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

00:00:00.760 Dr. Marty McCary is a Johns Hopkins School of Medicine professor.

00:00:05.840 He is also a member of the National Academy of Medicine.

00:00:09.160 You probably recognize his name from his New York Times bestselling books.

00:00:14.140 He was also an outspoken critic of mask mandates for children during the COVID era.

00:00:20.220 And he's just written a new book called Blind Spots,

00:00:22.640 When Medicine Gets It Wrong and What It Means for Our Health.

00:00:25.440 This is a fascinating look at corruption in medicine and why the medical industry purposely overlooks the importance of the microbiome

00:00:35.900 and how people can take care of their health and reverse the trend of chronic disease in this country by caring for our gut,

00:00:44.740 by caring for ourselves, by paying attention to the things we are consuming and what we are doing

00:00:51.340 to make ourselves more or less susceptible to disease.

00:00:56.040 This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers.

00:00:58.580 Go to GoodRanchers.com.

00:01:00.120 Use code Allie at checkout. 1.00

00:01:01.340 That's GoodRanchers.com, code Allie.

00:01:13.080 Dr. McCary, thanks so much.

00:01:14.660 Great to be with you, Allie.

00:01:15.640 Yes, for taking the time to join us.

00:01:17.460 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?

00:01:23.420 I'm a simple country doctor blessed with many friends.

00:01:26.880 Okay, that's it?

00:01:27.980 That's all?

00:01:28.680 I think you've written a few books, right?

00:01:30.960 I've had a great career at Johns Hopkins where I've been a surgeon and public health researcher.

00:01:36.340 I've written a lot of articles in the scientific literature.

00:01:39.800 I'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.

00:01:51.020 And you have two New York bestsellers, New York Times bestsellers, right?

00:01:57.180 You've got Unaccountable and The Price We Pay.

00:02:00.520 Tell us a little bit about those books and why you read them.

00:02:02.440 So 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.

00:02:09.600 And he said, write these down because people forget what it's like and it perpetuates a cycle of abuse.

00:02:16.540 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.

00:02:24.040 And then the second book was really quality, the issue of quality in medicine.

00:02:30.680 The second book was price.

00:02:32.240 And 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.

00:02:45.200 And the advocacy we did to stop that and try to address it.

00:02:50.300 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.

00:03:04.080 It's bipartisan.

00:03:04.840 I mean, most things in healthcare are bipartisan.

00:03:07.340 We're all against corruption, and we want better health, and we want to address the big topics we're not talking about.

00:03:12.900 So you've cared about healthcare corruption and what you've seen within the healthcare bureaucracy long before the days of COVID.

00:03:20.380 You were writing books about this, caring about this.

00:03:23.420 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.

00:03:31.360 I don't want there to be any retribution.

00:03:34.040 I don't want to put the energy into that.

00:03:36.180 So why did you decide to start writing about corruption in the healthcare industry?

00:03:39.460 I think we've done a terrible thing to doctors in this country.

00:03:43.060 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.

00:03:54.560 You're going to medicate or operate at late stages.

00:03:57.600 And we haven't given doctors the time to address these problems, the resources to get into the root causes of disease.

00:04:05.140 And we evaluate doctors on this hamster wheel of work units.

00:04:11.300 And so it's all about throughput.

00:04:13.180 And it's atrocious because doctors are very creative, bright people who go into the field out of sense of compassion.

00:04:21.040 I mean, they're amazing people.

00:04:22.120 And 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.

00:04:31.120 But if you look around at what's going on, we have a terrible track record.

00:04:37.720 We are watching rates of autism go up by 14% every year.

00:04:42.200 Half of children are obese or overweight.

00:04:44.300 A quarter have diabetes or prediabetes now.

00:04:46.860 Cancer rates have doubled in some areas like my field of pancreatic cancer.

00:04:51.920 Rates have doubled in the last two years.

00:04:55.040 No 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.

00:05:07.340 Why is this cancer doubling?

00:05:10.400 So we've got to zoom out and ask, what are we doing?

00:05:14.040 We've got the most over-medicated generation in human history.

00:05:17.760 We've got mental illness diagnoses being assigned liberally.

00:05:23.740 And in some cases, it's the medicalization of ordinary life.

00:05:27.960 We've got oppositional defiant disorders, one of our diagnoses.

00:05:33.720 I mean, what is that?

00:05:35.320 A kid disagrees or doesn't agree with an adult and that we give them a medical diagnosis and medicate them?

00:05:42.760 So we've got to take a step back.

00:05:44.960 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.

00:05:52.600 Sperm counts are 50% lower today than what they were just 50 years ago.

00:05:59.900 Wait a minute.

00:06:00.600 Who's working on this?

00:06:01.600 Who's talking about this?

00:06:02.840 And 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.

00:06:31.160 So a group of us are now saying we want to go directly to the public and teach them about health.

00:06:37.480 It's Casey Means, Peter Atiyah, Vinay Prasad, Zubin Damani.

00:06:40.840 We're all going out there and we're saying enough is enough.

00:06:43.460 The system is broken.

00:06:45.160 We're good at emergency care.

00:06:47.040 We're terrible at chronic diseases.

00:06:48.860 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.

00:07:07.440 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.

00:07:18.340 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.

00:07:28.200 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.

00:07:39.760 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.

00:07:47.040 But I guess just from a broad view, why, why do we see sperm counts going down?

00:07:52.980 Why do we see, it seems like, increased rates of infertility in both men and women?

00:07:58.200 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?

00:08:08.440 Why is all that happening if we are so overmedicated and the medical industry has a lot of money?

00:08:14.600 Well, there's actually a big body of medical research on this that the medical establishment has overlooked.

00:08:20.940 So when they make their guidelines, they're cherry-picking research or they're making stuff up sometimes, as we saw during COVID.

00:08:27.680 The 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.

00:08:39.760 These pesticides have hormonal effects.

00:08:42.080 They're altering the bacteria in the gut called the microbiome that's important in health and mood.

00:08:48.620 Some of those bacteria produce serotonin, making a connection between mental health and the gut.

00:08:54.840 And the ultra-processed food is essentially now chemicals that don't appear in nature.

00:09:02.140 You just look at seed oil derivatives.

00:09:04.040 They are reacting with the immune system because the body doesn't recognize it.

00:09:09.100 So the gut has an immune system along its lining.

00:09:12.240 It's a big concentration of the body's immune system.

00:09:14.500 And when you are ingesting microplastics, for example, which have estrogen-binding properties.

00:09:21.920 And what does estrogen-binding property mean?

00:09:24.720 So the substances, the glycophosphates, the carbamates, these ingredients in the pesticides, for example, have partial...

00:09:37.540 They can partially bind to the estrogen receptors.

00:09:40.940 And, of course, estrogen is one of the sex hormones in the body.

00:09:44.180 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.

00:09:52.620 It's still in Europe.

00:09:53.760 You'll hear commonly 13 to 16 is the age of puberty.

