The Future of Medicine: Evolution or

Revolution?
By Michael Finkelstein, MD

2017 Oath Inc. All rights reserved.

Part of HuffPost Lifestyle

Over the past century, conventional medicine has made extraordinary

advances in fighting disease and extending life. Thanks to
pharmaceutical and surgical interventions, supported by a vast array
of hi-tech gadgets, we are living longer than ever and surviving the
most horrific accidents and ailments. As noted by Tieraona LowDog,
MD, Fellowship Director at the Academy of Integrative Health and
Medicine (AIHM), in our recent interview, I think if we envisioned
waking up tomorrow, and there were no hospitals, no ambulances, no
surgical suites, no prescription drugs, no doctors, etc., I think wed
envision a world that would be much worse off than it is today.
Side by side with these appreciations of conventional medicine is the
growing concern that by focusing exclusively on the body; by fighting
disease instead of supporting a whole person; by viewing technology
and hard data (like heart rate and blood pressure) as the definitive
measurement of health; and by operating reactively instead of
proactively - i.e., waiting for disease to strike - conventional medicine
has lost the forest for the trees.
In other words, we have rejected the wisdom of ancient medicine,
failing to recognize the inter-connected web not only between body,
mind, and spirit, but also between individual, community, and planet.
And we are paying the price. As noted by Joseph Pizzorno, ND,
founding president of Bastyr Unviersity, in our recent interview,
environmental toxins are the primary cause of disease in the
Western world, and our carelessness with nature otherwise has led
to a litany of health problems, including foods that dont have
nutrients anymore.
Naturopathic medicine, integrative medicine, and most recently,
functional medicine have attempted to revise the tenants of Western
medicine, in a way that coalesces the intelligence and strength of each
system. Some healthcare leaders, however, question whether these
attempts are foolhardy.
Much of whats wrong with medicine today, said Leo Galland, MD,
Director of the Foundation for Integrated Medicine, in our recent
interview, is the disease theory of illness, which is what conventional
medicine is organized around. Its the idea that people get sick,
because they get a disease. So the question becomes, OK, what is the
disease that you have? And the treatment then is the treatment of
the disease, and the way that evidence is evaluated is, Treatment
helps the disease.
James Maskell, host of the Evolution of Medicine summit, took this
thinking one step further, in our recent interview, postulating that the
reason Western medicine is slow to incorporate more holistic models
is that the medical structures needed for acute disease and chronic
disease are completely opposite.
The [Western] medical system is built on reactivity, he elaborated.
Something happens, and we take action to solve that problem, which
makes total sense in acute disease. With chronic disease, it makes no
sense. You have to be proactive. What therefore is required, he
concluded, is not the evolution of medicine, but the revolution of
medicine - allowing conventional medicine to continue doing what it
does well, and providing new options based on new paradigms.
The revolution in fact seems to be underway in numerous healthcare
spaces. When LowDog was approached about leading the AIHM
fellowship, for example, the idea was to train doctors and nurse
practitioners in more holistic options. LowDog rejected that idea,
instead offering her vision of truly integrated medicine, which AIHM
has since implemented. Weve done such good work helping doctors
learn more and think more broadly about health and medicine and
wellness, LowDog recalled advising the AIHM team, but that is
never going to change the trajectory of whats happening in this
nation, let alone globally.
Medicine in its fullness, LowDog passionately asserted, includes not
only doctors, but also clergies, pharmacists, dentists, massage
therapists, nurses, shamans, mothers...We have to learn to work
together, to co-collaborate with patients and refer to one another and
work together in teams. A truly integrated field of medicine, LowDog
continued, functions much like a basketball team, where everyone is
assigned the role for which they are most uniquely qualified and
skilled. Its only by bringing everybody whose strengths fit the
position theyre playing that were really going to be able to save
dollars, improve lives, and improve peoples quality of life, she
emphasized.
To help move this revolution along, Maskell and other tech-savvy
individuals, such as Jeff Arnold - CEO of Sharecare and founder of
WebMD - are using the internet, smart phones, and other technology,
to facilitate a more community-minded form of medicine. Whereas
Maskell focuses on cultivating relationships between healthcare
practitioners, in the interest of building strong medical teams, Arnold
focuses on increasing self-awareness and enhancing the personal
relationships of consumers, in the interest of optimizing ones health.
Better relationships result in better health, Arnold emphasized in our
interview, and better health results in better relationships. How do
those two constantly self-reinforce? he asked. The key, he continued,
is generating a hyper-awareness among consumers, so that they
volunteer to participate in making themselves the healthiest they can
be.
To this end, Sharecare features smartphone apps that gather
comprehensive data about users and their environments, throughout
each day - physical activity, sleep, weather, conversations, music,
location, and more - translating all this data into concrete information
about what causes the user to relax or feel stressed, respectively. In
other words, the apps track and offer real-time biofeedback on what
activates a users sympathetic nervous system (the fight/flight mode
in which our bodies respond as if we are being chased by a lion), and
parasympathetic nervous system (the rest/digest mode in which our
bodies activate the healing response mechanism and release a bio-
chemical cascade of wellness throughout our system).
Given that the frantic pace of todays society has most of us in a state
of sympathetic overdrive, or chronic stress, through which our
fight/flight response is locked in the on position, and given that
chronic stress is a leading contributor to the gamut of health
concerns, from heart disease to obesity to cancer, it is an incredible
development that we now have our fingertips definitive knowledge of
what agitates us and what soothes, and by extension, what makes us
sick and what makes us well.
Coupled with guidance on how to understand and act on this
information, we all can more easily take proactive steps to live the
healthiest lives possible, gravitating toward what takes us to our
happy place in each of the seven spokes of the Slow Medicine
Wheel of Health - our physical body; our mental-emotional state; our
relationships to each other, to nature, and to the Divine; our
participation in community; and our lifes purpose. Indeed, we need
something this comprehensive and revolutionary. Not only are there
staggering levels of chronic illness today, but conventional medicine is
limited in responding to it, and furthermore has proven resistant to
providing more holistic approaches to managing it.
By contrast, at the core of all the innovative measures cited above,
from the educational to the technical, is an expanded definition of
health and enhanced tools for optimizing it: By taking a whole-
being/whole-life approach to wellness; by recognizing the many kinds
of doctors and healers in our midst; by providing tools to unify these
practitioners in collaborative teams; and by providing tools for
consumers to access these teams, while also monitoring their own
health on a daily basis, we truly do have the potential not only to
evolve medicine, but to revolutionize it.
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Michael Finkelstein, MD The Slow Medicine Doctor