Crisp, clear and concisely written, Marty Makary's book offers a wealth of information about specific and relevant health topics, while also providing a lens through which to more critically challenge the scientific trends and assumptions around us. His engaging and accessible style introduces the reader to significant amounts of current scientific research. You'll be glad to read it, and you'll want copies to share with our friends.

This book, which is scrupulously researched and magnificently researched, will change — in some demonstrable way — at least one significant health practice of every reader. Dr. Makary debunks the conventional thinking on so many subjects — HRT, antibiotics, peanut allergies and many more — showing how following it can lead to serious health problems. It is all the more shocking that the truth about these very important medical issues have been widely known for 20-60 years, and still wrong practices are widely used. This book offers not only fascinating reading, but invaluable insights into medical decisions that everyone makes for themselves and their families.

Very interesting book divided up into several chapters on medical ideas many of which were proven wrong. Most of these studies the Ama and other organizations knew were incorrect bit they were published without pushback even if not factual. Very easy read and very informative

Medicine is complicated but in the current world opinions based on belief structures often outrun and then stifle medical science. This book looks at some of the biggest healthcare policy failures which have and continue touching most of our lives (diets, hormones, ovarian cancer, childbirth, antibiotics, vaccines). Dr Makary’s extraordinary insights into academic groupthink dissects the path to these policies. There will not be a single US reader of this book who has not been affected by some of these errors.

As a physician, many medical books are difficult to impossible to digest unless you’ve been through medical school. Dr. Makary makes each chapter readable for most whether one has any medical background. Practicing for 40 years as a children heart specialist, I’ve used the phrase ‘we don’t know’ many, many times and should be a medical school class teaching future doctors they need not apologize to patients when the evidence is inconclusive. The author makes that point several times. Doctors like many or most people are entrenched with their beliefs so we need more books like this to give a warning to unchanging attitudes. This book achieves this goal.

The Blind Spot highlights the dangers of groupthink in medical research and practice. Once a consensus is formed, those who attempt to counter it are met with derision and blacklisting. I know this from firsthand experience, since I got blacklisted from conferences for calling out the workplace wellness industry, which as coincidence would have it was enabled by a lower-level employee of Dr. Makary’s own institution. Remember when your employer used to hire a “vendor” to line you up to take your blood and tell you and your employer all the undiagnosed diseases you had? The data quite clearly showed zero value in this but a combination of groupthink, profitability and payoffs to benefits consultants kept it going long past its Sell By date. Now imagine this groupthink thing playing out in the medical field as a whole. Accurate data is developed by independent, underfunded iconoclasts contradicting the consensus, a consensus feeding many careers. As Upton Sinclair said: “You can’t convince someone of something whose salary depends on believing the opposite.” So the medical establishment suppresses this dissent, blacklists the dissenters, and cuts off their research funding. The Blind Spot provides numerous examples of this. Example: antibiotics are not “harmless,” and are probably prescribed maybe twice as often as they should be, especially for children. Children given multiple antibiotics as babies and toddlers end up with adverse effects that don’t show up until years latger. Example: hormone replacement therapy got a bad rap due to one study way back in 2002 and is only now getting its mojo back as a quality-of-life improvement that also significantly reduces common health risks. Example: many people still don’t eat eggs because some researchers were bribed almost a half-century ago by the sugar lobby to demonize fat-and-cholesterol. It’s taken decades to undo that lie, largely because dissenters were suppressed. (My own nutrition course was taught by one of those perps, and it took me decades to get over it.) Even today, sugary products advertise “Contains No Cholesterol.” Example: most deadly ovarian cancers don’t originate in the ovaries. They originate in the fallopian tubes. This is well-established. But women are still subjected to invasive surgeries that don’t address this root cause. My only complaint about Blind Spot is that all the things that could have been in there that aren’t. For instance, few people know that most cavities (including my own, as it turned out) can be treated painlessly for $40 or less with a couple of drops of silver diamine fluoride. It’s been around for years, but for obvious reasons dentists don’t tell you about it. Perhaps Dr. Makary is saving nuggets like this one for a sequel…