00:09:56.980 When you have these massive titanic sort of level changes in the natural physiology of a human being,

00:10:06.240 you want to say, well, look, here we have all these studies that are making these connections.

00:10:11.680 Why is no one talking about this?

00:10:14.460 So organic foods are important of minimizing heavy metals, microplastics whenever possible.

00:10:21.360 Ultra-processed foods are a big one.

00:10:23.780 In microplastics, that's like you're talking about anything that's like a plastic container, right?

00:10:28.640 For the most part, you're talking about plastic water bottles, things like that.

00:10:31.920 Those are the microplastics with the ingredients that you listed that have estrogen-binding properties.

00:10:36.460 So they increase estrogen in the body, which obviously, as you said, can be deleterious,

00:10:41.900 not just for young people, but increased estrogen can also lead to certain kinds of cancers, right?

00:10:47.240 Yeah.

00:10:47.760 So it may not increase the estrogen levels intrinsically, but bind to those receptors.

00:10:52.100 So the receptors sense that it's estrogen and then react as if it's estrogen.

00:10:57.560 Okay.

00:10:57.980 In someone who may not have those high levels of estrogen, normally pre-puberty.

00:11:02.060 Okay.

00:11:02.800 It's been implicated with the rise in breast cancer.

00:11:05.980 It's like one in eight, one in nine women today will develop breast cancer. 0.96

00:11:09.980 We didn't see this 100 years ago, right?

00:11:12.760 What's going on?

00:11:13.660 So it's so obvious that we've got some pieces of the puzzle that fit together.

00:11:18.420 The medical establishment is not interested.

00:11:21.180 The NIH is more focused on chemical pathways they can block with drugs.

00:11:25.360 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.

00:11:40.180 We've got to go directly to the public.

00:11:41.520 When people ask for organic foods, when they want to buy food that's not prepared in plastic, for example, that helps move markets.

00:11:51.300 And we're starting to see demand for that stuff.

00:11:54.040 The NIH needs to realize the H in NIH stands for health.

00:11:57.760 It's not just drugs and things that increase the throughput of the medical industrial complex.

00:12:04.080 Yeah, that's right.

00:12:04.980 And Francis Collins has been the head of the NIH for a long time.

00:12:09.380 I had Megan Basham on my podcast, and he's an evangelical.

00:12:12.760 He's been hoisted up by a lot of Christian leaders.

00:12:14.820 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.

00:12:23.360 The NIH has had a disgraceful track record.

00:12:28.040 If 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?

00:12:47.860 In the UK, they've banned puberty blockers.

00:12:51.040 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.

00:13:03.780 We'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.

00:13:18.340 And we got a little peek of that during COVID, but I agree.

00:13:22.380 The NIH has been a disappointment.

00:13:24.440 They just came out with Lucky Charms is healthier than steak.

00:13:28.980 I mean, that was a multimillion-dollar study, and they took all this bad research and summarized it.

00:13:36.760 And, of course, you get bad conclusions.

00:13:39.120 So when you look in the modern era, one of the greatest perpetrators of misinformation has been the United States government on health.

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00:14:50.800 Would 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?

00:15:14.760 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.

00:15:30.620 I think a lot of it's just groupthink.

00:15:32.760 Now, certainly there's no incentive to look into highly engineered foods that are addictive and bad for you.

00:15:39.820 The food scientists are laughing at the American public.

00:15:42.620 They've engineered food.

00:15:44.780 They've added these ingredients that are banned in other countries.

00:15:48.120 They don't occur in nature.

00:15:49.760 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.

00:16:01.400 And we've got all these kids and people with low energy and sickness, and they can't pay attention after lunch.

00:16:07.860 Maybe we need to look at the school lunch programs and not just put every kid on Ozempic.

00:16:12.620 Maybe we need to talk about treating high blood pressure with addressing sleep quality and stress management, not just putting people on antihypertensives.

00:16:22.000 Right.

00:16:22.260 We need to look at the environmental exposures that cause cancer, not just the chemo to treat it.

00:16:27.680 Right.

00:16:28.000 So 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.

00:16:47.400 So I think there's a lot of groupthink.

00:16:51.880 When you have at the top of the NIH these old dinosaur professors that are funding research, guess what they're funding?

00:17:00.840 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.

00:17:13.640 And so we keep funding these small, incremental, tiny discoveries on these legacy ideas that sometimes are not proving to be worthwhile.

00:17:26.800 Right.

00:17:27.060 So let's say you're a smart medical student, and you go in, and you've got big ideas.

00:17:31.420 Let's say you think like a Ben Franklin thinker.

00:17:34.280 You want to think about the food supply and all these chronic diseases and how we fund research, and you're a big thinker.

00:17:42.900 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.

00:17:53.520 And that's why we're not really looking into these big topics.

00:17:58.300 So my research team at Johns Hopkins is funded by philanthropists.

00:18:02.280 We study whatever we think is important is going to make an impact.

00:18:06.220 And that's why we've been able to address natural immunity during COVID and the opioid epidemic in real time.

00:18:13.020 We don't have to wait for the NIH to pivot.

00:18:16.120 Right.

00:18:16.580 You know, my husband and I were talking about the other day, you know, we're 90s kids.

00:18:20.980 He was born in 90.

00:18:21.780 I was born in 92.

00:18:22.600 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.

00:18:29.060 We 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.

00:18:42.400 Not every morning.

00:18:43.480 I know my mom is listening to this.

00:18:44.980 Not every morning.

00:18:45.800 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.

00:19:00.220 It can be really hard.

00:19:01.640 Yeah.

00:19:01.800 Especially, you know, unless you're making all of your own snacks, it can be really difficult.

00:19:06.420 But I do think that we are a lot more educated and empowered than maybe a few decades ago.

00:19:12.320 And I do see that as kind of a positive development that seemed to come out of COVID.

00:19:18.160 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.

00:19:29.940 What foods are good for me?

00:19:31.540 What foods are bad for me?

00:19:32.880 Is that something you've seen?

00:19:33.960 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.

00:19:56.640 Meats are not bad for you.

00:19:57.980 It's how the meat is prepared or raised.

00:20:00.080 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.

00:20:21.220 Yeah.

00:20:21.440 I 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.

00:20:32.000 It just looks black.

00:20:33.240 And it's so appalling, you know, we would ask, like, why is it black? 1.00

00:20:37.520 I wasn't expecting that.

00:20:38.740 It's not black in the anatomy books.

00:20:40.500 And I remember the professor said, oh, that's common among people who live in cities.

00:20:46.460 And but don't worry, it's not bad for anyone.

00:20:49.600 And I thought, how quickly did you dismiss that?

00:20:53.140 Same thing with fertility rates going down, sperm counts going down, age of puberty going down, cancer rates going up, autism going up.

00:21:01.320 One in 22 kids now in California has autism.

00:21:04.640 Has anyone, you know, why are we so dismissive about these potential causes when they might be right in front of us?

