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why did we have a nightly ritual in the hospital of startling patients in their deep sleep, quickly sticking them with a needle to draw their blood,
great irony was that practically everybody in the hospital seemed to know that most of those daily tests were unnecessary, except the patient.
When we did give them something with flavor, it was the kind of junk food we’d normally scold people for eating at home.
the patient came in with one medical illness and then we hit her with two more—sleep deprivation and malnutrition.”
much of what the public is told about health is medical dogma—an
humans automatically default to rejecting new information or reframing it in order to ensure that old information in the brain remains true.
being open to new ideas requires active mental work to temporarily suspend our prior beliefs
you’ll see that consensus is not driven by science, but by peer pressure.
“opioids are nonaddictive”—because experts say so has proven catastrophic.
medical experts demonized natural fat in food, driving people to processed carbohydrates as obesity rates soared, and liberally prescribed antibiotics, altering the gut health of a generation.
many of our modern-day health crises are caused by the hubris of the medical establishment?
In 1999, researchers at Mount Sinai Hospital estimated the incidence of peanut allergies in children to be 0.6%. Most were mild.1 Then starting in the year 2000, the prevalence began to surge.
The 1990s was the decade of peanut allergy panic.
The report cited a 1996 British Medical Journal (BMJ) study.6 So I pulled that up and took a close look.
The actual data did not find an association between pregnant moms eating peanuts and a child’s peanut allergy. But that didn’t matter: The train had left the station.
Dr. Buckley recognized that it violated a basic principle of immunology known as immune tolerance: the body’s natural way of accepting foreign molecules present early in life. It’s like the dirt theory, whereby newborns exposed to dirt, dander, and germs may then have lower allergy and asthma
She explained that peanut abstinence doesn’t prevent peanut allergies, it causes them.
has consistently instructed parents to introduce a touch of peanut butter (mixed with water to avoid a choking risk) as soon as a child is able to eat it.
studies showing that avoiding certain foods triggers allergies to those foods.
Pharma exploited the situation by price-gouging the desperate parents and schools.
early peanut exposure resulted in an 86% reduction in peanut allergies by the time the child reached age 5 compared to children who followed the AAP recommendation.
kids who got their ears pierced sometimes developed a nickel allergy
His doctors managed his damaged heart by weakening it further.
“In science, we tend to get in a rut and then dig in,” he told me. “We have to be open-minded.”
It would take the AAP two years after Dr. Lack’s randomized trial was published to reverse its 2000 guidance for pediatricians and parents.14 It would also take two years for the NIH’s NIAID division to issue a report supporting the reversal.
I knew that back in 2000, scientists in the immunology community knew the truth about early exposure, and they’d had strong data to support it. But they were not included in the small committee that had issued the AAP recommendation.
I reached out to the AAP committee that had recommended peanut avoidance back in 2000. By their credentials, many appeared to be in the field of nutrition. None appeared to be experts in immunology.
protecting the institution was more important than letting the public see alternative viewpoints.
“The WIC program provides a unique public health opportunity to prevent peanut allergy. If peanut butter was to be one of the foods included, it could prevent more than 50% of new cases of peanut allergy every year,”
It’s one thing to give an opinion, but it’s another thing to suggest that an opinion is a scientific truth. As you’ll see in the coming chapters, the simple words “We don’t know” can often be the right answer.
There was just one problem: The study had NOT shown that HRT causes breast cancer.
A cruel irony came to light in follow-up studies. They found that participants who took estrogen alone had lowered their risk of breast cancer by 23% and lowered their risk of breast cancer death by 40%. That benefit diminished over time after women discontinued HRT.
The data are clear. HRT saves lives.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in American women. HRT reduces that risk by about 50%.
three big studies reported that HRT can reduce the risk of colon cancer.
HRT may also help prevent diabetes.
postmenopausal women had a higher risk of gum disease, and that HRT could reduce its incidence.
HRT may do more to improve the health of women over age 50 on a population level than any other medication in history.
no one recommends starting HRT more than ten years after menopause.
someone with a predisposition to blood clots or someone with active breast cancer, Veozah seems like a great medication. But otherwise, it makes no sense to me.
The best way to lower drug costs in the U.S. is to stop encouraging patients to take expensive drugs when there are less expensive alternatives.
leaders of the WHI have done tremendous damage to public health.
91,000 women have died prematurely from HRT avoidance in the first decade
in the last ten years, there have been at least another 50,000 premature deaths due to th...
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telling women to avoid HRT because it causes breast cancer may have been the biggest error in modern medicine.
If the doc responds with “I don’t prescribe it because I worry about the risk of breast cancer,” my recommendation is clear. Keep looking.
Throughout his life Chris’s microbiome had been repeatedly thrown out of whack. He was born by C-section, which means that his sterile gut at birth may have been seeded with bacteria from the hospital rather than with bacteria from the vaginal canal. He was not breast-fed, and that fact impacts the microbiome. He also loved junk food, I learned, further altering the bacteria in the microbiome. Then I saw in his records the biggest assault on his gut’s bacteria: the dozen or so courses of antibiotics he had taken throughout his childhood.
Viral infections are far more common and do not respond to antibiotics.
overprescribing of antibiotics is causing more harm than we may realize.
“There are no downsides to antibiotics.” It’s a phrase I’ve heard over and over in my career. Unfortunately, it’s not true.
