330. Saving Lives With Outsider Ideas feat. Charles Barber

Sep 11, 2023

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Sometimes, the ideas that end up being the most revolutionary come from outside the scientific mainstream. People who can approach the problem with different eyes and thoughts and see solutions from another angle. For medicine, the idea that revolutionized trauma wound care came from a complete outsider and accelerated when he joined forces with another outsider to promote a new way to clot blood.

Charles Barber is a professor at Wesleyan University and the author of several books. His latest book, titled In the Blood: How Two Outsiders Solved a Centuries-Old Medical Mystery and Took On the US Army, recounts the story of the unlikely development of Quikclot and the hurdles that were along its path to adoption.

Charles and Greg discuss what doctors had tried before Quikclot came along and then the story of how Frank Hursey and Brad Gullong turned heads and changed minds with the effectiveness of their new product to clot blood quickly and save the lives of those who had wounds that would previously have been fatal.

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Episode Quotes:

How two outsiders and three combat veterans revolutionized medicine

25:39: One of the reasons they don't go in for the very expensive things that the army went in—these high-tech blood-clotting things that eventually failed—is they just didn't have the budget. They didn't have the money for it. And the Quikclot that was produced out of the Zeolite, which, by the way, was deployed very early in Iraq war and saved a lot of lives, was like $15 a packet. And so it was this kismet of two outsider inventors with no credentials doing things that would allow them to lose their medical license had they had a medical license, putting a rock in the bloodstream, and then meeting up over a number of years with these three outsider medical people. What they all shared was combat, raw combat experience, and an intolerance for the bureaucracy if it got in the way of the phrase that they all used independently, saving the kids in the ditch.

Prioritizing insights over credentials

17:32: We live in this age of experts, where you have to have PhDs, MDs, and everything at the same time. And we don't pay attention the way we did even a hundred years ago to people who don't necessarily have the credentials but have the insight.

Does our approach to medicine create fertile ground for pharmaceutical company marketing?

46:22: If you were to pick one thing that changed the commodification of psychiatric drugs, it was the television advertising of drugs. And New Zealand and the US, then and now, are still the only countries that do it. And so, it's not far afield from this sort of American Wild West of grabbing highly potent, sometimes effective, often not effective technological solutions without going to the undergirding issues.

Mental illness is complicated

48:45: Mental illness is nothing if not extraordinarily complicated, and we've grown up with even advanced psychiatry. It's all this: either medicines or therapy, genes or character, environment or hereditary. And for some reason, we can't seem to understand that it's not that complicated.

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Guest Profile:

Faculty Profile on Wesleyan University
Author’s Profile on Penguin Random House
Charles Barber's Website
Charles Barber on LinkedIn

His Work:

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