you know, avoid peanut butter to then try to introduce it and something terrible happens. But then they went to a doctor that said, no, actually he needs to eat at least, I think it's like one peanut every day or something like that. And I don't completely understand exactly how it works. But basically, that keeps his peanut allergy at bay. And I'm not telling everyone out there to try that. This is what the doctor told him to do. But, I mean, this works for him. And what's also interesting is that one of my,

my kids was told, you know, we tested for an allergy, was told she had a peanut allergy one year. And then the next year we went back to test and it no longer came up as an allergy. I think a lot of people believe that if you're told that you have an allergy at one point, it is going to be like that forever. So avoid. Thankfully for us, that wasn't the case. So it does seem like there's a lot of fear mongering or a lot of misinformation about that. Yeah. And the human body is amazing. It works. And so what they found in the research when it finally got done, is introducing a little bit of peanut butter to get the immune system and recognize it? Five months was better than six months. That is, age five months, if you introduce it,

you got more benefit because the immune system was still learning from the environment. And four months, introducing a peanut butter at four months resulted in lower peanut allergies than introducing it at five months. That's how powerful early immune tolerance is. Interesting. Yeah. You know, there are so many other things that moms are told from the time that we're pregnant that we should and shouldn't do. And I'm very thankful for all the different kinds of people that have come forward and said, you know, here's actually what the data says. Here's what is really safe or unsafe during pregnancy, what we can eat and all of that. And also during and after birth,

I think there are more and more women who are saying, hang on, how I'm being treated in the hospital by doctors is not okay. The things that we're being pressured to do as far as the birth choices that we make, even doctors who seem to think skin to skin is not that big of a deal. It seems like there is a wave of women kind of standing up and saying, hey, hang on, how moms and babies are treated during labor and delivery are important. Yes, healthy mom, healthy baby, but there's more to that. That's something that you've seen, too, misinformation in that area. Yeah, we've seen the group think and medicine downplay these best practices in child birth that we now recognize have dramatic benefits, a delayed clamping of the umbilical cord

once the baby is born. That umbilical cord is pulsating healthy stem cells and fetal hemoglobin, which binds oxygen really well, and it's warm blood infused directly into the child's circulation to keep the baby warm. As a medical student, I remember they gave me the scissors and they were like, the second the baby comes out, you're going to cut the cord. Yeah, yeah. You know, clamp, clamp, cut it, you know. And I'm like, what are we doing? You know, they'll whisk the baby off to the back corner under some French fry light. And I'm like, what's going on here?

Oh, we have to rewarm the baby. Well, the baby was just getting a transfusion of healthy fetal hemoglobin stem cells and warm blood. And the best incubator is the mom's arms, skin to skin. There's been studies now that when the babies are held skin to skin, not for one or two minutes, because we have to take the baby to the nursery, even though the baby's normal and born at term. If the mom holds the baby for hours, as long as the mom can safely hold the baby, sometimes with help, the baby has a more normal heart rate. The blood pressure is more normal. They're less likely to need an ICU stay in the NICU.

They have a more normal glucose level. And you might wonder, why is the glucose level more normal when the mom holds the baby? the stress hormones are not spiking as high. And stress hormones at high levels change your glucose level. So there's this incredible, and there's something magical about the bonding we haven't described in medicine. And so when there's delayed cord clamping, they've actually done studies with this protocol that the myelination of the nerves in the brain are a little different on MRI later in childhood. Wow. So when a woman's going to deliver, they want to ask about delayed cord clamping. By the way, 90 seconds was better than 45 seconds in a head-to-head trial.