00:21:13.700 It seems that trying to go to the root cause of anything is almost billed as a conspiracy theory.

00:21:19.340 Even if you're just asking questions about why do we do things the way that we do?

00:21:24.080 And of course, it's extremely verboten or has been in the past to ask about vaccines.

00:21:30.120 I remember during COVID, that was the first time I had never been skeptical about vaccines at all.

00:21:36.920 And, you know, I was already a mom.

00:21:38.980 I had no problem with it.

00:21:40.240 And then COVID happened.

00:21:41.560 And 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.

00:21:52.900 And I'm like thinking, what?

00:21:55.080 What in the world?

00:21:56.140 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.

00:22:03.880 And our relationship, our doctor-patient relationship became very adversarial.

00:22:09.540 And I felt like, oh, I definitely can't trust you now because I am genuinely curious.

00:22:15.600 This is a person I had trusted.

00:22:17.040 I genuinely wanted answers.

00:22:18.440 I didn't think that I was, you know, educated about them.

00:22:21.720 I thought, surely, as someone who went to medical school, he would know.

00:22:26.240 And yet I was brushed off.

00:22:28.440 I was treated very aggressively.

00:22:30.740 And if that's my story, I think that's probably the story of a lot of moms.

00:22:35.620 Whether they are completely anti-vaccine or not, our trust of doctors and the medical system during COVID,

00:22:45.260 especially when it came to vaccines, just completely eroded.

00:22:49.620 And I don't think it's our fault.

00:22:51.480 I think it's the establishment's fault.

00:22:54.080 And honestly, I'm not sure what moms are supposed to do about that now. 1.00

00:22:58.100 I think doctors are important.

00:22:59.520 They're needed.

00:23:00.340 But a lot of them feel like they don't even have one they can rely on to answer their questions.

00:23:04.700 Well, the medical establishment has done a lot of damage.

00:23:07.420 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.

00:23:16.240 And they put out a recommendation that might be their opinion, but they put it out there with such absolutism.

00:23:22.840 And that is very damaging because people are smart.

00:23:26.020 And eventually, in the case of COVID, they got curious.

00:23:29.240 And they asked very deep and nuanced questions that exposed the medical establishment, like natural immunity.

00:23:36.100 Why does a toddler need to wear a cloth mask for nearly two years?

00:23:39.420 Does it really have no impact on development?

00:23:42.520 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.

00:23:54.020 So 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.

00:24:07.660 Yes, I remember that.

00:24:08.920 We talked about that on the show.

00:24:10.340 It's so good.

00:24:11.440 Yeah, I mean, it's like you're not allowed to have this discussion.

00:24:13.920 The medical establishment has made up their mind and they've issued their decrees.

00:24:17.920 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.

00:24:26.340 And 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.

00:24:36.280 And it was like they got infuriated.

00:24:39.000 And how do we stop this out?

00:24:41.020 And then they moved to the censorship step.

00:24:44.020 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.

00:24:58.020 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.

00:25:11.160 And then they censor the doctors through big tech who oppose this recommendation.

00:25:16.940 That 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.

00:25:26.680 And then you're silencing the opposition.

00:25:28.860 So it's all coming to light now.

00:25:31.980 And I think people are seeing through it.

00:25:34.300 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.

00:25:47.840 Wow.

00:25:48.100 40%.

00:25:48.660 Now, you would have thought that's 1% and they're spreading misinformation.

00:25:52.400 But no, there's actually a large group of doctors who went to medical school and they're smart.

00:25:57.560 And they have enough questions to say, I don't recommend this.

00:26:02.440 So people are seeing through this.

00:26:09.960 Okay.

00:26:10.780 So 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,

00:26:20.760 you want to try to alleviate that stress as much as possible.

00:26:25.440 And that might mean for you opting out of health insurance altogether and then joining the crowd at CrowdHealth.

00:26:33.260 CrowdHealth is not health insurance.

00:26:35.400 It is a way for you to cover your healthcare needs within a community of people that are paying every month for telemedicine visits and for discounted prescriptions and so much more without any doctor's networks getting in the way.

00:26:52.820 The group of members are people just like you who want to help pay for each other's unexpected medical events.

00:26:58.840 It's $175 for an individual, $575 for a family of four or more.

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00:27:24.220 That's joincrowdhealth.com slash Allie.

00:27:28.840 It's not just COVID.

00:27:31.720 The medical establishment got the opioid epidemic wrong.

00:27:36.640 They said opioids were non-addictive.

00:27:38.640 Igniting the opioid crisis for 30 years, they got that wrong.

00:27:42.200 They got peanut allergies wrong for 15 years.

00:27:45.520 Igniting the modern-day peanut allergy epidemic.

00:27:47.960 Can you explain that one?

00:27:49.180 Can we pause on that?

00:27:50.460 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 COVID.

00:27:58.580 And transgender nonsense, too. 1.00

00:28:00.320 A lot of stuff.

00:28:01.540 Yeah, masking, all that.

00:28:03.500 Yeah, masking toddlers, except for two hours when they're napping.

00:28:07.560 They said that's okay.

00:28:09.080 Yeah.

00:28:09.340 It was cool.

00:28:10.300 COVID pauses then for some reason.

00:28:12.220 Yeah, I mean, it's almost like a political badge, right?

00:28:14.320 We stand with the maskers. 1.00

00:28:15.560 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?

00:28:26.740 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.

00:28:37.220 No peanut butter.

00:28:38.280 Don't introduce it.

00:28:39.280 Keep them away from peanut butter. 0.56

00:28:41.160 And so this idea of peanut abstinence early in life would prevent peanut allergies was something they put out there with such absolutism.

00:28:50.860 It was an opinion.

00:28:52.340 They ignored a giant body of research on immune tolerance, what we call oral tolerance, or the dirt theory.

00:28:59.420 When you're exposed to something early in life, your immune system tolerates it later.

00:29:05.060 They 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.

00:29:20.000 And we saw a new type of allergy, this severe anaphylactic reaction.

00:29:23.460 A kid can stop breathing just being near a peanut butter, even if they're not consuming it.

00:29:29.360 It was that sensitive.

00:29:30.220 That's how much we sensitized the immune system in these kids who did peanut abstinence.

00:29:36.580 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?

00:29:46.880 We need to get more compliance.

00:29:49.620 We need to double down.

00:29:51.220 We have anti-science mothers out there. 1.00

00:29:53.600 We need to make sure no kid has peanut exposure early.

00:29:57.320 Fast forward 15 years, and the randomized trial, the official study gets done, showing they got it perfectly backwards.

00:30:06.420 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.

00:30:17.120 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.

00:30:27.220 Wow.

00:30:27.640 So they got it perfectly backwards.

00:30:29.720 Did they apologize eight years ago when the trial got done?

00:30:33.500 No.

00:30:33.800 Of course.

