How To Win At Angry Birds

Western medicine is failing in its primary objective of treating illness, relieving suffering and prolonging life.

Costs soar as the burden of chronic diseases rises, while at the same time we’ve made no meaningful progress in treating those diseases. And this is because our guiding paradigm is wrong.

Because of this, we have seen virtually no therapeutic breakthroughs in medicine in the past half century. Nor should we expect that any will come, no matter how many resources we throw at it. 

2 REASONS WHY WE GET SICK

There are two primary ways humans get sick. And two primary ways we die.

The first way we get sick is through a sudden insult to an otherwise intact biological system. These are acute, single factor events that compromise physiologic function. This category includes things like trauma and infections.

And these are the sorts of problems that modern medicine and its guiding paradigm arose to solve. With great success, too. The extension in human lifespan over the early to mid twentieth century was due in no small part to that success.

The second way we get sick is through gradual physiologic deterioration over time. Initially, this manifests as a reduction in our ability to maintain homeostasis in the face of stressors. Once homeostasis in a physiologic system cannot be maintained at baseline, deterioration becomes disease.

This second way is how the vast majority of people today get sick and die. It is a process that is chronic, insidious, and multifactorial, involving scores of physiological processes and biochemical mechanisms. And it leads to the familiar diseases of our time – things like diabetes, obesity, heart disease, stroke, cancer, autoimmune illness, and Alzheimer’s.

These are not the kinds of problems modern medicine, and its guiding paradigm, arose to solve. Our lack of progress, then, should not be surprising.

Solving these kinds of problems requires an entirely different approach.

The following series of videos entitled “How To Win At Angry Birds” (created for humanOS, where I serve as Chief Medical Officer) outlines why our current paradigm is wrong.

And, more importantly, it presents a new paradigm that I believe can usher in a revolution in human health and therapeutics.

(click here to view the 4 Quadrant Model that characterizes the ancestral therapeutic paradigm)