Happening Now: The Evolution of Medicine, Free Download!

October 10, 2016

Long ago, when we were still together, my ex-husband told me that, in hindsight, if he were ever looking for a business to invest in he would follow me around and see what I liked. You see, despite a profound lack of interest – or even belief – in fashion, I had a tendency to like and buy things that would later turn out to be immensely popular. I bought a bathing suit late one season that was splashed on a huge billboard in Times Square the next summer. When I received a slick book advertising LensCrafters’ wares in the mail, the eyeglass frames on the cover were, of course, the ones I had bought the previous year. I bought my first Dansko shoes when only doctors and nurses were wearing them. As soon as I saw the Bugaboo Frog stroller, I fell for its bright colors and clean lines. And I was mismatching socks long before LittleMissMatched appeared on the scene. My ex was convinced that I was intuitively tapped into the zeitgeist. I had never thought of it that way before, but I’ve thought about it since then, and I think he may have been onto something.

All this is background just to lend weight to the following statement: My intuition is screaming loud and clear that the book The Evolution of Medicine: Join the Movement to Solve Chronic Disease and Fall Back in Love with Medicine by James Maskell is going to change the world – and quickly! I’m strongly recommending that all our readers download it FREE this week (after Friday, it goes up to $9.99), and read it!

THIS IS THE FUTURE OF MEDICINE!  

THE MEDICINE THAT YOU, OUR READERS,

WANT AND NEED!

And you can have it very soon, if you get your favorite doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners, naturopaths –  and anyone else, in fact, who wishes to help people to resolve chronic illness and create wellness – to download and read this book.

It has become crystal clear by every objective measure that our standard medical model is utterly failing us. No one knows that better than our readers as many of us have found ourselves at the forefront of that failure. Some version of this failure is happening all over, but it’s most spectacular here in the United States where we have the highest per capita healthcare costs in the world paired with some pretty abysmal health outcomes. And not only is that situation not getting better, with the current model, it can only get worse.

Obviously, a high-cost system that can’t offer a person with chronic illness anything but “symptom whack-a-mole,” as Maskell brilliantly describes it, is a nightmare for patients. But it turns out the current medical paradigm is failing its doctors just as badly as its patients. Doctors spend a minimum of seven years of their lives training to practice medicine, often emerging from said training in debt to the tune of  $170,000, having spent at least three years in the bizarre hazing ritual known as residency, which takes smart, confident young adults and systematically breaks them down with 16-hour days and 80-hour weeks, only 20% of which is spent with patients in approximately 8-minute chunks. Then those broken people end up joining a for-profit practice or hospital where their starry-eyed innocence is crushed forever under the weight of paperwork and the pressure to meet benchmarks that have nothing to do with the only yardstick that should matter: the well-being of their patients. Or they spend several more years learning a high-priced specialty that often – bizarrely – views a particular part of the body through such a narrow lens that it appears to be somehow separate from the rest of the patient, rather than the part of a cohesive whole that it really is. As a result, doctors are burning out in record numbers and committing suicide at rates much higher than the general public, all at a time when we clearly need all healers on deck as the prevalence of chronic illness is skyrocketing.

There have always been doctors with the courage to break free of the stranglehold the profession likes to have over its members in order to help patients get better, but the medical profession generally makes it as difficult as possible for those doctors. Anyone who steps outside the very narrow box outlined for them in medical school gets called a quack at best and has their license revoked at worst, despite the fact that medical students are often warned on the very first day of medical school that 50% of what they will be taught is wrong or will be shortly outdated. Some doctors hang in there and make it work despite the odds against them, but in order to do so they often have to charge more than most patients or insurance companies are willing or able to pay because of the time-intensive nature of their work. Despite this, these doctors tend to love what they do, have long waiting lists, and patients often travel thousands of miles to see them. Clearly, despite the difficulties and dilemmas in setting up a working practice, these doctors are doing something very right.

So how do we turn this situation around? How do we get to the point where we have plenty of doctors who can work affordably enough to help the ever-growing population of people with chronic illness reverse these illnesses as well as prevent them in those who are not yet ill? That’s where James Maskell and his business partner Gabe Hoffman come in. Maskell and Hoffman have spent the last decade talking and working with thousands of doctors, finding out what the average “doctor in the street” needs in order to provide the kind of care we are clamoring for. Maskell notes, “Twentieth century science was solely focused on ‘what is the most effective treatment for the average human?’ It is now clear that there are not a lot of ‘average humans’ walking the planet,”  and says that effective medicine for the current era of chronic illness will have to be what Dr. Leroy Hood calls “P4 Medicine,” where the four Ps are “predictive, preventive, personalized, and participatory.” Maskell and Hoffman are betting heavily on the functional medicine model which is “based on participatory care, in which patients are the heroes of their own journeys.” This model focuses on root cause resolution and provides a method that can be taught and scaled. As Maskell says,

At the center of this operating system is the Functional Medicine Matrix, providing the consistent framework to deliver functional medicine. With this as a guide, doctors uncover not only a comprehensive timeline of the patient’s health but also the predisposing factors (antecedents), precipitating events (triggers), and ongoing contributors (mediators) of a patient’s chronic health problem. It’s a systematic, scientific, and reproducible way to understand a patient.

