Dr. Marty Makary on medicine's blind spots

Big Books & Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller

If you stopped eating eggs for fear it could raise your cholesterol, or you avoided giving peanuts to your toddler to prevent allergies, or you stayed away from hormone replacement therapy because you were told it could cause breast cancer — you are a victim of what Dr. Marty Makary calls “medical dogma.”

Long known as an iconoclast in the medical community, Dr. Makary’s latest book, “Blind Spots,” examines how health care can go so wrong. He chalks much of it to groupthink and a growing inability for science to identify its own biases.

His diagnosis? Humility.

“Medical science is about transparency and civil discourse. Great ideas and truths have always emerged from a healthy debate within the scientific community,” he tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. “And tragically, what we’ve seen in the modern era is a small group of people making the decisions for everybody — many times with a paternalist and hierarchical philosophy.”

Guest:

• Dr. Marty Makary is a surgeon and public health researcher at Johns Hopkins University. His newest book is “Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health.”