This is the Cato Daily podcast for Tuesday, December 3rd, 2024. I'm Caleb Brown. Dr. Marty McCarrie, a surgeon at Johns Hopkins, has been nominated to lead the Food and Drug Administration. At a Cato Institute event in October, McCarrie sat down with Cato's Jeff Singer to discuss his new book, Blind

Spots. When medicine gets it wrong and what it means for our health, McCarrie argues that

dogma, group think, and the suppression of scientific debate describe the culture of the modern

medical establishment.

The amazing thing is that that is a great surgeon, a good friend, and this person I was trying to

show the medical literature to with these three amazing randomized controlled trials,

it would be unethical to do more research at this point. And this person was not open-minded to the research. I'm sure they, like everybody,

perceives that they are open-minded. But what's going on here? Because when you look at this

behavior, when you look at the dogma for 30 years that the medical

establishment said that opioids are non-addictive, the dogma that antibiotics won't hurt you,

even though we now know it, they affect the gut microbiome and drive superbugs. The dogma that

hormone therapy causes breast cancer for hormone replacement therapy, even though the data never supported it. The dogma of hormone therapy causes breast cancer for hormone replacement therapy,

even though the data never supported it.

The dogma of the food pyramid, all these things take on a life of their own.

And you get this sort of bandwagon effect.

What is going on here?

It turns out there is a universal principle intrinsic to the human condition.

We're not talking about bad people. We're

talking actually about Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive discomfort or dissidents. That is,

we love to hold on to the original ideas that we hear, not because they're better or more

logical or scientifically supported than new

information, but we hold on to it just because we heard it first. And it gets comfortable.

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