A short talk by Aaron Hartman, MD, about "blind spots" in the healthcare system: ideas or practices once widely accepted but later shown to be harmful or incorrect. The speaker cites historical examples (tobacco/smoking and Ignaz Semmelweis' hand-washing work) to illustrate how the field has erred, then asks what blind spots might exist in healthcare today.
Chapters
Our healthcare system has gotten a lot of stuff wrong in the past. My question is, what are we getting wrong today? These things are referred to as blind spots, things we can't quite see in our rearview mirror in the past that are kind of off to the side. So in the past, we have lots of these examples that we can talk about for hours, which I want to talk about a few briefly. But these can inform us, what are we missing right to now, today, now, what I mean by a blind spot. A great example about a blind spot is tobacco or smoking. For decades, the American Medical association said smoking actually might be healthy for you. It took over 7,000 research articles over 50 years. Eventually, for the Surgeon General of the United States, C. Everett koop, in the 1980s to say smoking caused cancer decades. Another great example of a blind spot historically was hand washing. Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician, actually lost his entire career over something as simple as hand washing. So we have great examples of these blind spots, things that we've gotten wrong in the past. The question is, what are we getting wrong today?