I have been told by a doctor when I've asked about this that there is no scientific benefit to that. I mean, I've heard a lot of women are told that. And I don't think it's that they're coming from a place where they've actually studied it. I think that's just, you know, as you've been saying, what they're told. So in the book, Blind Spots, I go through a lot. of these best practices in one of the chapters, a lot of them pioneered by a doctor from India where they didn't have NICUs to accommodate all the preemie babies. And they had to use these natural techniques. And it was amazing the results. And one of her colleagues, an American doctor,

had said when she rolled out this protocol, he said, are we going to, are we going back to doing things the African way here. And she said in her feisty way, if Africa has something to teach us, then yes, we're going to learn from Africa. Right. And so avoiding unnecessary C-sections, avoiding antibiotics early in life when they're not necessary, both C-section and antibiotics safe lives. But they're both unnecessary a lot of times. 60% of antibiotics are unnecessary, an estimated 40% of C-sections are unnecessary. Parents or mothers are unfairly inappropriately told, oh, there's no difference. You can deliver vaginally or by a C-section, your choice.

How would you like to do it? Yeah. The microbiome in the gut, for example, forms differently when a baby is born by C-section versus through a vaginal delivery because the gut of a baby in utero is sterile. There's no bacteria in there. How do we get our millions of different bacteria that live in this harmony and are involved in digestion and immunity and mental health? Well, a baby passes through the birth canal and the bacteria of the vaginal canal seeds the microbiome, augmented by bacteria from breast milk, especially in the first hour, from skin contact, from grandparents kissing babies and things like that.

But when you're born by a C-section, a sterile baby is extract. from a sterile operative field and what may seed their microbiome are bacteria that normally live in the hospital. Right. And so a study just came out. And they've known the microbiome is different in babies born by C-section. Higher rates of asthma, higher rates of inflammatory bowel disease, ulcerative colitis, Crohn's disease, irritable bowel.

Study just came out in JAMA surgery, one of our big journals this year, that the higher rates of colon cancer we're seeing and people underage 50. there was an association between those individuals being born by a C-section. Wow. So we can't blow off these giant blind spots in medicine where there's good scientific study to tell us what we should be trying to do. Right. I had two C-sections first and then a vaginal birth, which is kind of rare.

But I was definitely with my first birth, one of those people that was pressured in all different kinds of ways and told, and there was no medical reason, but I was made to feel because I was close to 41 weeks. The nudges. Yes, I was close to 41 weeks and they dropped the, oh, maybe you'll have a stillborn baby thing, which there was no indication of that at all. She was perfectly healthy and not even that big. But of course, you hear that as a first time mom. If you as a doctor tell a woman in labor anywhere in the world, a C-section might be safer for your baby, then 100% of women are going to say, well, then do it right now, right? It's manipulation. if it's not based on good scientific data.

Same thing with an old man whose knee bothers them and the doctor wants to do a knee replacement. If you say, hey, you've got bone on bone, which is a well-known phrase that's thrown out there, even though bone is normally on bone. But, you know, I think there's a way of representing things in a different way. Yeah. Like it's grinding when it may not be grinding bone-on-bone. Then they're going to say do a knee replacement. Right.

and we got a blood vessel that has a blockage. We can open it up. Okay, sometimes, yes, that's necessary, but a study came out in one of our big journals after the 15-year golden era of putting in heart stents showing no improvement in survival to heart stents unless you're having an acute heart attack. It can relieve the symptoms of angina, but it's called the courage trial, found that most of these stents we were putting in were unnecessary. Some were life-saving, but most were unnecessary. And we can tell now from the research what the criteria should be. So we don't have a good, when we use good scientific evidence, we shine as a profession. We help a lot of people. But when we wing it, in a small group of medical elites in the oligarchy,

issue broad recommendations for everyone based on their gut feeling, we have a lousy track record, food pyramid, opioids, peanut allergies, hormone replacement therapy for women, we have a lousy track record. Well, it doesn't seem like health care is going to get better, at least right now in the very near future in the United States. Hopefully there will be improvements as we have people like Dr. McCarrie speaking up about the things that matter. But right now, you need to make sure that you are taking care of. If for whatever reason you cannot get the medications that you rely on, antibiotics that you need. If you get an infection, you want an emergency stash of these things. That's why Jace Medical exists. When you go to Jace.com slash Alley, you can go through their