00:30:33.900 Did they say, hey, we should have done that study ourselves before we issued that recommendation?

00:30:39.800 No.

00:30:40.060 Did they say, this recommendation is just opinion?

00:30:42.440 No, they didn't.

00:30:44.680 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 a little milk.

00:31:00.500 At age two, you can introduce a little eggs.

00:31:02.280 And at age three, you can introduce a little bit of peanut butter.

00:31:05.480 That was known as the one, two, three.

00:31:07.620 Wow.

00:31:08.180 It was misinformation.

00:31:09.080 It ignited the modern-day peanut allergy epidemic.

00:31:12.820 Wow.

00:31:13.420 You know, it makes me think.

00:31:14.500 I have a family member who was told, you know, he was allergic to peanut butter when he was a baby.

00:31:18.360 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.

00:31:28.940 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.

00:31:36.720 And I don't completely understand exactly how it works, but basically that keeps his peanut allergy at bay.

00:31:43.680 And I'm not telling everyone out there to try that.

00:31:45.980 This is what the doctor told him to do.

00:31:47.460 But, I mean, this works for him.

00:31:49.760 And 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.

00:31:57.700 And then the next year we went back to test and it no longer came up as an allergy.

00:32:02.500 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.

00:32:08.200 So avoid.

00:32:09.020 Thankfully for us, that wasn't the case.

00:32:10.400 So it does seem like there's a lot of fear mongering and a lot of misinformation about that.

00:32:14.780 Yeah.

00:32:15.060 And the human body is amazing.

00:32:17.740 It works.

00:32:19.280 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 to recognize it.

00:32:29.120 Five months was better than six months.

00:32:32.000 That is age five months.

00:32:33.400 If you introduce it, you got more benefit because the immune system was still learning from the environment.

00:32:38.780 And four months, introducing a peanut butter at four months resulted in lower peanut allergies than introducing it at five months.

00:32:45.660 That's how powerful early immune tolerance is.

00:32:50.260 Yeah.

00:32:50.920 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.

00:32:56.120 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.

00:33:01.840 Here's what is really safe or unsafe during pregnancy, what we can eat and all of that.

00:33:06.540 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.

00:33:18.100 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.

00:33:27.300 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. 0.93

00:33:37.400 Yes, healthy mom, healthy baby, but there's more to that.

00:33:41.080 That's something that you've seen too, misinformation in that area.

00:33:44.500 Yeah, we've seen the groupthink and medicine downplay these best practices in childbirth that we now recognize have dramatic benefits.

00:33:55.300 A delayed clamping of the umbilical cord once the baby is born.

00:33:58.980 That umbilical cord is pulsating healthy stem cells and fetal hemoglobin, which binds oxygen really well.

00:34:09.060 And it's warm blood infused directly into the child's circulation to keep the baby warm.

00:34:15.220 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.

00:34:20.280 Yeah, yeah.

00:34:21.160 You know, clamp, clamp, cut it, you know.

00:34:22.580 And I'm like, what are we doing?

00:34:24.340 You know, they'll whisk the baby off to the back corner under some French fry light. 0.99

00:34:29.120 And I'm like, what's going on here?

00:34:30.640 Oh, we have to rewarm the baby.

00:34:32.800 Well, the baby was just getting a transfusion of healthy fetal hemoglobin stem cells and warm blood.

00:34:40.900 And the best incubator is the mom's arms, skin to skin. 0.78

00:34:45.660 There's been studies now that when the babies are held skin to skin, not for one or two minutes,

00:34:50.760 because we have to take the baby to the nursery, even though the baby's normal and born at term.

00:34:55.840 If the mom holds the baby for hours, as long as the mom can safely hold the baby, sometimes with help,

00:35:02.260 the baby has a more normal heart rate.

00:35:05.580 The blood pressure is more normal.

00:35:07.620 They're less likely to need an ICU stay in the NICU.

00:35:12.140 They have a more normal glucose level.

00:35:15.340 And you might wonder, why is the glucose level more normal when the mom holds the baby? 0.87

00:35:19.220 The stress hormones are not spiking as high.

00:35:23.020 And stress hormones at high levels change your glucose level.

00:35:27.160 So there's this incredible, and there's something magical about the bonding we haven't described in medicine.

00:35:33.760 And so when there's delayed cord clamping, they've actually done studies with this protocol

00:35:39.240 that the myelination of the nerves in the brain are a little different on MRI later in childhood.

00:35:45.780 So when a woman's going to deliver, they want to ask about delayed cord clamping. 1.00

00:35:51.320 By the way, 90 seconds was better than 45 seconds in a head-to-head trial.

00:35:55.720 I have been told by a doctor when I've asked about this that there is no scientific benefit to that.

00:36:03.640 I mean, I've heard a lot of women are told that. 1.00

00:36:06.620 And I don't think it's that they're coming from a place where they've actually studied it.

00:36:10.500 I think that's just, you know, as you've been saying, what they're told.

00:36:13.920 So in the book Blind Spots, I go through a lot of these best practices in one of the chapters,

00:36:18.780 a lot of them pioneered by a doctor from India where they didn't have NICUs to accommodate all the preemie babies.

00:36:25.920 And they had to use these natural techniques.

00:36:29.320 And it was amazing, the results.

00:36:32.160 And one of her colleagues, an American doctor, had said when she rolled out this protocol,

00:36:38.300 he said, are we going back to doing things the African way here?

00:36:43.800 And she said in her feisty way, if Africa has something to teach us, then yes, we're going to learn from Africa. 0.95

00:36:50.780 Right.

00:36:51.100 And so avoiding unnecessary C-sections, avoiding antibiotics early in life when they're not necessary.

00:36:58.700 Both C-section and antibiotics save lives.

00:37:01.440 But they're both unnecessary a lot of times.

00:37:05.720 60% of antibiotics are unnecessary.

00:37:08.600 An estimated 40% of C-sections are unnecessary.

00:37:12.180 Parents or mothers are unfairly, inappropriately told, oh, there's no difference.

00:37:16.560 You can deliver vaginally or by C-section, your choice, how would you like to do it?

00:37:22.220 Yeah.

00:37:23.440 The microbiome in the gut, for example, forms differently when a baby is born by C-section

00:37:30.200 versus through a vaginal delivery. 0.97

00:37:32.940 Because the gut of a baby in utero is sterile.

00:37:38.220 There's no bacteria in there.

00:37:39.900 How do we get our millions of different bacteria that live in this harmony 0.93

00:37:43.840 and are involved in digestion and immunity and mental health?

00:37:48.540 Well, a baby passes through the birth canal and the bacteria of the vaginal canal seeds the microbiome,

00:37:56.160 augmented by bacteria from breast milk, especially in the first hour,

00:38:00.580 from skin contact, from grandparents kissing babies and things like that.

00:38:05.040 But when you're born by C-section, a sterile baby is extracted from a sterile operative field.

00:38:09.980 And what may seed their microbiome are bacteria that normally live in the hospital.

