Practicing medicine is fascinating and rewarding work – but, unfortunately, the mainstream medical ‘system’ often interferes with the mission of health and healing. Granted, the mainstream system, or, as I like to call it, ‘Old Medicine,’ is great for acute situations like broken bones and appendicitis but tends to fail on an epic scale when it comes to the ‘walking unwell.' I’m talking about the silent majority of people saddled with chronic health concerns that aren’t completely incapacitating or may not set off alarm bells on a basic lab test but, nevertheless, interfere with people living their life to the fullest. Be it a misbehaving belly, general aches and pains, lacking energy or poor sleep, night after night, no one should have to accept feeling crummy much of the time as ‘normal.’

Even if you lay all of your health issues on the table for your doc, what you receive in return may be limited to a few prescriptions, a handful of unanswered questions, and a rising suspicion that your solution might be worse for you than your condition. The latter of which is likely not wrong, this ‘cure’ may leave you with ample side effects and contribute to worsened health.

Perhaps we reach common ground when I say that this is ineffective for the majority of people’s day to day ailments. There is a need for a re-imagined medical system – where health is optimized with an integrative approach and you have access to a compassionate, supportive medical team. In this, as I call it ‘New Medicine,’ principles of mainstream and functional medicine are intertwined with state of the art testing and tech: ‘New Medicine’ is the future of medicine. This personalized and caring approach prevents, predicts and effectively heals. Here’s why we need a medical reboot, one that is in with the new and out with the old:

1. New Medicine will run on health care, not disease care.

Old Medicine reacts to a medical diagnosis and often provides a standard ‘bandaid’ for treatment - sometimes with success, sometimes without. New Medicine is about being proactive to prevent the medical diagnosis from occuring in the first place. Instead of coming into the room late in the disease process, a person would be screened for trouble areas early on and given a tailored health optimization program to prevent illness. The secrets of New Medicine’s predictive and preventive abilities lie in tailor-made health plans that rely on lifestyle interventions, in-depth testing, health data from wearable tech and behavior changes that heal from the root cause, up. Thus, new medicine encourages you to become an independent agent of your own biology.

2. New Medicine has no labels.

While Old Medicine either deems you ‘sick’ or ‘not sick,’ New Medicine sees this as a spectrum. This New Medicine trajectory shifts you along the spectrum, further from disease closer to optimized health, using detective work to identify behaviors and lifestyle changes that may undermine health.

3. New medicine is your partner in health.

Old Medicine leaves patients isolated and anxious to make their own health care decisions. The old playbook of handing over a “diagnosis” and “treatment” can disrupt hope and feel disempowering. At the crux of New Medicine, is the importance of the medical team to be an educator and partner to any patient that walks through the door. Each patient collaborates with an expert medical team to craft a tailored wellness plan, one that supports the patients health goals. It is about meeting you eye-to-eye to guide you through your challenges and empower you at each step with education and encouragement. This leaves you aware, connected, and fully confident to take charge of your health and healing to optimize for wellness.

4. New Medicine values you.

Old Medicine does not value the patient's time, especially when it comes to time spent sitting in the waiting room or setting up appointments. Once the patient has left the doctors office, the amount of support that they have access to and their relationship with the doctor dwindles. Considering that these visits only happen once or twice a year, it is safe to say that Old Medicine doesn’t seem to place much value on the patient. This changes with New Medicine. New Medicine offers a virtual schedule to convenience patients. Open your computer to show up to your appointment, where a practitioner will have your data pulled up and ready to provide support on your schedule. The future of digital medicine is now!

5. New Medicine knows that you are the owner of your health data.

Trying to access medical records can be a pain and at that, a thief of your time. Old Medicine owns your data. No one should feel pressured to give their energy away to access their own personal information. New Medicine gives you easy on-demand access to your data. Your privacy, your ownership.

6. New Medicine can prevent, predict and personalize.

Old Medicine was evidenced based, using population level data to inform health advice and treatments. New Medicine understands this is a starting point or points in the right direction, but that everyone is an individual. New Medicine utilizes genetic testing, an invaluable tool to discover how your individual body works, and which lifestyle and diet choices you can adopt to help optimize your health, wellness, and longevity. It can point the way towards targeted supplementation, influence better lifestyle choices and can be used to make patient care much more personalized. New Medicine utilizes extensive cutting edge biomarkers to better understand where best to intervene, and perhaps more importantly, understands that whatever the intervention is, it should be tracked regularly. And New Medicine uses state of the art technologies like continuous glucose monitors, HRV tracking and more to ensure its interventions have the desired effect.

It has always been my mission to put every tool possible into your hands, to enable effective health transformation and optimization – promoting independent wellness as opposed to medical system reliance. While it’s up to each patient to do the work, facilitating transitions from disease to optimum health with the best tools available, has always been to me the real meaning of health care. We are now at an inflection point in medicine, a time where we have the knowledge to give patients a new health optimization experience. This new and improved model of true health care is the future of medicine and I look forward to encouraging us to move past a norm of less-than-optimal sick care. I welcome this future of medicine with open arms and invite you to check out HEARTY, a New Medicine platform, developed by my good friend and digital health expert, Dr. David Luu. This is what I envision for New Medicine.