Where are the blind spots in medicine? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Blind Spots is the name of a new book by Marty Makary, a surgeon at Johns Hopkins and public health researcher, illustrating how medicine sometimes gets it wrong and then seems unable to reverse the tide of established treatments and practices. One such example he notes is the medical establishment’s longstanding ignorance of the microbiome.

Makary: We've got areas like the microbiome, that is the bacteria that line the gut, those bacteria live in a balance. It's important for digestion and the immune system, it's related to mood and mental health and it's involved in regulation of hormones but we've been ignoring this because it doesn't fit one of our specialties in medicine but it turns out it's central to health.  :25 

Makary says that willful disruption of the gut microbiome with antibiotic use can have long ranging consequences for the person who takes the drugs, especially if they’re very young, as well as society at large in promoting development of resistant organisms. He hopes that current research efforts on the microbiome point the way to protecting it. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.