Doctors Kill 250,000 People Per Year

Blind spots. What are they and why should you care? Have you ever heard about blind spots in our healthcare system? Things that we're just overlooking? This is one of the more important parts, I believe, of my book, Uncurable From Hopeless Diagnosis to Defining All Odds that I talk about in the book. And Marty Makary has actually written a book called Blind Spots. Great book if you want to take a really deep dive into this concept of blind spots. But the idea is, what are things in our healthcare system that we think to be true that actually aren't? You know, there's been multiple examples in the past. You know, Ignaz Semmelweis, you know, over in. I think he was a Hungarian over in Austria when he found hand washing was the difference between women having children that lived and lived and dying. He started recommending hand washing and literally lost his career and ultimately his life catching the infection he was trying to prevent with hand washing. Crazy story. Smoking in our country, tobacco use. I'm from Virginia, and back in the 80s, late 70s, early 80s, it was controversial. If smoking was bad for us back in the 60s and 70s, we knew it was good for us. My doctor smokes camels kind of thing. And then the 80s, old smoker's rights, right? The early 90s, like, you know, you have the right to smoke indoors kind of thing or on planes, et cetera, et cetera. We got that wrong one, so wrong. And it took over 50 years and 7,000 research articles before the Surgeon General, United States said smoking causes cancer. So my point is, what are blind spots now? A couple I talk about a couple in the book. One big one I talk about is medical error. You know, when I was in medical school, I learned that iatrogenesis, or things doctors do, was the fifth most common cause of death. You know, medication complications. What we've learned now is that's deeper than that. You know, 30% of all medications are toxins to your mitochondria. They affect your gut microbiome. Half of all pharmaceuticals are detoxified through your gut microbiome. So just medication side effects alone is a big player. There's actually a list of drugs that are high risk in the elderly that we're not supposed to prescribe, that Medicare and CMS recognize as concerning. And now we're just learning that antibiotics in childhood increase childhood obesity, increase asthma, eczema. If we're doing an agribusiness, the antibiotics make animals fat because they're commonly put in animal feed to make cows fatten up quicker and chickens fatten them quicker. It's common knowledge that antibiotics actually make animals fatter quicker. Do you think it does the same thing to humans? You know, we're now. We now have literature to say, yeah, it kind of does. Increases incidence of metabolic syndrome, a bunch of things. Is that a blind spot? When I was in my training, we gave antibiotics out like candy because there were no. There was no downside. Another medication example is ciprofloxacin, which is something we used a lot. Just use it all the time, time in the ER for people coming in with uti, great drug. But lo and behold, some people, because it is a mitochondrial toxin, would have developed chronic fatigue. Get floxed. You want to Google something interesting or AI something you're being floxed by. Cipro or levofloxacin is a thing. We developed this almost like a chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia kind of thing. You can have tendon ruptures. So the question becomes, are there other blind spots? You know, medical error? Is it more than just medications? Is there surgical things? Well, the thing about it is, because the current health administration does not recognize medical error as a problem. Just like we don't recognize aging as a illness, it inhibits direct study of things we don't recognize. And so you have to look at secondary data points. Medicare actuaries of people dying, what they died from, which is where in the book Blind Spots, Martin Makary and also where he, when he published literature, I think he published in the British Medical Journal. It's actually footnoted in the book. They had to publish it outside the country because our healthcare system in the, in the journals here, don't see medical error as a thing. It's hard to say that medical error is the third most common cause of death in our country because we don't. It's not quote, unquote proven. But if 250,000 people a year and the elderly are passing away from medical error, then that puts it like right there at number three. And the thing about, I think, is if you include the entire country, is it actually number two or one? You know, great question. Don't. Controversial, don't want to go there. But the question, we should look at this and determine how to minimize medical error as a issue. Another big blind spot. Hormones, bioidentical hormones. I talk about that in the book. There's so many things we've gotten wrong. So the question becomes, does our system, does the practitioner you work with recognize that we don't know everything? You know, half of all this was from Dr. Ioanni from the