“Does the medical system right now take any advantage, or maximum advantage, of community?”
This was a very important question asked by James Maskell in his thought-provoking TEDx Talk, Building Healthcare From Scratch.
His answer to the big question: “Not really.” In his view, “It's community, and not medicine, that creates health.”
Maskell is the author of the book The Community Cure: Transforming Health Outcomes Together, as well as a thought-leading speaker, health economist, community builder, and healthcare entrepreneur.
He passionately advocates that the US healthcare system is tragically outdated, and that too many physicians are being limited by the old ways of thinking.
Here’s a brief overview of why he feels that the modern physician should revisit some rather old-school approaches to community and medicine.
There are several anomalous pocket communities around the world called Blue Zones. These are areas where people often live to see their hundredth birthday, with far lower incidences of chronic conditions like heart disease.
Some examples include:
These places are geographically nowhere near each other and they don’t share any obvious topographical, demographic, or cultural similarities.
Roseto is landlocked with an average of 33 inches of snow per year. The Nicoya Peninsula, on the other hand, is tropical with zero inches of snow each year. Elsewhere, Shintoism is the leading religion in Okinawa, whereas Sardinia is a fiercely Christian area. What could these small communities, literally a world apart, have in common?
What trait do they all share that’s helping their residents live longer and healthier lives? They all share an old-school mentality when it comes to community.
“All of these areas have certain things in common, but by far the most powerful and exciting is community,” said Maskell.
“In all of these areas, the groups work together and support each other as part of the tribes. They eat together, they cook together, they play together, and they pray together… Blue Zones show us is that it's community, not medicine, that creates health.”
Most practice owners and practitioners are incredibly busy and they can often feel isolated. They typically don’t get the opportunity to share their experiences or resources with anyone outside their own clinic, or a few trusted colleagues they may be on a text or email basis with.
However, Maskell feels their limitations and struggles go much deeper than that. “For the last hundred years, a combination of reductionist science and industry have driven doctors' behavior and told them what to do.”
“So much so that it's almost a joke in America now how pharmaceutical reps come and tell the doctor what to do with each of their patients.”
However, he added that the medical field is at the precipice of a major shift in the way that doctors and physicians interact and share information.
“I've been to Silicon Valley and I've seen the future. It's doctors working together in real-time, giving feedback and best practices between them and the groups and contributing to a hive mind aggregating best practices.”
“There's so much power and value in people working together with a group of your peers in terms of empowerment and vulnerability and support… Technology is coming along and empowering communication in a new and exciting way. So one of the biggest beneficiaries of that is seamless communication.”
Maskell says he’s also had the opportunity to work with a number of medical clinics that create online forums and discussion meetings where patients are able to communicate with other patients and provide peer-to-peer support.
“Just imagine how much value and knowledge the mother of a child on the autism spectrum accumulates after 10 years of looking after that child. And then imagine how much value is created when they can communicate what they've learned to other parents. They can help new parents who may be completely overwhelmed by an autism diagnosis.”
He added, “This is all free, empowered by technology, and completely scalable.”
One of the most exciting trends Maskell says he’s witnessed in the world of healthcare in recent years has been the emergence of functional medicine as an alternative to more traditional approaches.
“For years, the prevailing paradigm has been to identify symptoms and to use drugs to suppress those symptoms. But in functional medicine, it turns everything on its head and it uses symptoms as a way to be able to understand what's going on in the root cause of dysfunction, and then be able to remove that root cause and allow the body to heal.”
He added that this approach gets the patient more actively involved in their own health, while also leading to better overall health outcomes.
“The beauty of the functional medicine operating system is that it's participatory. The future of medicine isn't going to be something that's done to you and you're just a passive patient taking what the doctor gives you. You're an active participant in your health.”
“So right now, you don't have to ask anyone's permission to eat more plants, to think differently about your stress, and to move regularly. You also don't need to ask anyone's permission to be able to improve your internal microbiome. You can take a probiotic, you can get into nature, you can get a pet.”
If you would like to learn more about Dr. Maskell’s innovative approach to medical thinking, you can visit www.jamesmaskell.com, or check him out on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Twitter.
Cerbo not only provides you with a do-it-all EHR, practice management, and patient portal solution, but we also take pride in the community of doctors and practitioners we have built!
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