Fueling The Healthcare Revolution
Recovering the Health and Vitality of Our Generation and the Next The field of healthcare in North America is in desperate need of a full-on revolution. Despite more advances in science, medicine, philosophy and psychology than any other time in history, the percentage of chronically ill Americans is also higher than any time in history. Tragically, those percentages are growing dramatically. This Revolution is long overdue. Symptoms of the Need for Change in American Healthcare According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about half of all US adults (roughly 117 million people) have one or more chronic health conditions; one in four suffer from two or more chronic health problems.1 As a result of the Western medicine, allopathic approach to using a “diagnose and prescribe” model for treating illness, Americans are taking higher quantities and more complex combinations of prescription drugs at an accelerating pace. According to the health research firm Quintile IMS, the number of prescriptions filled for American adults and children rose 85 percent between 1997 and 2016, from 2.4 billion to 4.5 billion a year. During that time, the U.S. population rose by only 21 percent.2 Meanwhile, a study by researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine says medical errors should rank as the third leading cause of death in the United States. According to the study and its base of research, medical mistakes that can lead to death range from surgical complications that go unrecognized to mix-ups with the doses or types of medications patients receive. The Johns Hopkins study estimates that more than 250,000 Americans die each year from medical errors. On the CDC’s official list, that would rank just behind heart disease and cancer, which each took about 600,000 lives in 2014, and in front of respiratory disease, which caused about 150,000 deaths. The authors of the Johns Hopkins study urged, in an open letter to the CDC, to immediately add medical errors to its annual list reporting the top causes of death.3 These already frightening facts don’t even begin to account for the myriad health problems caused by pharmaceutical drug side-effects, adverse reactions and unforeseen contraindications. In her recent groundbreaking book, “A Nation of Unwell”, Dr. Kristine Gedroic concisely describes the root of the problem with the Western medicine, allopathic approach. “As physicians, we are not trained to consider why patients are having symptoms in an attempt to correct the underlying cause. We are taught to ask the questions we need to have answered in order to add up to a particular disease or diagnosis, and we are trained to consider what medicine will help with the symptom and make the patient more comfortable or less at risk. We then discard all the other elements that seem to have no relation”. Dr. Gedroic goes on to liken this approach to the analogy of a fire and smoke detector, “When we take medicine for a symptom without looking for a cause, we are dismantling our internal smoke detector while the fire continues to burn, becoming more intense and problematic over time.”1 A Medical Profession Ready for Change In the course of our work at MindBody Talent, we talk with medical professionals of all stripes, literally every day of every week. Those conversations and relationships include allopathic and osteopathic physicians (MDs and DOs), nurse practitioners (NPs), physician assistants (PAs), therapeutic specialists and practitioners of a wide range of traditional and non-traditional therapies. We also work closely with executives who run medical practices, hospitals, wellness centers and senior living facilities. Those conversations have a very common and increasingly frustrated theme that goes something like this … “I didn’t enter the medical profession to only treat symptoms and too often fail in the process. I didn’t spend years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on my education to dispense pills and prescribe treatments that so often make the situation worse. There has to be a better way”. Thankfully, there is a better way… the Revolution in healthcare is finally and steadily gaining steam. Honoring the Past to Chart the Path Forward The Latin root of the term “revolution” means to “turn around” or to “roll back”. The revolutionary voices in the American healthcare system are doing just that … calling us to return to the roots of methods and practices that worked for thousands of years in the management of illness and the restoration of health. These visionary leaders are mining and honoring ancient wisdom that was largely discarded with the advent of modern science and innovations in medicine. They are charting paths that honor the old while embracing the new in blended models that work for our modern life and times. This Revolution is picking up momentum because of people like Dr. Kristine Gedroic and a growing number of like-minded experts in Functional, Integrative and Lifestyle Medicine that include Dr. Mark Hyman, director of the Center for Functional Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic and founder of The UltraWellness Center; Dr. Andrew Weil, founder and director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine; Dr. Dean Ornish, founder and president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute; Dr. Jeff Egler, medical director of the Inspire Health Center at Adventist Health; Dr. Lauren Munsch Dal Farra, CEO, and Dr. Sita Kedia, Medical Director, of PALM Health; Dr. Theri Raby, founder and medical director of The Raby Institute for Integrative Medicine at Northwestern; Dr. David Katz, founder of Yale University’s Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center and founder/president of the True Health Initiative; and Dr. Mehmet Oz, attending physician of New York Presbyterian/Columbia University who uses his prolific media presence to open so many alternative conversations about health. It’s also growing because of the thousands of practitioners and hundreds of medical practices, wellness centers and senior living communities across the country that are becoming savvy to the tenets and methodologies of Functional, Integrative and Lifestyle Medicine. These leaders are choosing to use a broader lens that includes modern advances in science and medicine, but also inclusively revisits ancient wisdoms, pays attention
