Dr. Marty McCary is a Johns Hopkins School of Medicine professor and 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 and What It Means for Our Health. This is a fascinating look at corruption in medicine and why 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.
00:01:28.680I think you've written a few books, right?
00:01:30.960I've had a great career at Johns Hopkins where I've been a surgeon and public health researcher.
00:01:36.340I've written a lot of articles in the scientific literature.
00:01:39.800I'm a researcher primarily, and I've written a couple books on the healthcare system and the medical establishment, trying to challenge them and push the field a little bit.
00:01:51.020And you have two New York bestsellers, New York Times bestsellers, right?
00:01:57.180You've got Unaccountable and The Price We Pay.
00:02:00.520Tell us a little bit about those books and why you read them.
00:02:02.440So Unaccountable was kind of my stories from residency and my early days of being a doctor that I would tell my dad, and he was a doc.
00:02:09.600And he said, write these down because people forget what it's like and it perpetuates a cycle of abuse.
00:02:16.540So that was a fun book to write, and it was turned into the TV series called The Resident, which ran six seasons on Fox.
00:02:24.040And then the second book was really quality, the issue of quality in medicine.
00:02:32.240And so it was called The Price We Pay, and it called for price transparency in healthcare and identified this practice of price gouging patients and hospitals doing predatory billing.
00:02:45.200And the advocacy we did to stop that and try to address it.
00:02:50.300So 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.
00:03:04.840I mean, most things in healthcare are bipartisan.
00:03:07.340We're all against corruption, and we want better health, and we want to address the big topics we're not talking about.
00:03:12.900So you've cared about healthcare corruption and what you've seen within the healthcare bureaucracy long before the days of COVID.
00:03:20.380You were writing books about this, caring about this.
00:03:23.420But 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.
00:03:31.360I don't want there to be any retribution.
00:03:34.040I don't want to put the energy into that.
00:03:36.180So why did you decide to start writing about corruption in the healthcare industry?
00:03:39.460I think we've done a terrible thing to doctors in this country.
00:03:43.060We'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.
00:03:54.560You're going to medicate or operate at late stages.
00:03:57.600And we haven't given doctors the time to address these problems, the resources to get into the root causes of disease.
00:04:05.140And we evaluate doctors on this hamster wheel of work units.
00:04:22.120And we have this broken system where they're just basically told, keep your head down and don't look around at what's going on.
00:04:31.120But if you look around at what's going on, we have a terrible track record.
00:04:37.720We are watching rates of autism go up by 14% every year.
00:04:42.200Half of children are obese or overweight.
00:04:44.300A quarter have diabetes or prediabetes now.
00:04:46.860Cancer rates have doubled in some areas like my field of pancreatic cancer.
00:04:51.920Rates have doubled in the last two years.
00:04:55.040No one in our research group at Johns Hopkins or our pancreas center, which is the biggest pancreas center in the country, has ever stopped to ask why.
00:06:02.840And as you get deep in the belly of the beast in medicine, as I've gone as far as you can go in academic medicine, you realize no one is talking about this stuff because the agenda is driven by groupthink 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 playing whack-a-mole at the end of chronic disease.
00:06:31.160So a group of us are now saying we want to go directly to the public and teach them about health.
00:06:37.480It's Casey Means, Peter Atiyah, Vinay Prasad, Zubin Damani.
00:06:40.840We're all going out there and we're saying enough is enough.
00:06:48.860And 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.
00:07:07.440So 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.
00:07:18.340And 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.
00:07:28.200So 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.
00:07:39.760So I know that you listed a lot of different things, a lot of chronic illnesses and problems that the American people are dealing with.
00:07:47.040But I guess just from a broad view, why, why do we see sperm counts going down?
00:07:52.980Why do we see, it seems like, increased rates of infertility in both men and women?
00:07:58.200Why 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?
00:08:08.440Why is all that happening if we are so overmedicated and the medical industry has a lot of money?
00:08:14.600Well, there's actually a big body of medical research on this that the medical establishment has overlooked.
00:08:20.940So when they make their guidelines, they're cherry-picking research or they're making stuff up sometimes, as we saw during COVID.
00:08:27.680The body of research out there is pretty clear that the 5 billion gallons of pesticides plus that we pour on our food supply has estrogen-like binding properties.
00:08:39.760These pesticides have hormonal effects.
00:08:42.080They're altering the bacteria in the gut called the microbiome that's important in health and mood.
00:08:48.620Some of those bacteria produce serotonin, making a connection between mental health and the gut.
00:08:54.840And the ultra-processed food is essentially now chemicals that don't appear in nature.
00:09:02.140You just look at seed oil derivatives.