confidential telemedicine process. You can buy a Jace case, which is a stash of emergency antibiotics that you might need for an infection. You can add on things like an Epipin or Ivermectin or you can get Jase daily, which is a year-long supply of the daily prescriptions that you and your family rely on. So go to jase.com slash alley. You'll get a discount on your order with my link, jasee.com slash alley. There's a lot of group think and there's a lot of pharmaceutical funding, but also it seems like insurance and fear of being sued plays into doctors' decisions, especially when it comes

to C-section and vaginal birth. It seems like a lot of OBGYNs are just so scared of any risk. And so they choose the most interventionist option thinking if I have the most control over this, which in a C-section, you, I guess theoretically, a doctor does have the most control over it. They're thinking this is best for me. Not necessarily best for the mom and baby, but this is best for me. Now, maybe I'm reading too far into that and I'm giving them too much malicious intent. But that's what it seems. It seems like there is a structure there where a lot of doctors are operating. not, you know, pun not intended, out of fear. We have appropriateness criteria that we've developed on my research team where we can profile doctors now by their C-section rate in low-risk deliveries, an important distinction. If your C-section rate in low-risk deliveries is over 40 percent, that's indefensible, okay?

And we know the factors that are involved. It might be a little bit of fear of litigation, but some really good doctors have C-section rates of 12 to 19 percent. What are they, do they not have lawyers in their community? No, of course they do. But they're confident in the criteria that they're using and they know they can defend their decisions. So I think a lot of times we might hide behind the medical legal fear, but OB is a hard

discipline. I think it's one of the hardest jobs in all of medicine because you're up all night and catnapping. And so it can be easier for the doctor or nurse. who's managing the care to say, let's just do a C-section. It's 11 o'clock. I mean, I like to assume the best in physicians, but we've looked at the data nationally. And about a quarter of OB doctors have C-section rates in low-risk deliveries that are unacceptably too high, according to our high-risk OB doctors at Johns Hopkins. We've run the data by them, and they say, yes, we've got this problem.

When you have spine surgeons in America saying that half of elective... spine surgery for back pain is unnecessary. Wow. That is a crisis. I don't do spine surgery, but when you have people who do that saying, hey, this is what's happening in our field, when you have cardiologists saying that half of the peripheral stents, the stents that go in leg arteries now, sometimes with no indications, that's the new Wild West of medicine, they'll find a little plaque in a leg artery, which everybody has by the time you're 70. So, oh, we're going to open that up a little bit, help with your circulation. When they say half of those are unnecessary, when you've got pediatricians saying that half of the antibiotics prescribed are unnecessary,

these are issues that we've only been talking about in our doctor's lounges. And now we're saying, hey, the public needs to be educated. The antibiotics, for example, carpet bomb that microbiome, that equilibrium. And a study at a Mayo Clinic, this is an amazing study. Mind if I share it with you? Yeah, please. I think it was the most amazing study of the last 10 years. Now, I'm always combing the medical literature. That's what we do on our research team. And I was blown away that this study did not get more attention.

Didn't get any attention, really. They looked at, at the Mayo Clinic, they looked at 14,000 kids. They compared kids who got antibiotics in the first couple years of life to kids who did not, recognizing that antibiotics carpet bomb and alter the microbiome balance in the gut. kids who took an antibiotic in the first couple years of life had a 20% higher rate of obesity, 21% higher rate of learning disabilities, all of which have been going up in the modern era of antibiotics and C-sections and ultra-processed foods, a 32% higher rate of attention deficit disorder, a 90% higher rate of asthma, and nearly a 300% higher rate of psiliac. And the more doses of antibiotics that someone took, the more courses of antibiotics that child took,

the greater the risk of each of those chronic diseases. We're altering the microbiome in ways we don't appreciate. We're messing with mother nature. And when a kid needs an antibiotic, an antibiotic can save a life. It can do amazing things, prevent hearing loss. But 60% of antibiotics are unnecessary. And when there's a dogma that, oh, you might not help you, but it won't hurt you. No, it's affecting the microbiome.

