I’m happy that our government appointed a bipartisan task force of competent health professionals to study the issue of health in our country. It’s good to see they want to understand why we are so unhealthy even though we spend so much in medical expenses.

I’m glad that we’re beginning to look at healthcare through a different lens. That we’re trying to come up with solutions to our problems.

I am not critical of the summary. I believe they’ve taken an in-depth look at health issues, and are trying to come up with the best solutions. But I have a number of concerns about this.

Accessibility

The summary is a description of public policy processes. So we know it’s going to be a bit dry. But just trying to read through the document can be overwhelming, even for someone like myself who studies health and reads public health documents. It outlines the magnitude of the undertaking and how little understanding we still have of why we’ve become so diseased.

Current Paradigm

Unfortunately, they’re still applying the same overall paradigm of thinking to the wellness problem. They’re still looking at it through the lens of current healthcare delivery and current systems and structures. Our healthcare problem arose in the current paradigm of healthcare delivery. We have to really look at it completely differently to find better and more accurate solutions.

Hurry Up and Wait

The task force is very clear: it’s going to take an enormous amount of time and effort to collect the data about what really works. This will be a generational undertaking and is worth doing, but let’s be clear—nothing is going to happen quickly. We must come up with the solutions ourselves.

photo by Martha Dominguez de Gouveia

Continuing to Use a Broken System

The recommendations of the task force revolve around the proper use of the current system which continue to be focused on a disease management rather than a disease prevention approach. You’ll know from our teachings that we believe the human body is designed well and it’s designed to be free of disease.

Chronic diseases are abnormal, and as I’ve often stated, especially in our children. Yes, we all may have certain conditions we have to live with based on factors beyond our control, but whatever your current context of health, you can still optimize it by taking the right actions. The task force would suggest that some of the right actions are:

• Go to your regularly scheduled doctor’s visits

• Take your medications as prescribed

• Get your appropriate blood test screenings on schedule

I know that the task force also is recommending we improve access to nutritious foods, and reduce exposures to behaviors and substances that create disease. But when it comes to the current system of healthcare delivery, they seem to be emphasizing using it more to try and solve a problem the current healthcare delivery system has seen escalate under its watch.

If you take the right actions, you probably won’t need to see a doctor with regularity. And you’ll probably not need to take prescriptions. Good health will be natural for you. The last place you need to go for the best advice on how to be healthy is the current healthcare system. It is good at putting you back together again when life has broken you in some way, but it’s terrible at teaching you how to be your healthiest self.

What Can We Do Now?

The good news is the solutions, when it comes to you as an individual, are not as challenging as this document would lead you to believe. They are simple truths of health. Applying them is challenging because it involves change for almost all of us. But the actual underlying truths are simple. We spell those out clearly in our teaching resources and our Authentic Health curriculum.

For starters, let’s focus on what we can do right now, for you as an individual, which would then expand into our communities, and then maybe across our country. Let’s not wait on this task force to gather all of its data, and do all of its studies so we can finally get sound policy about not only access to health care, but access to effective healthcare.

photo by Sarah Cervantes

Choosing A New Path

If you want to experience your best health, you’re going to have to choose a different path. Come visit me and join my online community. Together, we can solve this problem well ahead of the schedule that the policymakers have planned. Perhaps if we do this together, and we make enough noise about it, we can begin to get the right actions on the public policy side.