Future of Medicine Dr. Bland 00:00 So how has medicine really been designed? It’s been designed really to make things simple. That’s where if this then that. So basically we have one drug for one illness, so you would get the disease, you name it, you have a diagnosis, you then have a treatment which is generally one drug for that specific condition.
00:18 Now that worked when it was infectious disease and it was an antibiotic control condition. Pneumonia, at certain pneumococcus bacteria, caused it, and now you have a certain intervention with a drug, an antibiotic. Well with these complex chronic illnesses that are now the dominant themes that old model, all of that way that we emerged our thinking, really doesn’t apply very well to the complex problems that we have today. So we have to have a new model. We have to develop another way.
00:43 It doesn’t mean we throw out all those things that we learned that were useful for acute. It just means we need a different model for chronic. We just can’t take the acute model and apply it to chronic and get a positive outcome. And how do we know that? Because look at the ever-expanding cost of healthcare today, 78 percent of our healthcare dollars go to the management of chronic disease without a system really to manage it.
01:03 We’re using an acute system to manage chronic illness and they were asking why does it cost so much? So I think this is opening the door for another innovation of paradigm shift, a tremendous revolution in human thinking as it relates to how we’re going to explore and ultimately prevent and treat chronic illness. And we’re right at that nexus today. We have the tools, we have the scientific understanding.
01:24 Twenty years ago we didn’t even know the origin of the chronic illnesses. We just had an explanation of their appearance. We didn’t know where they came from. That’s no longer true today. Now we actually have an explanation biologically as to how the system of the function at the cellular, the tissue, the organ, organ system and whole body level interacts to produce what we call these illnesses. And each one is uniquely different to the person that has him. So this is the age of personalized healthcare. Moving from the age of the averages to the age of the individual, to the treatment of the cause and nuts and the effect, and it’s an exciting time.