And by the way, farmers have seen this for decades. If you give antibiotics routinely to animals, they're fatter. And the world expert of the microbiome, who I interviewed for the book, actually said, if this is happening to animals, what's to doing to children? And he did the studies. He did all the animals stays. And sure enough, you hear. about people eating a perfect diet and they can't lose weight, maybe their microbiome has been

altered. We have a tendency to blame people for all these chronic diseases in medicine. Maybe we've been giving people the wrong information that, saying antibiotics won't hurt you. Maybe we've been poisoning the food supply. Maybe we've been ignoring these giant blind spots of pesticides and ultra-processed foods and seed oil derivatives and microplastics. And maybe it's not their fault. Okay, we like to blame people and we have this old model in medicine. If you come in and, you know, eat better and exercise more, we usually give out the misinformation that you should switch to a low-fat diet.

Not true. No health benefits there, right? Saturated fat does not cause heart disease from any legitimate study that's ever been done. And it's not for lack of trying to look at it. it. And then you come back in six months and we say you're a bad, bad, noncompliant patient. And we throw meds at people. Doctors hate this system. Patients hate this system. So why are we doing it? Yeah. We've got to get off the hamster wheel and ask what is going on here. Last sponsor for the day is Birch Gold. Did you know there is nearly $1 trillion of infrastructure and pandemic funds yet to be spent.

there's a massive amount of money that the lame duck administration that we have right now is pushing really hard to spend in their last few months, which means that we could see another prolonged inflation surge just like we did during COVID. And so you need to make sure that you have your savings protected. Protect your IRA or 401k by investing in gold. Birch gold makes it seamless to roll over your retirement account while preserving your tax advantaged status. Get your free info kit on gold today by texting Alley to 989898.9.9.8. That's Allie to 98-98. I've got a few questions about the antibiotic subject. One, can you give us just a definition of microbiome? I know it has something to do with the gut, but when you say that something is altering a microbiome, what does that mean? So microbiome are millions of different bacteria that line the GI tract from the mouth all the way to the anus.

And they're involved in digestion. Think of them as good bacteria. They're normally in every gut, in every human being. And they live in a balance. Some of them are pro-inflammatory. And if you kill some of the bacteria, maybe the pro-inflammatory or bad bacteria can overgrow. And we have kind of seen the consequences of some of this stuff.

We've seen kids who get antibiotics all the time in childhood, sometimes come in with intractable chronic abdominal pain. And we don't know what to do with it in modern medicine. So we assign these diagnoses, irritable bowel syndrome, bacterial overgrowth syndrome. In a very clear way in the hospital, we see one of these fatal types of bacterial overgrowth called a C-DIF infection, where, and we'll see this every couple months in the hospital in my department. We'll see somebody take a nemoxicillin for something minor.

maybe it was necessary usually it's not and then it kills some of the bacteria and the clostridium difficile strain of bacteria in the gut normally there will overgrow and grow out of control and actually it can become so toxic people die and we used to remove the colon in this emergency setting to try to rid the infection because sometimes no antibiotic works against it that's an extreme acute example but it's going on at a lower level every day in America when kids go in the school lunch program and they're eating all this processed food and milk where we take out natural fat, which we shouldn't be doing. We take out the natural fat and we add sugar. We're taking something out naturally. We're adding something that we know increases general body inflammation.

And how does messing with the microbiome, like you talked about, C-section rates, but also antibiotics, messing with a microbiome, that can then lead to a greater propensity for obesity. How does that work? We don't know. But what we do know is that some of the bacteria are involved in digestion of food. And we got millions of bacteria. We never really could study it before the modern era of DNA sequencing. Now you can take a sample and you can say, here are the 500 bacteria in the sample that we looked at. Let's look at the distribution and the diversity of bacteria. Let's look at do they have high levels of bacteria A and B. So we're starting now to understand it, but some of the bacteria also produce GLP1,

