Aaron Hartman, MDFunctional Medicine Specialist | Clinical Researcher

What We've Gotten Wrong in Medicine

3 Jan 2025 · 1 min

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0:59

Aaron Hartman, MD (speaker) asks what medicine has gotten wrong historically and today. He lists several past errors and abuses — delayed recognition of smoking harms, rejection of Ignaz Semmelweis’s handwashing, lobotomies, forced sterilizations, the Tuskegee experiments — and challenges clinicians to question current errors such as the cholesterol–heart disease theory and hormone therapies for women. The piece is a short reflective prompt urging continual self-scrutiny in healthcare.

Chapters

What have we gotten wrong in science and medicine in the past? We got smoking wrong. It took us about 50 years and 7,000 research articles before the Surgeon General of the United States said smoking was bad for us. Even though in China they knew smoking was bad and addictive, and they saw it in their soldiers back in the 1600s and tried to get it out of their country. Took us a long time to figure out here. How about hand washing? The inventor of handwashing, Ignaz Semmelweis, who was a Hungarian physician practicing, I believe, in Austria, was lost his career, was jailed and eventually beaten. Because back then, he used to beat the crazy out of you. Right? And died from the infection he was trying to prevent. We used to use lobotomies to treat people with mental health issues. We used to do forced sterilization in our country. Look into the Tuskegee experiments in modern times. What have we gotten wrong? We've got the cholesterol theory wrong. Cholesterol doesn't cause heart disease. Hormones for women. We've gotten that wrong. So the question I keep on asking myself, that I push myself on a daily basis, and every physician, any practitioner or healthcare practitioner should what are we getting wrong today?