Dr. Marty Makary Speaks Out
Marty Makary is a somewhat controversial surgeon who has advocated for change in a medical system that can be highly resistant to change. In late 2024, he published a book entitled Blind Spots in which he deals with current and past hierarchical errors that resulted in patient injury or death because of a medical community’s historic resistance to change.
He tells of prescribing, as a resident, a fluoroquinolone antibiotic to a woman suffering a bladder infection. The patient later told him that after taking it, her Achilles tendon had ruptured. “What? I thought. “How on earth can an antibiotic do THAT? I went back and researched it. Sure enough, a spontaneous tear of the Achilles tendon was a well-known complication, one of the many I had underappreciated.”
The incident led Makary to take a deep dive into the complications of prescription antibiotics and how they affect our gut microbiome by killing the good bacteria that keep us healthy. His resulting research uncovered several disturbing facts about antibiotics that he discovered in sound scientific studies:
Half of all antibiotics prescribed in the U.S. are unnecessary.
20% of hospitalized patients treated with an antibiotic will experience an adverse effect.
By the age of 3, the average American child has already taken about four courses of antibiotics.
(In Pakistan, a two-year-old has already received 10 antibiotics!).
Children who took antibiotics grew up to have much higher rates of obesity, learning disabilities, asthma and celiac disease than those who did not take them.
People who took five or more courses of antibiotics were 53% more likely to develop diabetes.
A doctor is far more likely to prescribe an antibiotic in a telemedicine visit than in person.
These issues appeared in only one chapter of Blind Spots. The author also confronts issues with the child peanut allergy epidemic, silicone breast implants, and other damaging medical dogma that was the result of intrenched and dangerous decision-making by scientists, researchers, and the medical community. You may not agree with every issue Makary confronts in this book, but you’ll find the discussions do raise concerns and suggest more scientific research and evidence is needed.
Dr. Makary has done his homework. If named to head the FDA, will he apply his knowledge of FQs and antibiotics with advocacy for change to the decades-long damage that fluoroquinolones have caused so unnecessarily to a estimated one million U.S. patients that have already suffered serious adverse events? We’ll have to wait and see. . .
