The Ever-Changing Healthcare Landscape

By Nick Jacobs

Ever since I became a healthcare executive—too many years ago than I like to remember—I have tried to learn as much as I can about the different ways humans try to improve and maintain their health. This has led me to explore new ideas, engage leaders in the fields of wellness and, of course, read anything and everything I can to expand my knowledge—all in the interest of helping others.

Recently, I read The Age of Scientific Wellness, by Drs. Leroy Hood and Nathan Price, which explores their vision to work to eliminate chronic disease. Now in his mid-80s, Dr. Hood developed many of the initial automated DNA and Protein sequencers helpful in the first mapping of the human genome.

According to Dr. Hood, he believes the future of medicine will be Four P’s: Predictive, Preventable, Personalized and Participatory. Many of the challenges and roadblocks he described 15 years ago are either still a reality or have been exasperated by the political breakdown and polarizations brought by masking and immunization rules introduced during COVID-19. On the plus side, we see great progress in areas such as AI and genome-mapping costs.

Drs. Hood and Price describe our current healthcare system with the following pattern: Wait for something to go wrong; try to identify the cause of the problem; try to fix it; if the fix works, try it on the next person to exhibit the same symptoms; and treat complications caused by the disease or the fix—or sign the death certificate.

They also state that, “If you get one disease such as diabetes, you are more than likely to get sick with another.” Thus, diabetes equals coronary artery disease, kidney disease, or dementia. Also true, they say: “Risk factors for one disease are the starting point for another.”

One of the interesting findings revealed in the book was that fewer deaths occurred from COVID-19 in places like Japan where, compared to the U.S., the levels of diabetes, hypertension and obesity are much lower. This further affirms why scientific wellness is critical to our future.

Dr. Hood’s views the human body and its function as an interlocking system. Yet the structure of our medical system calls for us to see our bodies in binary terms: we are either sick or well. Dr. Hood takes a different view, saying we live in “a spectrum of wellness” and by adopting this perspective, we can optimize our wellness time. Currently, most of us live through the wellness phase for 10 to 15 years of adult life, or about 20 percent of our time on Earth. Dr. hood says this is true because it has been almost impossible to see these disease transitions but in the book, he and Dr. Price say, “Soon we will be able to identify these transitions and safely intervene, and in many cases reverse, the movement to disease and return individuals to outright wellness.”

The book provides numerous statistics (some difficult to hear). For example, by age 44, one out of four Americans has at least one diagnosable disease, while 75 percent have a recognizable disease by age 65. Bottom line: we live more than half of our lives bearing some disease. Another bit of information to consider: 86 percent of the $4 trillion spend on health care in the United States is on chronic disease.

Drs. Hood and Price believe wellness can extend from our 20s to beyond our 80s. They are focusing on three areas to explore to help create more wellness and a life of healthfulness: analysis of our genomes, our phenomes (the set of phenotypic entities in a cell, tissue, organ, organism and species) and personal digital measurements. Each of these represents opportunities and challenges.

The authors also take a comprehensive look into the idea of brain health and verify a hot topic today, that chronological age does not always correspond with biological age. Or, simply stated, life span does not always equal health span.

Nick Jacobs is a partner with SMR, LLC and founder of the Academy of Integrative Health and Medicine, former board member of the American Board of Integrative Holistic Medicine, Jacobs maintains a website, Healinghospitals.com.