Martin Makary Archives | The Short Coat

We were too slow, too cautious, and too “old-guard” in our responses to COVID

TL;DR

Guest Marty Makary condemns the old way that healthcare responds to current events.

Sticking to the clinical trials process and a reluctance to use the knowledge already available from Chinese doctors slowed US responses and killed people.

“We had terrible medical leadership throughout the pandemic, and I think it’s good for our leaders to show some degree of humility to say, look, we consistently got it wrong.”

This episode is sponsored by Panacea Financial, a company just for medical students and doctors. Check them out!

New York Times bestselling author and Johns Hopkins surgeon Marty Makary returns to the show to just blast US healthcare and medicine’s response to COVID. The flip-flopping on mask effectiveness, the distribution of vaccines, ignoring the role of natural immunity of people who were infected and survived, insisting on a two-dose vaccine rollout instead of first getting everyone vaccinated once. All of these decisions were slow, ill-considered, and in some cases theatrical rather than scientific. Even Fauci got it wrong! *gasp*

Join MD/PhD student Aline Sandouk, and M1s AJ Chowdhury and Rick Gardner as we dissect the chaos. The paperback edition of Dr. Makary’s book, The Price We Pay, includes an update that discusses COVID’s implications for the business of healthcare.

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Continuing our recent discussion on the price of healthcare in the United States, on this episode we talk with Dr. Martin Makary. Dr. Makary is a surgeon at Johns Hopkins, a best-selling author, and a health policy expert. Dr. Makary’s latest book entitled The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care–and How to Fix It, is due out in September. We were so glad to talk with him, because it’s all-too-easy to be jaded about the ‘business’ of healthcare when one in five Americans are in collections over healthcare debt. But Dr. Makary combines outrage at the market forces that have created a used-car-lot sales environment with optimism about healthcare’s future prospects for transparency and fairness. Things are changing, he says! Interestingly, the medical students doing research with him–pouring their hearts, souls, and minds into it–have helped to create that sense of optimism in him. In other words, millennials may be saving American healthcare even as they’re killing the napkin and real estate industries.

On top of all that, while The Price We Pay is an indictment of the insurance and billing practices that hinder the work of doctors and the healing of patients, the book is also a guidebook to the things that can and are being done to restore medicine’s mission.

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I’m looking at you, millennials: what do you think? Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime, visit our Facebook group, or email theshortcoats@gmail.com. Do all three!

Continue reading Millennials may be changing healthcare (ft. Martin Makary, MD) →

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