What if the very science we trust to keep us healthy sometimes leads us astray?
When I picked up Dr. Marty Makary’s new book Blind Spots, I expected another insider’s account of medicine’s bureaucratic failures.
What I discovered instead was an unflinching diagnosis of the problems with medicine—how institutional groupthink and the unquestioned faith we place in medical authority quietly distort the science guiding our health choices.
The Courage to Call Out Medicine’s Dogmas
Dr. Martin Adel Makary, now Commissioner of the FDA, writes with the clear-eyed candor of a surgeon who has witnessed too much from the inside. He reveals how consensus can become more dangerous than ignorance when it solidifies into dogma.
The examples he shares are striking: the hormone replacement therapy panic, decades of misplaced fear surrounding dietary fat, and the epidemic of overdiagnosis fueled by unnecessary cancer screenings.
Each story follows the same arc—a plausible theory rises to gospel, dissenters are silenced, and countless lives feel the consequences.
Antibiotics and the Forgotten Ecosystem Within
The chapter that struck me most profoundly was Makary’s deep dive into antibiotics and the microbiome.
For decades, antibiotics were prescribed reflexively—celebrated as “miracle drugs” for every infection, every sore throat, even acne. Doctors were trained to see bacteria as enemies to be eradicated.
But, as Makary reveals, that approach was tragically short-sighted.
The trillions of microbes in our gut, skin, and lungs are not freeloaders—they are essential partners in maintaining our immune and metabolic balance.
By waging war on them, we destabilized our own biology.
He calls it “one of the greatest unforced errors in modern medicine.”
The collateral damage has been immense: chronic inflammation, autoimmune disorders, obesity, mood disturbances, and antibiotic-resistant superbugs—all born from our blind spot about the body’s intricate interconnectedness.
Makary urges, “It’s time for the medical community to apply the same rigor and funding to microbiome research that it applies to heart disease, cancer, and other conditions.”
To me, this chapter embodies the spirit of Blind Spots: a call to rediscover medicine’s humility and to recognize that every intervention ripples through the body’s complex ecosystem in ways we rarely measure or fully respect.
How Blindness Becomes Policy
Makary carefully exposes how these blind spots persist. Once a medical guideline is published, it often hardens into institutional dogma.
Journals favor dramatic results over subtlety. Funding and prestige reward those who defend established paradigms.
And doctors, fearful of liability or professional ridicule, adhere to the “standard of care” even when they quietly suspect it may be flawed.
He recounts how early critics of the “fat makes you fat” hypothesis and its related cholesterol theory were dismissed as “anti-science,” only for their warnings to be validated years later.
By then, entire industries, from statins to low-fat foods, had been built on that very error.
This is the self-reinforcing feedback loop Makary urges us to recognize: a system that equates consensus with truth and obedience with safety.
“All the more reason,” Makary writes, “why we must consciously maintain our objectivity in everything we do. That includes learning from people we do not like who say things we do not like.”
Even regulators are not immune.
He openly acknowledges the “revolving door” between drug companies and agencies like the FDA and CDC, and calls for a radical commitment to data transparency, patient-level datasets, open trial replication, and clear disclosure of financial conflicts.
Coming from someone now leading the FDA, this stance is nothing short of revolutionary.
What It Means for Patients—and for Medicine’s Soul
Reading Blind Spots confirmed what many of us have quietly sensed for years: modern medicine’s crisis is not technological, it is philosophical.
We’ve confused control with understanding. We’ve outsourced healing to algorithms and guidelines that rarely see the person behind the diagnosis.
Makary’s message is not anti-science, it is deeply pro-science in its purest form: a call for humility, transparency, and the courage to say, “we don’t know.”
He urges physicians to speak openly about uncertainty, share data, invite replication, and reward truth-telling over status.
As someone who has long advocated for a healthcare system that honors the body’s innate self-healing intelligence, I found Makary’s book both courageous and deeply validating.
It echoes what functional and naturopathic clinicians have emphasized for decades: that true healing begins with listening—to the patient, to nature, and to the body itself.
Seeing What Medicine Can’t Yet See
Makary’s “blind spots” are ultimately about epistemic humility, the recognition that our current tools and frameworks capture only part of human biology.
When he writes about the microbiome, he is describing what many in biophysics and quantum biology already sense: health is a matter of coherence, not just chemistry.
Every intervention, whether an antibiotic, vaccine, or medication, shapes the body’s information field.
When we act blindly, without appreciating that energetic context, we risk causing harm in the name of science.
True science requires the courage to question our own assumptions and to admit when data remain incomplete.
In this way, Blind Spots serves as a bridge between conventional medicine and a more holistic, systems-based understanding of health.
A Wake-Up Call, and a Chance for Redemption
For readers who still believe the medical establishment always acts in the public’s best interest, Blind Spots may feel uncomfortable.
For the rest of us, it offers reassurance that reform is not only overdue, it is already quietly emerging from within.
Makary doesn’t call for revolution; he calls for renewal: a return to medicine’s ethical roots, where the pursuit of truth matters more than the defense of hierarchy.
His courage to name medicine’s mistakes, while still believing in its potential, makes this book one of the most important of the decade.
If you want to understand why modern medicine continues to mishandle chronic disease, begin with its blind spots.
And if you hope to help transform it, start by demanding what Makary demands: honesty, transparency, and the humility to see what we’ve long been unwilling to see.
