The most precious gift of life is good health. Yet each day tens of millions of people do not experience this, and live with the pain, agony and impaired function of chronic, degenerative disease. According to government statistics, the National Institute of Health, and U.S. Congressional hearings, there are over 784,000 deaths each year as a result of adverse drug reactions, medical complications, and medical mistakes, at a cost of $282 billion dollars annually.

Each year over five million adverse drug reactions are reported. In 1998, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that adverse drug reactions were the third leading cause of death. The World Health Organization has ranked the United States a lowly 37th in the world in quality of healthcare, 42nd in life expectancy, despite spending nearly double per capita of the next nearest country. Something is desperately wrong with our system.

Our modern, expensive medical system is the finest in the world at handling acute medical conditions. However, this accounts for less than 20% of healthcare issues. More than 80% of health needs, as well as their associated costs, are of the chronic, degenerative nature, and our medical education programs have not prepared our health providers for these conditions. As we look at the pathway and patterns that contribute and lead to the endpoint symptoms, which are labeled a "disease," our entire current healthcare system is focused on treating the "disease" by suppressing the observed symptoms with expensive drugs, surgeries, hospital stays, and long term care.

Acute care assessment and treatment is essential in treating emergency or urgent care situations. Yet this model fails miserably, and dramatically increases costs when applied to chronic disease or preventive medicine. Many scientific studies now demonstrate that 80% to 90% of chronic disease may be preventable.

Unfortunately, modern medical education and research does not address these issues. As a result, acute symptom assessment and treatment protocols are applied to all chronic disease; it's the only tool in their toolbox. This is like a mechanic waiting for a car to crash before fixing it, rather than fixing the brakes or tires so that it doesn't crash. In fact, the system encourages people to crash, because without acute symptoms or problems they will not get their insurance to pay for treatment.

Even with the proposed new "National Health Care" insurance system, there may be limits imposed on coverage based on a patient's age and/or viability.

Fortunately, there is a system that may help solve all of these problems based on Wellness, Prevention and Functional Medicine which focuses on the upstream, deep underlying root causes of dysfunction. This changes the pathways toward a disease state to a pathway towards health.

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