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“The media clapped like seals congratulating the researchers. Reporters amplified the study’s conclusion, even thought they hadn’t yet seen the actual data… the media promoted whatever health authorities said, rarely challenging them or publishing quotes from dissenting experts.”
For decades now, such are the sound bites emanating from communications sources, telling people about alleged medical-research results or medical recommendations; information that is distorted at best, and is even harmful to the population.
The Book of the Week is “Blind Spots, When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What it Means for Our Health” by Marty Makary, MD, published in 2024. This slightly sloppily edited volume contained anecdotes of wrongheaded messaging of medical “experts” that resulted in numerous needless deaths and ruined lives. Not to mention lawsuits.
In 2000, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) told Americans that an infant should not be fed any peanut butter or products with any peanuts– as the child would develop a peanut allergy. The AAP should have made the opposite recommendation, as their reasoning was backwards.
Makary saw that the AAP’s board of messengers were mostly dieticians and had little or no immunology knowledge! For fifteen years, many pediatricians blindly obeyed the AAP, and told their patients to avoid peanuts. Those patients developed extreme (life-threatening) peanut allergies that had to be treated with exorbitantly priced EpiPens. The experts with whom Makary spoke– who claimed to know what caused a peanut allergy, were later promoted and got awards in their respective careers.
The above happens frequently in the medical industry. For decades, arrogant medical authorities also told people that opioids aren’t addictive. To combat a myth such as this, the author and his colleagues started a website, “Sensible Medicine” but a drawback is that one of the types of people (a closed-minded, cocky medical professional) who could benefit from the site, won’t read it!
The author wrote that Big Pharma shies away from funding research that doesn’t involve intellectual property from which it can make big bucks. Thus, funding was stopped for a non-mRNA technology flu vaccine (one covering many flu strains)– because it wouldn’t have to be administered annually, and wouldn’t pay royalties to anyone.
Meanwhile, the media continue to spout their staged and scripted reality shows of political soap-operas whose issues affect a tiny percentage of ordinary Americans, while America’s broken healthcare system continues to cause the deaths of, and bankrupt numerous people every day.
Read the book to learn of many more healthcare abominations borne of greed, and dogma, and how healthy skepticism is a good thing.