the active ingredient in OZempic. As you know, it's a natural hormone. It's produced in the body and at low levels by the microbiome. So there's more research going on. There are studies that have shown probiotics of a certain kind have helped treat bipolar. That was a study out of Shepard Pratt. Some of the mental illness may be a function of the change in serotonin production from the gut. Yeah. So we're seeing a whole new field now of probiotics where we're trying to understand can we try to restore a more normal microbiome. Well, that's what I was going to ask, you know, for, oh gosh, which way, which way do I? Okay, let's see. Let me ask me one last antibiotics question and then I'll ask you about healing the microbiome. So you said that I think you said 60% of

antibiotics are unnecessary, deemed unnecessary. Yes. Outpatient, yeah. How in the world can a parent know because, okay, I go to the doctor and thankfully my kids really haven't needed antibiotics. Praise the Lord. But if I go to the doctor and my kid is just crying because of an ear infection, you can tell it hurts. And the doctor says, yeah, this is a bad ear infection. But, okay, say your baby is eight months old. You really don't want to give antibiotics. Yeah. Like, it just seems like a lot of responsibility for a parent to know when an antibiotic is really necessary or not. Yeah. So what are we supposed to do? Look, this is why a bunch of us as doctors are trying to go directly to the public and educate them.

on these topics. So someone needs to look in the child's ear. It's a lost art. Sometimes you go to these urgent care centers. They don't even know what they're looking at if they even do look at the ear. If you do telemedicine, sometimes they can't even look in the ear and they're prescribing antibiotics. If it's a viral infection, if it's what we call cirrusotitis media, they don't see any evidence of a bacterial type infection. They don't see the posture of the other bacterial signs. You can take all the antibiotics in the world. It's not going to help. Yeah, the kid is miserable, but it's not going to help. So we've lost clinical excellence in American medicine.

We've got to distinguish the bacterial from the viral otitis media. Same with upper respiratory infections. If it's a strep throat, they may benefit from rapid use of antibiotics. If it's viral as most upper respiratory infections are, it doesn't matter. It's probably just going to alter your microbiome. And it's sad because we see kids late in the teenage years come in with these chronic abdominal ailments. And the moms think, what could I, we know, how could I have possibly prevented this? How could this happen to my little boy or girl? Well, you've been feeding

them ultra-processed food their entire life. You've given them 12 courses of antibiotics. Maybe they only needed one or two. And so the average 10-year-old in America has already had 11 courses of antibiotics. The average two-year-old has had three courses of antibiotics. So we've got to address the appropriateness of care with good clinical excellence. And parents should know that if the kid appears to have a viral infection or the doc says, look, it looks viral. The antibiotics are here for you to take, but they're probably not going to help. You want to think twice because they're not totally benign. Nothing in medicine is totally benign without side effects. So healing the microbiome, whether it's been damaged because of processed foods or antibiotics or whatever it is.

You mentioned probiotics. Yeah. What else can someone do to try to fix that part of their body? It's very difficult. Eat healthy. Eat things grown out of the ground with good soil and are not loaded with pesticides. Avoid unnecessary C-sections. Avoid ultra-processed foods. Seed oils, and I know you mentioned that, try to avoid those because of the inflammation, right? Yeah, all those things are increasing inflammation, all of that. And you want to reduce your general body inflammation. In 50 years or 100 years, we're going to be talking about health in terms of how's your inflammation? Are you high, medium, or low? There'll be better ways to test for

inflammation. Most diseases are inflammatory diseases, inflammatory bowel disease, arthritis, Heart disease is inflammation of the coronary artery wall. That's what enables the small, dense lipoproteins to embed in form plaques. So inflammation is the root of so much of health. And yet we spend almost no time talking about it in medical school. We don't talk about at all the association with what we eat or any of the stuff we're talking about. But the probiotics are popular. The question is which ones help and which ones are just going through your system.

and they're just a waste of money. Right. Most go right through your system. And we're starting to understand which ones, and we're starting to study which ones may actually help. I tell people to maybe try different things if they're really desperate. We have people who have such an altered microbiome. They desperately want to try to heal it.

