Dr. Marty Makary

Guest: Dr. Marty Makary from Johns Hopkins

Subject: How groupthink and bad science threaten patients

Monologue: Israel is arresting journalists. Climber Sandy Irvine’s boot found 100 years later; can the mystery of who first summited Everest now be solved? Praise for Coast Guard rescue swimmers and a Canadian lawyer gets a visit from cops over her online support for Palestinians.

Book: Blind Spots - When Medicine Gets it Wrong and What It Means for Our Health

I raced, breathless into my studio on Thursday for our taping with Dr. Marty Makary, a C-19 dissident whom I have admired from afar for years. I was late because I’d spent the morning dealing with a crazed troll whose vitriol and hatred knocked me back a bit. I was shaking as I sat down behind the mic, but interviewing is what I do, it’s in the blood and DNA and Dr. Makary is so articulate, he put me at ease. In minutes, I’d temporarily forgotten about the troll and was immersed in his story-telling and research. What a blessing.

My late start meant that we didn’t quite get the sound right on my mic and I’m still not sure where the gremlin is located. Neither is my tech producer who works remotely. I sound lousy but Dr. Makary’s audio is fabulous. He was gracious as we mucked about with technicals and he even allowed me extra time. You get to know something about high profile people when things go wrong. Most are gracious. Some are jerks. Dr. Makary is the former — by a mile and I am grateful. A day that started very badly was looking up by the time I had finished interviewing this lovely man.

His book is about a number of important medical failures driven by bad science and groupthink. My favourite story is about the explosion of childhood peanut allergies that swept the West for a decade or two. It was based entirely on medical advice to withhold nuts early — thereby causing the very allergy the advice was meant to prevent. I’d always wondered about this phenomenon, especially given there seemed to be none of it when I was in school during prehistoric times. How many kids died of anaphylaxis because the medical establishment got this so wrong? Dr. Makary and his book are a masterclass in critical thinking.

I didn’t announce the book giveaway properly on the show — so I will pull an email from a paying subscriber list in the next 36 hours (you deserve some perks) and contact you about the win.

Update on Jeremy Loffredo, the American journalist arrested, beaten and jailed in Israel. Loffredo was released by a judge but is not allowed to leave the country. Meanwhile the basis for the charges has been totally undermined as reported by The Grayzone, Loffredo’s employer.

“The criminal case against the American reporter fell apart after an Israeli journalist testified that his own article containing Loffredo’s full video report had cleared military censorship. Yet Israel refuses to let Loffredo leave the country.”

On October 11, journalist Jeremy Loffredo was ordered released from Israeli jail.

Israeli soldiers arrested the Jewish-American reporter and three other journalists at a checkpoint in the West Bank on October 8. According to one of the jailed reporters, @the_andrey_x, the soldiers blindfolded them tightly, roughed them up, drawing guns on them at one point, and hauled them off to detention in Jerusalem.

“The soldiers… illegally requested that the journalists hand in their phones, and when they refused, the soldiers pointed a gun at one of the journalists, hit him with their hands and the barrel of a gun, then dragged him out of the car and slammed him onto the concrete. When lying on the ground, they pointed 2 guns at his head. The rest of the journalists exited the car and the military raided it, confiscating phones, cameras, and personal items,” said @the_andrey_x.

Andrey recalled that in the course of abusing the journalists, “The soldiers told the female Israeli photographer that she should have been raped by Hamas.”

While Loffredo’s colleagues were released after 11 hours, the “Judea and Samaria” division of the Israeli police opened an investigation into Loffredo for supposedly “aiding the enemy in a time of war.”

If you’ve heard the podcast you noticed that I am quite excited that the great mountaineer and documentary director, Jimmy Chin is the one who located some remains of Sandy Irvine on Mount Everest — leading the way to solving a hundred-year-old mystery. Will we now find the camera that could prove that Irvine and his climbing partner beat Sir Edmund Hillary to the Summit by about thirty years? And on a tougher route?

On 29 May 1953 Mount Everest was officially summited for the first time. The climbers, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, entered the history books for their achievement, something nobody had managed before.

At least, that is what is believed. However there was another ascent, decades earlier, which may have achieved the impossible and reached the top of Everest. In June 1924 two mountaineers set out to reach the summit, and may indeed have done so.

The two, George Mallory and Sandy Irvine, never made it back to their camp. They died at some point during the attempt, but the crucial and unanswered question since has remained: did they make the summit and die on the descent? Were these two the first to reach the top of Everest?

Mallory’s body was found in 1999, but no conclusions could be drawn from that discovery. It was his companion, Andrew “Sandy” Irvine who had carried the camera. Now, a National Geographic documentary film team have found a crucial clue in unravelling the mystery, the partial remains of Irvine. 

According to a report in National Geographic, the documentary team that included the filmmakers and climbers Jimmy Chin, Erich Roepke and Mark Fisher spotted a boot emerging from a glacier. The team believe the boot had been trapped in the glacier, only emerging now to be discovered.

The whereabouts of the rest of Irvine’s body is currently unknown, but the discovery has given searchers a massively reduced area in which to concentrate their efforts. As to the identify of the owner of the boot, of that there can be no doubt: Sandy Irvine wrote his name on the sock inside.

Above is the devastatingly handsome, Oxford Educated climber, Sandy Irvine whose foot and climbing boot were located on Everest after a hundred years. He was only 22 when he disappeared. Was he going up or coming down?

Director Jimmy Chin on Everest with Irvine’s boot.

This find will very likely lead to another brilliant mountaineering/climbing film by Chin who directed the Oscar winning Free Solo. I can’t wait!

Here is the floating ice-cooler-man who survived Milton being rescued by a CG rescue swimmer.

Feel free to comment. I read them all. And thanks for the kind words this week. They mean a lot.

Stay critical.

#truthovertribe