An important podcast
This is the most important podcast I have listened to in a while. It’s a conversation between Rick Rubin and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. Everyone who is concerned with public health, or their own health for that matter, should listen carefully.
Bhattacharya is professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University and part of the elite group of researchers that published the Great Barrington Declaration.
Early on during the COVID pandemic, the letter criticized the government’s response with lockdowns and was signed by 40,000 medical practitioners across the US.
In response to the letter Bhattacharya and his colleagues from Oxford and Harvard were smeared as “fringe epidemiologiests” by bureaucrats including Anthony Fauci and secretly blacklisted from social media platforms like Twitter.
Just how scandalous this treatment of these serious scientists was, becomes clear when you listen to Bhattacharya and his sober, clear-headed and yet empathetic approach to healthcare.
A couple of important insights from the podcast, though I highly recommend listening to it in full:
- All of medicine is filled with trade-offs that are often unrecognized.
- Economic Epidemiology is an important field that tries to account for such trade-offs attempts a holistic assessment of certain policies or treatments. This approach is often missing from our current approach including our reaction to COVID.
- Our healthcare system is fraught with ideology, bad incentives and distortions.
- A lot of drugs trials are run on intermediate end points, not actual health outcomes. When actual health outcomes are measured, the efficacy of a lot of drugs is far less clear. E.g. statins reduce cholesterol level, but are far less likely to reduce the likelihood of heart attacks
- There is a lot we don’t understand about the human body. Ethical science and medicine should recognize this. “I don’t see how anyone can go to medical school and not come away humbled”. When Bhattacharya went to medical school at Stanford, his professor would tell him that half the things they teach are wrong. We discover that a previous paradigm we had is actually completely wrong all the time.
- A lot of continual education in Medicine is pharma funded. A lot of the medicine being practiced is related to the availability of certain drugs. e.g. Depression only started to be diagnosed a lot when SSRIs became available as a treatment. This creates massive distortions in the system
