For generations, Americans have relied on public health leaders to keep us safe and healthy, but according to Dr. Marty McCully, chief of transplant surgery at Johns Hopkins, many of the recommendations we follow are turning out to be flawed.
Macari told CBN News that the medical community’s failures have become apparent to many Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’re dealing with an epidemic of mistrust,” Dr. McCully said, “and many of us were right when we said that schools shouldn’t keep kids out for years, that young children don’t need to wear cloth masks for that long, that natural immunity is real, that there’s no scientific justification for giving booster COVID vaccines to young, healthy people, that a Wuhan lab leak was likely to blame, and so on.”
He said perhaps the most egregious behaviour occurred over rules banning people from visiting dying loved ones in health care facilities.
“This is a violation of human rights. Under no circumstances should anyone be prevented from holding the hand of a dying loved one in the hospital,” McCulley said. “But the medical community is not apologizing.”
COVID was just the tip of the iceberg
Macari said the incorrect COVID-19 recommendations are just the tip of the iceberg, adding that public health leaders have a long history of issuing incorrect guidance. In his book, “Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong and What It Means for Our Health,” Macari gives several examples, such as American parents being told not to feed peanut products to their children from birth to age 3.
“We found that avoiding peanuts during the first few years of life did not prevent peanut allergy but rather caused it, which led to the modern peanut allergy epidemic,” he said.
Another decision, Macari said, was the wrong approach to painkillers.
“The opioid epidemic was caused by the medical community promoting the dogma that opioids are not addictive,” he said.
Similarly, Dr. McCully points to the Food Guide Pyramid, introduced by the US Department of Agriculture in 1992 and upheld as best dietary advice until 2005. The guide recommended that Americans eat mostly foods such as bread, pasta and rice.
“The obesity and diabetes epidemic may have been caused in part by the food industry-funded ‘food pyramid’ dogma,” he said.
Wrong thinking patterns
Dr. Macari said that while poor public health decisions sometimes result from the arrogance of some of America’s top doctors, they are more likely caused by flawed thinking patterns that can affect anyone, regardless of profession.
“We tend to believe the first piece of information we hear, not because it’s more logical than new information, but simply because we heard it first,” he said. “This kind of intellectual laziness means that our brains unconsciously reject new information or reframe it to fit what we already believe.”
Dr. Macari says this is why 80 percent of doctors today reject hormone replacement therapy, which can be very beneficial for older women.
“Twenty-two years ago, there was a medical dogma that was promulgated by the National Institutes of Health, and some doctors claimed it caused breast cancer, but the data didn’t support that.”
Similarly, Macari says many doctors who were taught in medical school that antibiotics don’t harm patients are overprescribing them today, despite emerging data showing that antibiotics kill important gut bacteria.
“They train your immune system. They also produce serotonin, which is linked to brain health and mood,” he says. “This microbiome is central to health. This has been a blind spot of modern medicine. We don’t talk much about it.”
Check the facts
Macari says too many pediatricians mistakenly believe that young patients might commit suicide if they don’t get the gender reassignment surgery they want.
“The worst thing you can do in science is to tell parents and patients that something is absolutely scientifically supported when it’s not,” he said. “We found that the increased suicide risk was not due to the child’s assigned gender identity disorder diagnosis, but rather due to the underlying psychiatric disorder.”
Macari says medical professionals, and in fact all people, would benefit from asking whether certain beliefs are held because they are actually true or simply because they were first learning about the subject.
“We need to recognize that our brains have human tendencies and actively suspend those biases, because we all have them. We need to acknowledge that and suspend those biases when objectively considering new information.”
For example, Macari says when it comes to the health care system, health care professionals need to question whether pharmaceuticals are always the answer.
“We need to study not just chemotherapy for cancer treatment, but also environmental exposures that cause cancer. For diabetes treatment, we might have to offer cooking classes, not just give insulin,” he said, adding that weight-loss drugs and high blood pressure medications might be replaced with lifestyle changes. “For high blood pressure treatment, we might need to talk about sleep quality and stress management. We might need to talk about school lunch programs, not just give Ozempic to every 6-year-old.”
Don’t lose faith in your doctor
While Dr McCully points out medical negligence and stresses the need for improvement, he also warns against overreacting.
“We don’t want to create hysteria among the general public about health care workers,” he said. “In cases of emergency or emergencies, please follow your doctor’s orders.”
But he said more doctors should be willing to say “I don’t know” when it applies.
“We don’t have good answers for the actual causes of chronic abdominal pain, or autism, or autoimmune diseases, or inflammatory diseases in general that are so prevalent in society right now,” he acknowledged.
Back to basics
Dr. Macari believes that modern diet and lifestyle play a key role in both the cause and treatment of many chronic diseases.
“It’s almost as if we’re rediscovering many of the biblical principles on health that we need to return to,” he said. “It’s not a matter of discovering something new, but of remembering the great traditions of health.”
The tradition is based on ancient practices such as eating whole foods the way God created them, rather than consuming processed foods and drinks made in laboratories or factories. Similarly, biblical practices such as prayer and being part of a community are known in research to protect our health. Research has also shown that fasting, which is cited throughout the Bible, provides many physical benefits.
So while public health guidance can be confusing and sometimes wrong, it’s helpful to evaluate the recommendations from an open-minded, spiritual perspective.
***Subscribe to the CBN Newsletter and download the CBN News App to stay up to date on the latest news from a Christian perspective.***
Related:
Health Benefits and Types of Fasting
Health benefits of deep religious devotion
Fast food, fake food, processed food is killing us