00:38:15.060 And so a study just came out.

00:38:17.240 And they've known the microbiome is different in babies born by C-section.

00:38:22.480 Higher rates of asthma, higher rates of inflammatory bowel disease,

00:38:26.360 ulcerative colitis, Crohn's disease, irritable bowel.

00:38:29.180 Study just came out in JAMA Surgery, one of our big journals this year,

00:38:33.040 that the higher rates of colon cancer we're seeing in people under age 50,

00:38:37.740 there was an association between those individuals being born by C-section.

00:38:42.240 Wow.

00:38:43.160 So we can't blow off these giant blind spots in medicine where there's good scientific study to tell us

00:38:49.260 what we should be trying to do.

00:38:51.420 Right.

00:38:51.740 I had two C-sections first and then a vaginal birth, which is kind of rare.

00:38:57.840 But I was definitely, with my first birth, one of those people that was pressured in all different kinds of ways and told.

00:39:04.880 And there was no medical reason, but I was made to feel because I was close to 41 weeks.

00:39:09.660 The nudges.

00:39:10.240 Yes.

00:39:10.600 I was close to 41 weeks.

00:39:11.820 And they dropped the, oh, maybe you'll have a stillborn baby thing,

00:39:15.960 which there was no indication of that at all.

00:39:18.060 She was perfectly healthy and not even that big.

00:39:20.320 But, of course, you hear that as a first-time mom.

00:39:22.500 If you, as a doctor, tell a woman in labor anywhere in the world a C-section might be safer for your baby, 0.93

00:39:30.680 then 100% of women are going to say, well, then do it right now, right? 1.00

00:39:33.300 It's manipulation if it's not based on good scientific data.

00:39:37.560 Same thing with an old man whose knee bothers him and the doctor wants to do a knee replacement.

00:39:44.040 If you say, hey, you've got bone on bone, which is a well-known phrase that's thrown out there,

00:39:49.180 even though bone is normally on bone, but, you know, I think there's a way of representing things in a different way.

00:39:56.980 Yeah.

00:39:57.760 Like it's grinding when it may not be grinding bone on bone.

00:40:01.320 Then they're going to say do a knee replacement.

00:40:03.080 Right.

00:40:03.960 And we've got a blood vessel that has a blockage.

00:40:06.000 We can open it up.

00:40:08.560 Okay.

00:40:08.960 Sometimes, yes, that's necessary.

00:40:10.440 But a study came out in one of our big journals after the 15-year golden era of putting in heart stents,

00:40:17.860 showing no improvement in survival to heart stents unless you're having an acute heart attack.

00:40:25.860 It can relieve the symptoms of angina, but it's called the COURAGE trial,

00:40:31.100 found that most of these stents we were putting in were unnecessary.

00:40:34.500 Some were life-saving, but most were unnecessary.

00:40:36.800 And we can tell now from the research what the criteria should be.

00:40:41.880 So we don't have a good – when we use good scientific evidence, we shine as a profession.

00:40:46.740 We help a lot of people.

00:40:47.960 But when we wing it and a small group of medical elites in the oligarchy 0.99

00:40:52.400 issue broad recommendations for everyone based on their gut feeling,

00:40:57.160 we have a lousy track record.

00:40:59.580 Food pyramid, opioids, peanut allergies, hormone replacement therapy for women. 0.79

00:41:03.500 We have a lousy track record.

00:41:06.800 Well, it doesn't seem like healthcare is going to get better, at least right now in the very near future

00:41:16.240 in the United States.

00:41:17.280 Hopefully, there will be improvements as we have people like Dr. McCary speaking up about the things

00:41:23.300 that matter.

00:41:24.060 But right now, you need to make sure that you are taken care of.

00:41:27.940 If, for whatever reason, you cannot get the medications that you rely on or antibiotics that you need,

00:41:34.760 if you get an infection, you want an emergency stash of these things.

00:41:38.580 That's why Jace Medical exists.

00:41:40.460 When you go to jace.com slash Allie, you can go through their confidential telemedicine process.

00:41:46.240 You can buy a Jace case, which is a stash of emergency antibiotics that you might need for an infection.

00:41:52.280 You can add on things like an EpiPen or ivermectin, or you can get Jace Daily, which is a year-long supply

00:41:59.040 of the daily prescriptions that you and your family rely on.

00:42:02.220 So go to jace.com slash Allie.

00:42:04.380 You'll get a discount on your order with my link, jace.com slash Allie.

00:42:09.500 There's a lot of groupthink, and there's a lot of pharmaceutical funding, but also it seems like

00:42:19.500 insurance and fear of being sued plays into doctors' decisions, especially when it comes

00:42:26.740 to C-section and vaginal birth.

00:42:28.400 It seems like a lot of OBGYNs are just so scared of any risk, and so they choose the most

00:42:34.840 interventionist option thinking, if I have the most control over this, which in a C-section,

00:42:40.440 you, I guess, theoretically, a doctor does have the most control over it.

00:42:43.640 They're thinking, this is best for me.

00:42:45.880 Not necessarily best for the mom and baby, but this is best for me.

00:42:50.540 Now, maybe I'm reading too far into that, and I'm giving them too much malicious intent,

00:42:57.360 but that's what it seems.

00:42:58.760 It seems like there is a structure there where a lot of doctors are operating, not, you know,

00:43:04.000 pun not intended, out of fear.

00:43:07.160 We have appropriateness criteria that we've developed on my research team where we can

00:43:11.640 profile doctors now by their C-section rate in low-risk deliveries, an important distinction.

00:43:17.520 If your C-section rate in low-risk deliveries is over 40%, that's indefensible, okay?

00:43:23.740 And we know the factors that are involved.

00:43:25.880 It might be a little bit of fear of litigation, but some really good doctors have C-section rates

00:43:30.420 of 12% to 19%.

00:43:32.000 Do they not have lawyers in their community?

00:43:36.780 No, of course they do, but they're confident in the criteria that they're using, and they

00:43:40.820 know they can defend their decisions.

00:43:42.920 So I think a lot of times we might hide behind the medical-legal fear, but OB is a hard discipline.

00:43:50.220 I think it's one of the hardest jobs in all of medicine because you're up all night and

00:43:55.080 cat napping, and so it can be easier for the doctor or nurse who's managing the care to

00:44:01.580 say, let's just do a C-section.

00:44:03.080 It's 11 o'clock.

00:44:05.620 I mean, I like to assume the best in physicians, but we've looked at the data nationally, and

00:44:11.760 about a quarter of OB doctors have C-section rates in low-risk deliveries that are unacceptably

00:44:16.840 too high, according to our high-risk OB doctors at Johns Hopkins.

00:44:20.580 We've run the data by them, and they say, yes, we've got this problem.

00:44:24.580 When you have spine surgeons in America saying that half of elective spine surgery for back

00:44:31.880 pain is unnecessary, that is a crisis.