Until now, holistic, integrative, or functional medicine had not demonstrated repeatability or economic feasibility, and any particular doctor’s success was due as much to their business acumen as it was to their medical knowledge. One can start to understand why functional medicine and its precursors may have developed an inferiority complex. The true healers among us are rarely business geniuses as well. Functional medcine’s providers have been operating in the shadows and fringes of mainstream medical practice, always seen as the underdogs. Maskell believes that era is over; functional medicine is providing value to patients and doctors that is nowhere to be seen in the mainstream, and its time has come. As far as he’s concerned, the writing is on the wall for the old medical paradigm, and functional medicine providers have to understand that “we are winning” and begin to act like it. It’s time that we leverage the knowledge garnered by those trailblazing healers/business geniuses in order to bring many more providers rapidly up to speed.

I could not agree more.

Autism parents, such as many of TMR’s readers, are well used to seeking out expensive “fringe” medical providers in the form of DAN! and MAPS doctors, because not only are they the only ones who can help their children, they seemed to be the only ones interested in helping their children as well. Parents have made appointments far in advance, sometimes more than a year in advance, traveled thousands of miles, and spent thousands of dollars that are not covered by their medical insurance in order to find help for their children’s chronic illness. Many have found that help, but the many hurdles involved mean that many others have not. What if there were small, affordable functional medicine micropractices in every town, with doctors who knew what tests to run, how to interpret them, and who could provide additional help in the form of a health coach and a community of peers to talk to?

Community is one of the most important aspects of Maskell’s vision:

A mother whose child has had autism for ten years can attend community meetings to share their experiences of caring for their child or family members. Other parents whose children have new diagnoses can learn from the more experienced members of the community, including how to ensure they’re taking medications, how to help them eat well, what foods help or hurt behaviors, how to cope with new schools or birthday parties, and everything in between. Having been through it before, people can reflect on what they learned, what worked for them, and what they would have done differently, and this adds value to both participants, the sharer and the listener.

This vision perfectly aligns with the vision of The Thinking Moms’ Revolution, where we have been aware of the tremendous value of this sort of community for a long time. It was just such a community, in fact, that gave birth to TMR in the first place. The 24 parents who started TMR felt the difference community made in their own lives and sought to bring that difference to the lives of others. Think how many more people could be helped and how much sooner – not just children with autism, but their siblings with ADHD or immune deficiencies, and their parents with autoimmune conditions as well – if these functional medicine micropractices become a practical reality. And how much happier would your local doctors be knowing that they were actually making a difference for the better in their patients’ lives?

Personally, I believe that one of most basic problems with the current medical paradigm is that patients with chronic illness are fed up with symptom whack-a-mole and want to get truly well – and doctors have simply not been taught how to help patients do this. This sets up an immediate tension between doctors and their patients, which in many ways pits them against each other. This situation must be resolved to the satisfaction of both doctors and patients. So far, mainstream medicine’s “solutions” have involved ridicule, mandates, and directives that only increase the divide between doctors and patients. Resolution will not come from doctors telling patients, “you are stupid, and I know what’s best for you.” It can only come when both doctors and patients embrace a participatory care model, where the doctor leverages their medical knowledge to enable a patient’s personal journey to restored health.

This is James Maskell’s vision for our future, the near future, and if there is anyone who knows how to make it happen, it’s him. Success depends upon a number of factors: maximizing each provider’s efficiency by streamlining functions that can be automated rather than cutting patient time, patient education provided by printed or video materials that can be referred to again and again, and leveraging community to help actualize the the newfound knowledge. Maskell and Hoffman have spent the last several years seeking out the technological tools that can give healthcare providers everything they need to migrate slowly or quickly to a functional medicine practice with such low overhead that it could be run from a single laptop, and that is sustainable, scalable, and provides tremendous value to the community in which it thrives. Many providers will be able to retool and get themselves up to speed simply by reading this book, asking themselves the questions found at the ends of the chapters, and doing the action items. Others may require a little more help, and Maskell’s site goevomed.com is ready to provide that help.

Do yourself and the world a favor and invite your favorite friends, family, and providers to download the Evolution of Medicine (free this week) where the future is now!

(Oh, and if by any chance you love pickles, you might want to know that the very best pickles in the world come from Maitland Mountain Farm in Salem, Massachusetts.)

~ Professor