00:09:04.040They are reacting with the immune system because the body doesn't recognize it.
00:09:09.100So the gut has an immune system along its lining.
00:09:12.240It's a big concentration of the body's immune system.
00:09:14.500And when you are ingesting microplastics, for example, which have estrogen-binding properties.
00:09:21.920And what does estrogen-binding property mean?
00:09:24.720So the substances, the glycophosphates, the carbamates, these ingredients in the pesticides, for example, have partial...
00:09:37.540They can partially bind to the estrogen receptors.
00:09:40.940And, of course, estrogen is one of the sex hormones in the body.
00:09:44.180So 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.
00:11:13.660So it's so obvious that we've got some pieces of the puzzle that fit together.
00:11:18.420The medical establishment is not interested.
00:11:21.180The NIH is more focused on chemical pathways they can block with drugs.
00:11:25.360And 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.
00:11:40.180We've got to go directly to the public.
00:11:41.520When people ask for organic foods, when they want to buy food that's not prepared in plastic, for example, that helps move markets.
00:11:51.300And we're starting to see demand for that stuff.
00:11:54.040The NIH needs to realize the H in NIH stands for health.
00:11:57.760It's not just drugs and things that increase the throughput of the medical industrial complex.
00:12:04.980And Francis Collins has been the head of the NIH for a long time.
00:12:09.380I had Megan Basham on my podcast, and he's an evangelical.
00:12:12.760He's been hoisted up by a lot of Christian leaders.
00:12:14.820But 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.
00:12:23.360The NIH has had a disgraceful track record.
00:12:28.040If you look at their study on transgender treatments in 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?
00:12:47.860In the UK, they've banned puberty blockers.
00:12:51.040The 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.
00:13:03.780We're flying blind, and we can't be putting—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.
00:13:18.340And we got a little peek of that during COVID, but I agree.
00:14:50.800Would you say that it is fair to state, 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?
00:15:14.760Because 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.
00:15:30.620I think a lot of it's just groupthink.
00:15:32.760Now, certainly there's no incentive to look into highly engineered foods that are addictive and bad for you.
00:15:39.820The food scientists are laughing at the American public.
00:15:49.760They 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.
00:16:01.400And we've got all these kids and people with low energy and sickness, and they can't pay attention after lunch.
00:16:07.860Maybe we need to look at the school lunch programs and not just put every kid on Ozempic.
00:16:12.620Maybe we need to talk about treating high blood pressure with addressing sleep quality and stress management, not just putting people on antihypertensives.
00:16:28.000So we've got to talk about food as 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 whole host of chronic diseases that we just didn't see before the modern era.
00:16:47.400So I think there's a lot of groupthink.
00:16:51.880When you have at the top of the NIH these old dinosaur professors that are funding research, guess what they're funding?
00:17:00.840Things 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.
00:17:13.640And so we keep funding these small, incremental, tiny discoveries on these legacy ideas that sometimes are not proving to be worthwhile.
00:17:27.060So let's say you're a smart medical student, and you go in, and you've got big ideas.
00:17:31.420Let's say you think like a Ben Franklin thinker.
00:17:34.280You want to think about the food supply and all these chronic diseases and how we fund research, and you're a big thinker.
00:17:42.900When 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.
00:17:53.520And that's why we're not really looking into these big topics.
00:17:58.300So my research team at Johns Hopkins is funded by philanthropists.
00:18:02.280We study whatever we think is important is going to make an impact.
00:18:06.220And that's why we've been able to address natural immunity during COVID and the opioid epidemic in real time.
00:18:13.020We don't have to wait for the NIH to pivot.
00:18:22.600Some of the things that we ate for breakfast that I guess we just, I don't know, we just didn't think about it.
00:18:29.060We didn't know, like, the Reese's Puffs cereal, the Lucky Charms, the, I would have, like, Rice Krispie cereal, and then just put, like, I don't know, a whole tablespoon of sugar in there and mix it up.
00:18:45.800But 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.
00:19:01.800Especially, you know, unless you're making all of your own snacks, it can be really difficult.
00:19:06.420But I do think that we are a lot more educated and empowered than maybe a few decades ago.
00:19:12.320And I do see that as kind of a positive development that seemed to come out of COVID.
00:19:18.160Like, 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.
00:19:33.960Yeah, 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.
00:19:57.980It's how the meat is prepared or raised.
00:20:00.080And 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.
00:20:21.440I mean, I remember in med school, one of the first days in anatomy, we dissected the cadaver and you would see in some of the cadavers, the lung is black.
00:21:41.560And I started hearing my pediatrician saying, you know, as soon as she turns six months and they tell us that they're good to go for the COVID vaccine, then we can see about that.