00:44:35.860 I don't do spine surgery, but when you have people who do that saying, hey, this is what's

00:44:39.820 happening in our field, when you have cardiologists saying that half of the peripheral stents, the

00:44:45.720 stents that go in leg arteries now, sometimes with no indications, that's the new wild west

00:44:51.280 of medicine, they'll find a little plaque in a leg artery, which everybody has by the

00:44:57.060 time you're 70, say, oh, we're going to open that up a little bit, help with your circulation.

00:45:01.780 When they say half of those are unnecessary, when you've got pediatricians saying that half

00:45:07.280 of the antibiotics prescribed are unnecessary, these are issues that we've only been talking

00:45:12.460 about in our doctor's lounges, and now we're saying, hey, the public needs to be educated.

00:45:17.640 The antibiotics, for example, carpet bomb that microbiome, that equilibrium.

00:45:24.040 And a study at a Mayo Clinic, this was an amazing study.

00:45:27.480 Mind if I share it with you?

00:45:28.300 Yeah, please.

00:45:29.160 I think it was the most amazing study of the last 10 years.

00:45:32.000 Now, I'm always combing the medical literature.

00:45:34.020 That's what we do on our research team.

00:45:35.340 And I was blown away that the study did not get more attention, didn't get any attention,

00:45:40.860 really.

00:45:41.660 They looked at, this was at the Mayo Clinic, they looked at 14,000 kids, compared kids who

00:45:46.360 got antibiotics in the first couple years of life to kids who did not, recognizing that

00:45:52.620 antibiotics carpet bomb and alter the microbiome balance in the gut. 0.90

00:45:59.100 Kids who took an antibiotic in the first couple years of life had a 20% higher rate of obesity,

00:46:04.300 21% higher rate of learning disabilities, all of which have been going up in the modern

00:46:12.280 era of antibiotics and C-sections and ultra-processed foods, a 32% higher rate of attention deficit

00:46:20.740 disorder, a 90% higher rate of asthma, and nearly a 300% higher rate of celiac.

00:46:28.080 And the more doses of antibiotics that someone took, the more courses of antibiotics that

00:46:34.280 their child took, the greater the risk of each of those chronic diseases.

00:46:38.300 We're altering the microbiome in ways we don't appreciate.

00:46:42.400 We're messing with mother nature.

00:46:44.880 And when a kid needs an antibiotic, an antibiotic can save a life.

00:46:50.020 It can do amazing things, prevent hearing loss.

00:46:53.040 But 60% of antibiotics are unnecessary.

00:46:57.580 And when there's a dogma that, oh, it might not help you, but it won't hurt you.

00:47:03.540 No, it's affecting the microbiome. 0.91

00:47:06.780 And by the way, farmers have seen this for decades.

00:47:09.100 If you give antibiotics routinely to animals, they're fatter.

00:47:13.420 And the world expert of the microbiome, who I interviewed for the book, actually said,

00:47:18.400 if this is happening to animals, what's it doing to children?

00:47:22.400 And he did the studies.

00:47:24.820 He did all the animal studies.

00:47:26.040 And sure enough, you hear about people eating a perfect diet and they can't lose weight.

00:47:31.660 Maybe their microbiome has been altered.

00:47:34.380 We have a tendency to blame people for all these chronic diseases in medicine.

00:47:39.820 Maybe we've been giving people the wrong information, saying antibiotics won't hurt you.

00:47:45.080 Maybe we've been poisoning the food supply.

00:47:47.760 Maybe we've been ignoring these giant blind spots of pesticides and ultra-processed foods

00:47:55.300 and seed oil derivatives and microplastics.

00:47:58.400 And maybe it's not their fault.

00:48:01.460 We like to blame people.

00:48:03.460 And we have this old model in medicine.

00:48:05.420 If you come in and eat better and exercise more, we usually give out the misinformation

00:48:10.000 that you should switch to a low-fat diet.

00:48:12.560 Not true.

00:48:14.060 No health benefits there.

00:48:15.540 Saturated fat does not cause heart disease from any legitimate study that's ever been

00:48:21.020 done.

00:48:21.300 And it's not for lack of trying to look at it.

00:48:24.400 And then you come back in six months and we say, you're a bad, bad, non-compliant patient.

00:48:30.560 And we throw meds at people.

00:48:32.860 Doctors hate this system.

00:48:34.480 Patients hate this system.

00:48:36.180 So why are we doing it?

00:48:38.200 We've got to get off the hamster wheel and ask, what is going on here?

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00:49:32.020 That's Allie to 989898.

00:49:34.800 I've got a few questions about the antibiotic subject.

00:49:42.580 One, can you give us just a definition of microbiome?

00:49:46.440 I know it has something to do with the gut, but when you say that something is altering

00:49:50.500 a microbiome, what does that mean?

00:49:52.560 So microbiome are millions of different bacteria that line the GI tract from the mouth all the

00:49:58.820 way to the anus. 1.00

00:50:00.140 And they're involved in digestion.

00:50:02.700 Think of them as good bacteria.

00:50:03.940 They're normally in every gut, in every human being.

00:50:07.600 And they live in a balance.

00:50:09.660 Some of them are pro-inflammatory.

00:50:12.300 And if you kill some of the bacteria, maybe the pro-inflammatory or bad bacteria can overgrow.

00:50:19.960 And we have kind of seen the consequences of some of this stuff.

00:50:24.640 We've seen kids who get antibiotics all the time in childhood sometimes come in with intractable

00:50:30.200 chronic abdominal pain.

00:50:31.480 And we don't know what to do with it in modern medicine.

00:50:33.220 So we assign these diagnoses irritable bowel syndrome, bacterial overgrowth syndrome.

00:50:41.580 In a very clear way in the hospital, we see one of these fatal types of bacterial overgrowth

00:50:47.320 called a C. diff infection.

00:50:49.700 And we'll see this every couple months in the hospital in my department.

00:50:53.700 We'll see somebody take a damoxicillin for something minor.

00:50:57.280 Maybe it was necessary.

00:50:58.600 Usually it's not.

00:50:59.500 And then it kills some of the bacteria and the clostridium difficile strain of bacteria

00:51:05.640 in the gut, normally there, will overgrow and grow out of control.

00:51:10.720 And actually it can become so toxic people die.

00:51:13.460 And we used to remove the colon in this emergency setting to try to rid the infection because

00:51:19.200 sometimes no antibiotic works against it.

00:51:21.340 That's an extreme acute example, but it's going on at a lower level every day in America when

00:51:29.320 kids go in the school lunch program and they're eating all this processed food and milk where

00:51:34.940 we take out natural fat, which we shouldn't be doing.

00:51:39.440 We take out the natural fat and we add sugar.

00:51:42.440 We're taking something out naturally.

00:51:44.660 We're adding something that we know increases general body inflammation.

00:51:49.200 And how does messing with the microbiome, like you talked about, you know, C-section rates,

00:51:55.860 but also antibiotics, messing with the microbiome that can then lead to a greater

00:52:00.620 propensity for obesity, how does that work?

