The blind spots of medicine

Stories of painful mistakes that endanger our health

Medicine is often wrong not because it knows little, but because it is too sure.
Do you think that medical recommendations are always based on evidence? That if we hear them our whole lives and experts repeat them, they must be right? I wish that were always true.
Physician and researcher Marty Makary convincingly shows that even today' s medicine has its blind spots. That is, areas where expert consensus has turned into dogma, where questions have stopped being asked, and where misinterpretations of data and pressure from authorities have led to mistakes that have cost entire generations. And maybe they affected you too.
Makary takes you through stories of research, medical decisions, and patients for whom the healthcare system failed – not because of the absence of evidence, but in spite of it.
In the book you will learn, among other things:
The peanut allergy epidemic was not triggered by nature, but by official health recommendations.
Millions of women have lost healthy ovaries unnecessarily because the true site of cancer origin was long ignored.
Routine administration of antibiotics destroys the microbiome and increases the risk of obesity, asthma, diabetes and mental disorders.
Eggs and cholesterol were scapegoated not because of evidence, but because of vocal individuals.
Due to ignoring the warning evidence of HIV transmission through blood, people could still be infected through transfusions for almost a decade.
Hormone replacement therapy can do more for the health of women over fifty than any other drug in history.
Dogma is passed down from generation to generation.
In the face of a flood of conflicting information, people most often believe what their parents taught them.
Before 1900, cardiovascular events were rare and almost never mentioned in the medical literature.
This book is not an attack on science. It is a challenge to live up to her ideals.