Maybe try some different probiotics. You've got to give it a chance for a little bit. We're going to see more products coming on the market soon. But it's hard. The best way to address. an altered microbiome is to prevent it from being altered. Right. Okay, tell us a little bit, which I know that we've been talking about it basically,

but tell us more explicitly about your book, Blind Spots, when medicine gets it wrong in what it means for our health. So there are so many exciting areas of research and medicine right now where we're learning incredible things, like about the microbiome. And the public is not even aware. Doctors are not even aware of the new research. because we're kind of in this myopic tunnel. We are hyper-specialized.

We've got our own lane in medicine. No one's really putting the whole thing together, with the exception of some functional medicine doctors and good primary care doctors. So there's a lot of exciting research that is coming up right now in medicine that directly applies to everything we do as doctors. But when I show it to my colleagues at Johns Hopkins,

they're blown away by it and they've never heard of it. So if they've never heard of this research, maybe this is a good opportunity to educate both the medical community about the research studies and the general public. For example, there's probably no medication that has improved the health of a population more than hormone replacement therapy started around the time of menopause, arguably with the exception of antibiotics, which save lives. hormone replacement therapy cuts the rate of heart attacks in half.

Wow. It reduces cognitive decline after menopause by 50 to 60%. In one study, it prevented Alzheimer's 35% by 35%. Bones are stronger. If a woman falls, they're far less likely to break a bone or have a hip fracture or need surgery. Their bones are stronger. So you're talking about testosterone? We're talking about estrogen.

Estrogen. Or estrogen plus progestone. With menopause, you're losing estrogen, so you're replacing the estrogen that's being lost through menopause. That's right. You're replacing the natural hormone that your body produces. Okay. A woman will stop producing it or markedly reduce the production around 45 to 57 years of age.

Okay. They'll 80% will know it because they'll have symptoms of menopause, hot flashes, night sweats, mood swings, weight gain. There's like a hundred symptoms of menopause. It's amazing. tragically, women are more likely to get prescribed an antidepressant if they come in with menopause than they are replacing the body's natural estrogen with estradial and plus progesterone depending on the situation of the individual. So what we call hormone replacement therapy for women who go through menopause,

starting it within several years of menopause, has these dramatic health benefits, reducing cognitive decline, heart disease, improving bone strength. maybe even reduce cancer rates. But tragically, the reason why 80% of doctors do not recommend it or will scare women out of it is because 22 years ago, an NIH scientist announced in a press conference that he had just completed a study that showed that hormone replacement therapy for postmenopausal women causes breast cancer. He didn't release his data.

And when you actually look at the table of the study, once it was, you know, you're not, public, after all the media headlines, after the medical community was convinced he was right, after women flush their hormone therapy down the toilet because they were scared, turns out there was no statistically significant increase in breast cancer or breast cancer mortality. Wow. Yet to this day, women are denied this incredible therapy that enables them to live longer and feel better. on average women live three and a half years longer in one study's estimate.

Wow. Fifty million women have been denied the benefits of hormone replacement therapy because of one guy at the NIH who misled the public and I interviewed him in his retirement for the book Blind Spots and had a very enlightening conversation about him, ended up talking to others who were involved, and they told him before he made the announcement, you can't do this. you will create so much fear because everyone's scared of cancer. If you dangle something as sensitive as breast cancer in front of women around and associated with hormone therapy, you will do tremendous damage and you may never be able to put the genie back in the bottle.

Yeah. And that's tragically what happened. Wow. But now the truth is coming to light, which is part of why you wrote this book. That's right. All the blind spots that the medical industry has. Thank you so much. Thank you for the work that you do and for the courage.

that you have. I really encourage everyone to go out and get this. We're going to put the link to this to blind spots in the description of this episode on YouTube or wherever you're listening so you can get to it easily. We need this book to be number one. Number one on Amazon, we need another New York Times bestseller. All the questions that I asked about, like, how do patients take charge? How do parents take charge? Books like this help us do that. It equips us, it gives us the confidence to walk into our doctor's office and to advocate for ourselves. based not just on our feelings and suspicions, but based on facts and science. So thank you so much, Dr. McCarie. Thank you, Allie. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.