It’s time for medicine at large to look at whole people instead of diseases and conditions, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Where are the blind spots when it comes to the practice of medicine? Johns Hopkins surgeon Marty Makary, author of a new book entitled ‘Blind Spots,” says they are too numerous to identify individually.

Makary: We have massive blind spots in medicine.  Maybe we we need to be talking more about school lunch programs instead of just putting every six year old on Ozempic. Maybe we need to talk about treating high blood pressure by addressing sleep quality and stress not just putting everybody on meds. Maybe we need to talk about the environmental exposures that cause cancer not just the chemotherapy to treat it. We have the most medicated generation in human history.               :27

 Makary advocates for a whole-life, integrative approach to instilling health rather than treating diseases and conditions as they arise, since the majority of them are the result of the many choices we make, including what we eat and what we don’t, and how much preventive health we engage with. He opines that traditional medicine has been complicit and now must choose an inclusive approach. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.