Sometimes it feels like we’re still pulling out of a Covid coma grappling with how much our medical authorities got wrong. Dr. Marty Makary says that adds to a long pre-Covid list. He is a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Dr. Makary says “Blind Spots” in his profession created the opiod epidemic and got virtually everything wrong about diet, resulting in making America fatter and less healthy. We interviewed him before he was confirmed as President Trump’s head of the FDA.

The following is a transcript of a report from “Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson.”
Watch the video by clicking the link at the end of the page.

Sharyl: What is your basic philosophy on healthcare?

Dr. Marty Makary: We in medicine have to start talking about these giant blind spots. We’ve gotta talk about food as medicine. We can’t just fund chemotherapy drugs and let pharma control the healthcare field and all of research and discovery. We have the most medicated generation in the history of the world and we can keep throwing more meds at people. Or we can actually take a step back and talk about general body inflammation and the microbiome and environmental exposures that cause cancer, not just the chemotherapy to treat it. So these are the big questions that a new generation of doctors are asking. They don’t get funding or support from the government and the NIH and the traditional academic oligarchy, but they are doing work now and making discoveries that are turning modern medicine upside down.

Sharyl: To what do you attribute what you call “Blind Spots”? Because these are things our doctors should know about. Are they not taught in medical school? Are you guys not taught to look for answers to these problems rather than just treatments?

Makary: Medical school is totally broken because we take these bright, creative young minds and we beat them with this memorized regurgitation mindset and they lose this sense of awareness and, and interpersonal skills and the ability to be compassionate sometimes and to talk the language of everyday folks. And the biggest problem in medicine today is that we don’t have the ability to say: ‘I don’t know’ when the right answer is ‘I don’t know’ many times. There’s two types of doctors, those that have humility, that use basic scientific principles that are clinical wisdom and they win the trust of their patients. And there are others that are just reciting some catechism from an organized medical elite that says, ‘you gotta drink three glasses of cow’s milk a day’ or whatever the recommendation is that’s based on dogma. So when modern medicine uses good clinical studies and scientific principles, we shine. We help a lot of people. When we make recommendations based on opinion things we just make up. We have a lousy track record and we can harm a lot of people.

Sharyl: What would you say is the takeaway for people if, if there is one coming from “Blind Spots”?

Makary: When we listen to rank-and-file doctors who are using their wisdom and basic scientific principles, we shine as a profession. We can help a lot of people and we win the trust of our communities. But when we make stuff up and we get it wrong time and time again and we don’t have the humility to say, I don’t know when we don’t know or we got it wrong, we told you the wrong thing, then we lose a tremendous amount of trust. And right now in America we have an epidemic of distrust and it’s gonna hurt people.

Sharyl (on-camera): Also in his new book, “Blind Spots”, Dr. Makary talks about the government’s stance on bird flu.

Watch video here.