00:23:00.340But a lot of them feel like they don't even have one they can rely on to answer their questions.
00:23:04.700Well, the medical establishment has done a lot of damage.
00:23:07.420And 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.
00:23:16.240And they put out a recommendation that might be their opinion, but they put it out there with such absolutism.
00:23:22.840And that is very damaging because people are smart.
00:23:26.020And eventually, in the case of COVID, they got curious.
00:23:29.240And they asked very deep and nuanced questions that exposed the medical establishment, like natural immunity.
00:23:36.100Why does a toddler need to wear a cloth mask for nearly two years?
00:23:39.420Does it really have no impact on development?
00:23:42.520A 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.
00:23:54.020So when they said, oh, there's absolutely no downside to it, which was the response of the medical establishment when I wrote a piece titled The Case Against Masking Children in the Wall Street Journal.
00:24:11.440Yeah, I mean, it's like you're not allowed to have this discussion.
00:24:13.920The medical establishment has made up their mind and they've issued their decrees.
00:24:17.920And 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.
00:24:26.340And then, hey, there's other doctors who are speaking up and they have platforms and they're getting out there and they're on television and they're talking on podcasts and they're writing articles.
00:24:41.020And then they moved to the censorship step.
00:24:44.020So 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.
00:24:58.020And 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.
00:25:11.160And then they censor the doctors through big tech who oppose this recommendation.
00:25:16.940That is a very dangerous thing when you're dealing with a new medication that you're requiring every person in America to take through mandates.
00:25:26.680And then you're silencing the opposition.
00:25:31.980And I think people are seeing through it.
00:25:34.300They'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.
00:26:10.780So as we're talking about the craziness of the healthcare industry and we're thinking about just all of the complexities that have been heaped on patients,
00:26:20.760you want to try to alleviate that stress as much as possible.
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00:27:50.460The 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 COVID.
00:28:15.560But they issued a recommendation in the year 2000 in response to parents asking, how do I prevent my kid from getting a peanut allergy?
00:28:26.740They 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.
00:28:52.340They ignored a giant body of research on immune tolerance, what we call oral tolerance, or the dirt theory.
00:28:59.420When you're exposed to something early in life, your immune system tolerates it later.
00:29:05.060They got it perfectly backwards, and what happened was a couple years into that recommendation, peanut allergies went from rare and mild, which is what it was a generation prior, to more and more common.
00:29:20.000And we saw a new type of allergy, this severe anaphylactic reaction.
00:29:23.460A kid can stop breathing just being near a peanut butter, even if they're not consuming it.
00:29:30.220That's how much we sensitized the immune system in these kids who did peanut abstinence.
00:29:36.580So 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?
00:29:51.220We have anti-science mothers out there.
00:29:53.600We need to make sure no kid has peanut exposure early.
00:29:57.320Fast forward 15 years, and the randomized trial, the official study gets done, showing they got it perfectly backwards.
00:30:06.420You 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.
00:30:17.120In 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.
00:30:44.680They 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 a little milk.
00:31:00.500At age two, you can introduce a little eggs.
00:31:02.280And at age three, you can introduce a little bit of peanut butter.
00:31:05.480That was known as the one, two, three.
00:31:14.500I have a family member who was told, you know, he was allergic to peanut butter when he was a baby.
00:31:18.360Of 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.
00:31:28.940But 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.
00:31:36.720And I don't completely understand exactly how it works, but basically that keeps his peanut allergy at bay.
00:31:43.680And I'm not telling everyone out there to try that.
00:31:45.980This is what the doctor told him to do.
00:31:49.760And what's also interesting is that one of my kids was told, you know, we tested for an allergy, was told she had a peanut allergy one year.
00:31:57.700And then the next year we went back to test and it no longer came up as an allergy.
00:32:02.500I 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.
00:32:19.280And 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 to recognize it.
00:32:29.120Five months was better than six months.
00:32:50.920You 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.
00:32:56.120And 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.
00:33:01.840Here's what is really safe or unsafe during pregnancy, what we can eat and all of that.
00:33:06.540And 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.
00:33:18.100The 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.
00:33:27.300It 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.
00:33:37.400Yes, healthy mom, healthy baby, but there's more to that.
00:33:41.080That's something that you've seen too, misinformation in that area.
00:33:44.500Yeah, we've seen the groupthink and medicine downplay these best practices in childbirth that we now recognize have dramatic benefits.
00:33:55.300A delayed clamping of the umbilical cord once the baby is born.
00:33:58.980That umbilical cord is pulsating healthy stem cells and fetal hemoglobin, which binds oxygen really well.
00:34:09.060And it's warm blood infused directly into the child's circulation to keep the baby warm.
00:34:15.220As 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.