00:52:03.940 We don't know.

00:52:04.880 But what we do know is that some of the bacteria are involved in digestion of food.

00:52:12.200 And we've got millions of bacteria.

00:52:13.700 We never really could study it before the modern era of DNA sequencing.

00:52:17.620 Now you can take a sample and you can say, here are the 500 bacteria in the sample that

00:52:23.080 we looked at.

00:52:23.660 Let's look at the distribution and the diversity of bacteria.

00:52:26.780 Let's look at, do they have high levels of bacteria A and B?

00:52:33.180 So we're starting now to understand it, but some of the bacteria also produce GLP-1, the

00:52:39.480 active ingredient in Ozempic.

00:52:41.020 As you know, it's a natural hormone.

00:52:43.280 It's produced in the body and at low levels by the microbiome.

00:52:48.600 So there's more research going on.

00:52:51.380 There are studies that have shown probiotics of a certain kind have helped treat bipolar.

00:52:58.640 That was a study out of Shepard Pratt. 1.00

00:53:00.620 Some of the mental illness may be a function of the change in serotonin production from the gut.

00:53:07.360 So we're seeing a whole new field now of probiotics where we're trying to understand,

00:53:14.320 can we try to restore a more normal microbiome?

00:53:19.500 Well, that's what I was going to ask, you know, for, oh gosh, which way do I, okay.

00:53:25.680 Let's see.

00:53:26.120 Let me ask my one last antibiotics question and then I'll ask you about healing the microbiome.

00:53:31.680 So you said that, I think you said 60% of antibiotics are unnecessary, deemed unnecessary.

00:53:38.160 Yes.

00:53:38.600 Outpatient.

00:53:39.180 Yeah.

00:53:39.420 How in the world can a parent know?

00:53:42.620 Because, okay, I go to the doctor and thankfully my kids really haven't needed antibiotics.

00:53:48.100 Praise the Lord.

00:53:48.780 But if I go to the doctor and my kid is just crying because of an ear infection, you can tell

00:53:53.560 it hurts.

00:53:54.200 And the doctor says, yeah, this is a bad ear infection.

00:53:57.160 But, okay, say your baby is eight months old, you really don't want to give antibiotics.

00:54:02.580 Yeah.

00:54:02.740 Like, it just seems like a lot of responsibility for a parent to know when an antibiotic is

00:54:10.460 really necessary or not.

00:54:12.460 Yeah.

00:54:12.920 So what are we supposed to do?

00:54:14.080 Look, this is why a bunch of us as doctors are trying to go directly to the public and

00:54:17.680 educate them on these topics.

00:54:19.480 So someone needs to look in the child's ear.

00:54:23.100 It's a lost art.

00:54:24.560 And sometimes you go to these urgent care centers, they don't even know what they're

00:54:27.840 looking at if they even do look at the ear.

00:54:29.820 If you do telemedicine, sometimes they can't even look in the ear and they're prescribing

00:54:34.240 antibiotics.

00:54:35.080 If it's a viral infection, if it's what we call serous otitis media, they don't see any

00:54:39.040 evidence of a bacterial type infection.

00:54:42.320 They don't see the pus or the other bacterial signs.

00:54:44.900 You can take all the antibiotics in the world.

00:54:46.320 It's not going to help.

00:54:47.580 Yeah, the kid is miserable, but it's not going to help.

00:54:49.660 So we've lost clinical excellence in American medicine.

00:54:55.560 We've got to distinguish the bacterial from the viral otitis media.

00:54:59.640 Same with upper respiratory infections.

00:55:01.840 If it's a strep throat, they may benefit from rapid use of antibiotics.

00:55:07.500 If it's viral, as most upper respiratory infections are, it doesn't matter.

00:55:10.980 It's probably just going to alter your microbiome.

00:55:13.180 And it's sad because we see kids late in the teenage years come in with these chronic

00:55:17.780 abdominal ailments.

00:55:19.100 And the moms think, how could I have possibly prevented this?

00:55:25.300 How could this happen to my little boy or girl?

00:55:29.020 Well, you've been feeding them ultra-processed food their entire life.

00:55:33.500 You've given them 12 courses of antibiotics.

00:55:36.120 Maybe they only needed one or two.

00:55:37.640 Um, and the, so the average 10-year-old in America has already had 11 courses of antibiotics.

00:55:45.300 The average two-year-old has had three courses of antibiotics.

00:55:48.940 So we've got to address the appropriateness of care with good clinical excellence.

00:55:54.060 And parents should know that if the kid appears to have a viral infection or the doc says,

00:55:58.600 look, it looks viral.

00:56:00.360 The antibiotics are here for you to take, but they're probably not going to help.

00:56:04.340 You want to think twice because it's, they're not totally benign.

00:56:09.200 Nothing in medicine is totally benign without side effects.

00:56:13.160 So healing the microbiome, whether it's been damaged because of processed foods or antibiotics

00:56:19.440 or whatever it is, you mentioned probiotics.

00:56:22.920 What else can someone do to try to fix that part of their body?

00:56:27.540 It's very difficult.

00:56:28.800 Eat healthy, eat things grown out of the ground with good soil.

00:56:33.280 And are, are not loaded with pesticides, avoid unnecessary C-sections, avoid, um, ultra-processed

00:56:42.540 foods, but-

00:56:44.380 Seed oils.

00:56:44.920 And I know you mentioned that try to avoid those because of the inflammation, right?

00:56:48.400 Yeah.

00:56:48.560 All those things are increasing inflammation, all of, all of that.

00:56:51.760 And you want to reduce your general body inflammation.

00:56:55.220 In 50 years or a hundred years, we're going to be talking about health in terms of how's

00:56:59.620 your inflammation?

00:57:01.280 Are you high, medium, or low?

00:57:03.580 There'll be better ways to test for inflammation.

00:57:06.640 Most diseases are inflammatory diseases.

00:57:10.220 Inflammatory bowel disease, uh, arthritis.

00:57:13.660 Heart disease is inflammation of the coronary artery wall.

00:57:17.960 That's what enables the small dense lipoproteins to embed and form plaques.

00:57:22.600 So inflammation is the root of so much of health.

00:57:25.620 And yet we spend almost no time talking about it in medical school.

00:57:28.560 We don't talk about at all the association with what we eat or any of the stuff we're

00:57:32.940 talking about, but the probiotics are popular.

00:57:36.260 The question is which ones help and which ones, um, are just going through your system and they're

00:57:42.800 just a waste of money.

00:57:44.460 Right.

00:57:44.920 Most go right through your system and we're starting to understand which ones and we're

00:57:49.400 starting to study which ones may actually help.

00:57:51.320 I tell people to maybe try different things if they're really desperate.

00:57:55.940 Um, we have people who have such an altered microbiome.

00:57:59.320 They desperately want to try to heal it.

