Getting Scientific About Wellness: Introducing Lee Hood

Three things will last forever — faith, hope and love — and the greatest of these is love.

1 Corinthians 13:13

Repurposing for healthcare, this verse becomes:

Three things are essential for great healthcare — access, value and wellness — and the greatest of these is wellness.

There is no healthcare without access. Healthcare without value is profligate. Healthcare without wellness is self-defeating and soul-destroying. 

By contrast, healthcare that promotes health and prevents disease is self-sustaining, regenerative and cost-effective. Wellness ennobles, enriches and extends life. Enhancing wellness should be healthcare’s primary mission.

As our medical interventions become more targeted, sophisticated and expensive, America’s people are getting sicker and dying younger. Rampaging chronic disease is stealing American vitality and prosperity. 

Medicine cannot reverse this catastrophic trend without embracing a scientific approach to understanding and advancing wellness. This may seem obvious, but the scientific study of wellness to date has been negligible. Until now.

It is an honor and privilege to introduce 4sight Health’s newest contributor, Dr. Leroy Hood. Lee is a giant in fields of medicine, science and engineering. He is on “a quest to give mind and body wellness the scientific rigor and urgency it deserves.” He’s shown here receiving the National Medal of Science from President Obama in 2013.

Hope, faith and even love aren’t enough to reinvent U.S. healthcare. Perhaps it requires medical science’s most incisive and “systems-oriented” thinker to reveal healthcare’s inherent shortcomings and enormous potential. You can read Lee’s first article on the 4sight Health platform here. His provocative commentary initially ran in the LA Times on March 21, 2021. 

Enjoy! Much more to come.

Read all dispatches from Dave Johnson here.