PLOS, which is the largest online journal in the world, put a nice article out there, also footnoted and incurable, that 50% of all published research articles are later found to be false. So when people talk about evidence based medicine and following the evidence, following the literature, the following stuff that could be wrong half of the time that is insane if you think about like that. And so how you know what the right stuff is, you have to, you have to season science, quote unquote with clinical experience. You know, a doctor who's been practicing for 20, 30 years is going, no, yeah, that doesn't work. I've tried it. Yeah, that's, yeah, that works. I know I've never read an article about it, but I know it works. Right? That's kind of how I can connect the dots between hypermobility, severe form, being eds and a whole host of other medical issues before I started reading about in the literature. That's also how I started seeing long Covid before I read about, before it became a thing. Back In May of 2000, I saw my first long COVID patient when we knew there was no such thing. Right. If you all remember that being open to this and realizing our system has blind spots and we have to be open to the idea that we don't know everything and the data can sometimes deceive us because there are biases in research public publishers. There's also biases in editorial boards. Something a lot of people may not know is that an editorial board is the board that determines what gets published in the journal and what doesn't get published. If someone has a crazy idea that vitamin D can lower your risk for cancer or lower your A1C, well, that's kind of weird. Who would publish that in 2000? Right? They won't publish it. The board will. The editorial board will say, we do not agree with this. We do not publish it. So there's this slow creep. Yeah, there's a saying that science and medicine advance one funeral at a time. That's really true because you have to get new thinking, new ways of thinking. It takes decades. I think the most recent thing I read, it takes between 20 and 30 years for new research to make it to your clinical practice. So with all these things, you really need to work with someone who's reads a lot, who has, who's been seasoned, clinically practiced at a lot of different places if you want to avoid medical error. And then you have to be your own advocate. This is something you do talk about in the book as well. Make a big part about being your own advocate. In today's world, with AI, with access of all this information, the average person now can have a grasp on their health more than they could 10, five, even three years ago. With AI, even two or three years ago, you can go to your doctor's visit knowing, hey, I think this is what's going on. This is why. These are my symptoms. These are the most important things. This is what gone and literally present yourself. You know, it's really interesting. When I do my training, hey, this is a great idea. Oh, I love this idea. It's great, you know, present yourself to a doctor. I used to do this. We. This is not training. We do this all the time. Where interns would take a physical exam on a patient, come in the hospital, I had no idea what's going on, but I got good at a physical exam and I got good at the history. I'd present this patient with shortness of breath and swelling their ankles and puffiness of their face, and to my resident, and they go, oh, it's heart failure. Do this, this, and this. I would have no idea what was going on, but I would present the patient to the resident, who then the team would present it to the attending the following day. Learn to present yourself to your doctor. Learn to research, Learn to say, what did. I am a xyz. I've got these symptoms to present your history, to present your timeline. That in itself could be a. If you get. If that's all you get from the book, present yourself to your doctor. That can be a powerful tool to you with your health. So I actually love that idea I just came up with while I was talking. Brilliant. Present yourself. Present yourself to your doctor. And if they're adverse to it, they're negative to it. You need to find someone who'll work with you, someone who's going to be your advocate, but also come alongside you and be willing to learn with you. Now, in today's day and age, we need to realize we don't know it all. We can't know it all. I was actually, I have medical students that come with me. It's interesting. He was telling me about one of the neurosurgeons at the university, talking to him, saying, these are the hands of God. And it's. The point of that is we still have hubris and pride in our healthcare system. And as a patient, you just need to recognize which is which, which is skill and which is hubris, and avoid the hubris and go to the skill. Anyway, I hope this is helpful as you kind of go through interval from hopeless diagnosis to final odds. Hope these little deep dives help you get a little different perspective on the book and learn more about things you can apply to your health to be the best version of you that you can be. Take care.