Dr. Aaron Hartman compares peanut allergy rates in Ashkenazi Jewish populations across Israel and the UK. Early peanut exposure in Israel led to a ten-fold lower allergy rate than the UK, where medical guidelines once advised avoiding peanuts in childhood. Well-intentioned advice caused the harm.
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Peanut allergies. Was America the only place that got it wrong? Was the UK, England, the only place that got it wrong? Were there places in the world that actually got it right? Well, actually there was, and this is a test case. I love looking at test cases. In Israel, there's a Jewish, very common Jewish practice of giving kids these little, it's almost like, um, Cheez-It kind of things that are coated in peanut stuff. And they actually give newborns this to suck on. Same Ashkenazi Jewish population in Britain followed the recommendations. What did they do? They stopped exposing kids to peanuts early on. And what happened over a decade or two is you saw a 10-time increase in incidence in peanut allergy and allergies in Ashkenazi Jews living in the United Kingdom versus those in Israel. The difference was in Israel, they did early exposure to peanuts through these things, through these little, these little things. And in the UK, they didn't. What is this? This is a medical blind spot. This is a dictum, a mandate, an idea, a concept that our healthcare system pushed, recommended. Um, sometimes even forced. That was just plain wrong. And peanut allergies is one of many of the examples of how we just got this wrong. If you'd like to learn about more examples about how our system recommended things that are wrong, follow us, like, share, subscribe. We'll be talking about these a lot over the next couple of months. You need to know what our system's gotten wrong to never look for these. If one of the big blind spots in our healthcare system is, is the iatrogenesis, things doctors recommend that actually hurt you, and this is being overlooked, you need to start knowing how to look for it. And we're going to educate you. To teach you how to look for the blind spots in our system so you can avoid those and avoid medical error. Take care, talk to you soon.
