Medical ‘Groupthink’ Harms Patients, Especially Kids

Written by Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. on September 20, 2024. Posted in Current News

Dr. Marty Makary, a public researcher with Johns Hopkins University and author of “Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets it Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health,” said more doctors are “refusing to kiss the ring of the medical oligarchs, and instead are teaming up with creative people to redesign medical care.”

There’s evidence that many of our modern-day health crises in the U.S. were caused, or hastened, by the hubris of the medical establishment, according to Dr. Marty Makary. 

In a recent interview with The Defender, Makary discussed his new book, “Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets it Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health.”

Makary, a public health researcher and chief of Islet Transplant Surgery at Johns Hopkins University, developed the surgical safety checklist. The World Health Organization adopted the checklist, which is credited with saving countless lives.

Makary has been vocal about the potency of natural immunity to COVID-19. In May, he criticized The New York Times for being slow to report on the thousands of people injured by the COVID-19 vaccines.

He’s the author of several best-selling books, including, “Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won’t Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care.”

In his latest book, to be released on Sept. 17, Makary contends that medical “groupthink” — which he defines as “the human tendency to follow a crowd and not thinking independently” — many times creates an illusion of consensus.

“Medical groupthink and medicine’s hyperspecialization approach to sickness has resulted in giant blind spots,” Makary told The Defender. “The influence of Big Pharma on what gets studied in medicine has also contributed to modern medicine’s blind spots.”

These “blind spots” cause erroneous ideas to be propagated as true, while causing important truths to be overlooked.

Patients — especially kids — suffer as a result, Makary said:

“Important topics central to the health of children have been ignored, namely the role of ultra-processed food, chemical additives, pesticides and medical interventions that alter the microbiome and gut health of children.

We’ve not been talking about these topics in mainstream medicine, but it’s time to talk about them. Emerging scientific research is shedding light on medical dogma and medicine’s blind spots.”

In his book, Makary cites a wide array of emerging scientific research and explains how it challenges conventional medical beliefs on multiple topics, including peanut allergies, antibiotics, childbirth and cholesterol.

“Chronic diseases are the leading cause of death in the U.S. and consume a majority of the $4.5 trillion we spend on health care,” he wrote. “The current reactionary, siloed, Whac-A-Mole health care system isn’t working. … We need fresh ideas.”

Makary believes the people in medicine are generally “good” but they’re functioning in a “bad” system that needs to change.

He also believes doctors should apologize when they get it wrong. Some “medical establishment leaders who got things perfectly backward have never apologized for their decades-long hubris,” he said.

Medicine’s ‘culture of obedience’

Makary’s book calls out the medical establishment’s “culture of obedience” that punishes doctors who express opinions that contradict medical dogma.

Medical dogma is a big problem, he said:

“Having spent many hours with top doctors sorting scientific evidence from opinion on some of today’s biggest health questions, I realize that much of what the public is told about health is medical dogma — an idea or practice given incontrovertible authority because someone has decreed it to be true based on a gut feeling.”

Doctors who express opinions that contradict the dogma may be censored or have their licenses revoked.

“Today, more than ever, organized medicine is finding ways to limit and stifle scientific debate,” he said.

For instance, when he and his colleagues published a study on natural immunity that showed high levels of antibodies in people following a COVID-19 infection, the study was censored on social media.

He also pointed to the time he was barred from attending a medical conference because all attendees were required to have received three COVID-19 vaccines. Makary had received two.

“After being elected to the National Academy of Medicine, I got barred from attending their national conference for the same reason.”

Fraudulent research is a problem

Doctors must be allowed to speak freely without fear of retribution or cancellation because sometimes the medical community bases its opinion on fraudulent research.

In 2023, Stanford University’s president resigned after being accused of falsifying data.

The dean of Weill Cornell Medicine left his post following similar allegations about several of his studies, Makary said. “One was a joint study with Weill Cornell and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital that had been cited 178 times.”

Makary wrote, “Recently, Dr. John Carlisle, an editor of the medical journal Anaesthesia, examined 500 clinical trials and found that a whopping 44% of them contained false data.”

Carlisle’s findings disturbed many doctors and made them think twice about blindly trusting that medical journals published only accurate research.

We need speech that challenges groupthink

For the sake of patients’ health, doctors must speak up to challenge groupthink, Makary said.

“Freedom of speech isn’t for easy speech — speech that affirms what the majority already believes,” Makary wrote. “It’s designed to protect speech that is uncomfortable — speech that challenges groupthink.”

However, recently some of the most influential medical groups in the U.S. actively sought to keep doctors from speaking their minds about COVID-19.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association and other medical societies in 2023 filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of government censorship of health information — including physicians’ opinions.

This appalled many doctors, Makary said:

“Critics argued that granting the government power to censor speech by doctors — speech that the medical establishment doesn’t like — violates not only the letter of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, but the medical profession’s historic liberty to say whatever we believe to be in the best interest of our patients. …

For centuries, Harvard’s seal and main gate on campus has been bannered with the institution’s motto, ‘Veritas,’ which means truth. It does not read ‘Cancellus.”

In June, the Supreme Court sided with the Biden administration in a censorship lawsuit, but three justices dissented. Those three said the country may later regret that the court didn’t call out the government for violating the First Amendment.

Doctors rejecting the ‘billing-coding hamster wheel’

Makary said he’s hopeful about medicine’s future for at least two reasons. First, many doctors are getting off “the billing-coding hamster wheel of medicine.”

These doctors are prioritizing their patients’ quality of health over the quantity of patients they can schedule in a day, he said. “We want to be evaluated by health outcomes, not by throughput.”

Makary also said a new generation of “nonconformist” doctors is rising up. They are willing to ask tough questions, including, “Is something we assume to help actually doing more harm than good? Are we burning the village to save it?”

These people are “refusing to kiss the ring of the medical oligarchs, and instead are teaming up with creative people to redesign medical care.”

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