Leroy Hood Quotes

Prediabetes is easily identified through clinical measurements such as insulin resistance, fasting glucose levels, and glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c, often abbreviated to A1c). Unfortunately, we act on these measurements far less frequently than we should. Early interventions are far easier and far more effective than the more complex and generally ineffective therapies available to treat advanced diabetes. In most cases, all it takes to reverse prediabetes are some straightforward lifestyle choices, including a decrease in dietary sugar and an increase in exercise. These changes require some discipline but are generally simple and even pleasurable.

you cannot hope to understand a biological system that is chaotically broken though disease if you do not understand its normal operational state. This means you cannot hope to understand a state of disease if you don’t understand a state of wellness.

Why should medicine be all about fighting disease? Why shouldn’t it, first and foremost, be about keeping people well?

healthcare that is predictive, preventive, personalized, and participatory.

More than 86 percent of total healthcare dollars are spent on chronic disease in the United States, where $1 out of every $5 spent is on healthcare.10 That’s $4 trillion, rising at more than 6 percent per year—a rate that will be impossible to fund if it continues for even fifteen years.

Can our current system be adapted to the new disease paradigm? That’s doubtful—and it probably won’t take you four trillion guesses to figure out why. Four trillion dollars a year is a lot of money. And although the way it’s being spent isn’t good for most peoples’ health, it has contributed to profitability for some medically oriented constituencies.

By not focusing on prevention, it is as if our healthcare system places no value whatsoever on a healthy life.

under the current healthcare system, wellness isn’t profitable.

Healthcare today generally waits for visible symptoms to treat illness, allowing conditions that might otherwise be successfully treated early to grow to the point that treatment is either ineffective, terribly difficult, or prohibitively expensive. And it makes little attempt to educate patients about their own responsibilities when it comes to optimizing their well-being—something doctors are almost never trained to do.

The measurements of wellness we should be collecting—the genome, phenome, and digital measures of health—are far more detailed and subtle than “how we feel.” Together, they capture information on hundreds of different biological systems. If we begin collecting these measures in a state of wellness, the resulting data can predict wellness-to-disease transitions that are imperceptible to our conscious minds.

Just as doctors have always searched for patterns in the smaller data sets with which they have been working, AI will seek patterns in the infinitely more complicated data sets that exist now and in the future. And if there is one thing AI is good at, it’s finding patterns.

The lack of training in nutrition mirrors that in other important areas of human health, including exercise (more than half of the physicians trained in the United States received no formal education in physical activity), sleep (medical school students across several nations receive about three hours of education on healthy sleep), and stress (just 3 percent of visits to a primary care physician include any discussion on this topic).

Medical expenses contribute to two-thirds of all bankruptcies in the United States.

To create leading-edge biological technology, you had to gather under one roof all the different specializations required for a wide range of highly complex technical projects beyond biologists: chemists, computer scientists, engineers, mathematicians, physicists, and physicians. You had to put them in proximity to one another and create the conditions for serendipitous interaction. You had to teach them how to understand one another’s languages. And you had to treat them the way a good football coach treats a team—respectful of each person’s contribution to the whole and mindful that everyone is an expert on their own position.

One of the great secrets to success in life is to invert this impulse and do the “good thing” today while telling ourselves we can do the “bad thing” tomorrow.