00:58:01.840 Maybe try some different probiotics.

00:58:04.400 Uh, you got to give it a chance for a little bit.

00:58:06.860 We're going to see more products coming on the market soon, but it's hard.

00:58:10.700 The best way to address an altered microbiome is to prevent it from being altered.

00:58:15.860 Right.

00:58:16.380 Um, okay.

00:58:17.060 Tell us a little bit, which I know that we've been talking about it basically, but tell us

00:58:20.740 more explicitly about your book, Blind Spots When Medicine Gets It Wrong and what it means

00:58:25.800 for our health.

00:58:27.500 So there are so many exciting areas of research and medicine right now where we're learning

00:58:33.920 incredible things like about the microbiome.

00:58:36.620 And the public is not even aware.

00:58:39.680 Doctors are not even aware of the new research because we're kind of in this myopic tunnel.

00:58:45.300 We are hyper-specialized.

00:58:46.920 We've got our own lane in medicine.

00:58:49.720 No one's really putting the whole thing together with the exception of some functional medicine

00:58:55.380 doctors and good primary care doctors.

00:58:56.940 So there's a lot of exciting research that is coming up right now in medicine that directly

00:59:04.200 applies to everything we do as doctors.

00:59:07.040 But when I show it to my colleagues at Johns Hopkins, they're blown away by it and they've

00:59:13.280 never heard of it.

00:59:14.280 So if they've never heard of this research, maybe this is a good opportunity to educate

00:59:19.480 both the medical community about the research studies and the general public.

00:59:23.860 For example, there's probably no medication that has improved the health of a population

00:59:28.840 more than hormone replacement therapy started around the time of menopause, arguably with

00:59:35.480 the exception of antibiotics, which save lives.

00:59:38.100 Hormone replacement therapy cuts the rate of heart attacks in half.

00:59:42.600 It reduces cognitive decline after menopause by 50 to 60 percent.

00:59:47.540 In one study, it prevented Alzheimer's 35 percent by 35 percent.

00:59:52.240 Bones are stronger.

00:59:54.720 If a woman falls, they're far less likely to break a bone or have a hip fracture or need

01:00:00.660 surgery.

01:00:01.880 Their bones are stronger.

01:00:02.660 So you're talking about testosterone?

01:00:04.000 We're talking about estrogen.

01:00:05.680 Estrogen.

01:00:06.220 Or estrogen plus progesterone.

01:00:07.840 Okay, so menopause, you're losing estrogen, so you're replacing the estrogen that's being

01:00:12.220 lost through menopause.

01:00:13.220 That's right.

01:00:13.580 You're replacing the natural hormone that your body produces.

01:00:16.900 A woman will stop producing it or markedly reduce the production around 45 to 57 years 1.00

01:00:23.340 of age.

01:00:24.640 80 percent will know it because they'll have symptoms of menopause, hot flashes, night

01:00:29.280 sweats, mood swings, weight gain.

01:00:31.740 There's like 100 symptoms of menopause.

01:00:34.520 It's amazing.

01:00:35.780 Tragically, women are more likely to get prescribed an antidepressant if they come in with menopause

01:00:40.880 than they are replacing the body's natural estrogen with estradiol and plus progesterone, depending

01:00:48.540 on the situation of the individual.

01:00:50.960 So what we call hormone replacement therapy for women who go through menopause, starting

01:00:55.140 it within several years of menopause, has these dramatic health benefits, reducing cognitive

01:01:01.100 decline, heart disease, improving bone strength, maybe even reduce cancer rates.

01:01:07.060 But tragically, the reason why 80 percent of doctors do not recommend it or will scare

01:01:14.240 women out of it is because 22 years ago, an NIH scientist announced in a press conference 1.00

01:01:21.000 that he had just completed a study that showed that hormone replacement therapy for postmenopausal

01:01:26.580 women causes breast cancer. 1.00

01:01:28.960 He didn't release his data.

01:01:31.360 And when you actually look at the table of the study, once it was public, after all the

01:01:37.020 media headlines, after the medical community was convinced he was right, after women flushed 0.99

01:01:41.960 their hormone therapy down the toilet because they were scared, turns out there was no statistically

01:01:48.740 significant increase in breast cancer or breast cancer mortality.

01:01:53.280 Yet to this day, women are denied this incredible therapy that enables them to live longer and feel

01:02:01.560 better.

01:02:01.940 On average, women live three and a half years longer in one study's estimate.

01:02:07.880 50 million women have been denied the benefits of hormone replacement therapy because of one 0.98

01:02:13.800 guy at the NIH who misled the public.

01:02:17.380 And I interviewed him in his retirement for the book Blind Spots and had a very enlightening

01:02:23.020 conversation about him.

01:02:24.920 Ended up talking to others who were involved.

01:02:27.000 And they told him before he made the announcement, you can't do this.

01:02:31.500 You will create so much fear because everyone's scared of cancer.

01:02:36.020 If you dangle something as sensitive as breast cancer in front of women around and associated

01:02:41.260 with hormone therapy, you will do tremendous damage and you may never be able to put the

01:02:46.380 genie back in the bottle.

01:02:47.720 Yeah.

01:02:48.180 And that's tragically what happened.

01:02:50.880 Wow.

01:02:51.380 But now the truth is coming to light, which is part of why you wrote this book.

01:02:54.320 All the blind spots that the medical industry has.

01:02:57.500 Thank you so much.

01:02:58.900 Thank you for the work that you do and for the courage that you have.

01:03:02.100 I really encourage everyone to go out and get this.

01:03:03.960 We're going to put the link to this, to Blind Spots, in the description of this episode on

01:03:08.420 YouTube or wherever you're listening so you can get to it easily.

01:03:11.580 We need this book to be number one.

01:03:13.620 Number one on Amazon.

01:03:14.940 We need another New York Times bestseller.

01:03:17.320 Thank you.

01:03:17.560 All the questions that I asked about, like, how do patients take charge?

01:03:21.180 How do parents take charge?

01:03:23.060 Books like this help us do that.

01:03:25.440 It equips us.

01:03:26.340 It gives us the confidence to walk into our doctor's office and to advocate for ourselves

01:03:30.900 based not just on our feelings and suspicions, but based on facts and science.

01:03:34.820 So thank you so much, Dr. Makari.

01:03:37.080 Thank you, Allie.

01:03:37.800 Thanks for having me.

01:03:38.740 Really appreciate it.

01:03:39.660 Thank you.

01:03:40.080 Thank you.

01:03:40.620 Thank you.

01:03:40.700 Thank you.

01:03:41.120 Thank you.

01:03:41.620 Thank you.

01:03:41.700 Thank you.

01:03:41.740 Thank you.

01:03:41.780 Thank you.

01:03:41.800 Thank you.

01:03:41.860 Thank you.

01:03:41.880 Thank you.

01:03:41.920 Thank you.

01:03:41.980 Thank you.

Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - September 18, 2024

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

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