Aaron Hartman, MD discusses 'blind spots' in healthcare, citing concepts from Marty Makary's book and urging listeners to question current medical paradigms. He gives an example contrasting city versus country living — noting research suggesting rural/‘dirtier’ childhood exposures (including observations from Eastern Europe during the communist era) were associated with fewer environmental allergies compared with cleaner settings. The segment emphasizes re-evaluating what the healthcare system may be missing.
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Blind spots. Let's keep on talking about those. Now I want to give credit to a book by Marty Makary. He's actually a surgeon at Johns Hopkins, written a lot of great books as well as the Price We Pay. And so a lot of going forward, a lot of the concepts we're talking about actually coming out of his book. So if you want to learn more about blind spots, we'll link the book here so you can learn about that. Another idea of a blind spot that does not specifically mention in his book is actually the idea of living in the city versus the country. Actually we've learned that people who live in the country have exposure to animals, dust being outside actually have less access allergies. There's this amazing research looking in Eastern Europe where people who grew up during the communist era that grew up in dirty areas with more smoke actually had less environmental allergies than people in other part of Germany or Scandinavia who actually didn't group in clean areas had much higher incidence of allergies. Again, just thinking, questioning our current paradigms. What are we missing out in our healthcare system now? Where are our current blind spots?