This will probably read as odd to many
considering the economic strength of the pharmaceutical industry and the brand
recognition that modern medicine has achieved, but healthcare has not yet truly
had its revolutionary period. When preventable conditions dominate the
most deadly list, kids are sicker now than ever (despite our wealth and
resources), our health system ranks last in the world amongst our
industrialized peers despite being first in cost, and adverse reactions and
deaths via medications are out of control, contemporary healthcare can hardly
be considered revolutionary, with respect given to specific innovations.
Recent events and deeply troubling repercussions have magnified the long-standing
problem with basing healthcare on the theories of disease. The time has,
thus, come to redefine health so that we can begin designing the blueprint for
healthcare's future.
A problem cannot be fixed if its fundamental
cause is not identified. Health has been poorly defined for most of our
lifetimes and we have been given a cradle-to-grave indoctrination of a narrow
viewpoint on it. Just as you cannot achieve true freedom in a socialist
state, you cannot change healthcare if the system that oversees it is
philosophically rooted in sickness and symptom treatment. For all its
proselytizing on science, our healthcare system has failed to follow the basics
of the scientific method, for though it may ask lots of questions that become
theoretical constructs, it overlooks the laws of life.
Thomas Edison was one of the greatest inventors
who ever lived, using already proven laws on electricity to among other things
light up our world. “The doctor of the future will give no medicine,” he
said in 1903, “but will interest his patient in the care of the human frame, in
diet and in the cause and prevention of disease.” Health history
witnessed a revolutionary step-forward when it followed Edison’s lead toward
disease prevention and developed modern sanitation, the unsung hero of and
quite possibly the primary reason for plummeting rates of communicable disease
in the mid-to-late 20th century. Regrettably, healthcare has
since remained stuck in a disease-oriented bubble, one failed theory after
another, ignoring laws.
Designing systems based on scientific laws is
paramount to the effectiveness and safety of the systems. Aviation, for
instance, is based on the laws of physics. Accidents happen, but they are
so rare now that air travel is considered the safest form transportation.
If 250,000 people per year died in America of plane crashes like they do of
adverse reactions to medications, would we not go back to the drawing board on
aerodynamics? Of course we would, but fortunately the laws of physics create
an always sturdy foundation for future innovation.
The first step in revamping American healthcare,
then, is redefining health based on patterns that repeatedly hold up against
scrutiny (i.e. laws). An optimal definition would create a new baseline
understanding of health and how each of us can achieve it, giving power and
responsibility back to the individual body in which the laws of life are
expressed.
To that end, it is important to emphasize a
forest instead of individual trees mentality as it relates to our bodies, that
we are the products of intricate internal relationships neurologically (i.e.
communication), psychologically (i.e. thoughts), physiologically (i.e.
function), and anatomically (i.e. structure), not just a bunch of random parts
to be studied and treated in sections.
Optimizing the body – when the aforementioned
internal relationships are the equivalent of strong marriages – is perhaps the
ideal phrase to form the foundation for this revised definition because we know
from meticulous study that the human body, when optimized, can overcome just
about anything. A symptom like fever or the symptoms associated with food
poisoning will come as needed and go on their own. They represent the
body's ability to adapt when challenged by an aggressive foreign invader.
No interventions are required to deal with them unless the symptoms get out of
control, which is very uncommon.
Adaptability, therefore, should factor into
health redefined as well. The body's adaptability represents how
efficiently it can sort through physical, chemical, emotional, or environmental
stressors. Generally, a proliferation of symptoms suggests, more than
anything else, weakened adaptability. A laws of life-based response to
symptomatic outbreaks would be to address the various causes of weakened
adaptability, as opposed to applying diagnostic labels and treating symptoms
with chemical interventions, which only hinder the body's response because they
interfere with innate adaptation, causing a second adaptation to be necessary
(such is why side effects to medications dominate three-quarters of drug
ads).
So, here is a new definition of health:
HEALTH (noun) – an
optimized state in which the numerous organ systems in the body work
harmoniously together at a level conducive to sustaining an innate adaptability
capable of preventing sickness and overcoming the causes of various symptoms
The future of healthcare may well rest in this
philosophical and scientific shift; from studying, for instance, why the 1% are
really sick or dying among the 8% expected to eventually be diagnosed with
COVID-19 and instead focusing most of the research on the vast majority of that
8% who recover fully or, better yet, the 92% who never earn the diagnosis at
all. It would make sense to base healthcare research on how healthier
people remain well and avoid illness.
Based on the above definition, a revitalized and
refocused healthcare system could make its primary objective to understand what
takes our bodies out of an optimized state, building on established knowledge
of such adaptability-reducing agents as physical trauma, chemical insults, and
emotional stress and the holistic methods built to eliminate or lessen
them. After all, no more than you can learn how to float by studying how
to sink, you cannot learn how to be healthy by studying sickness.
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