Dr. Casey Means and Dave Asprey discuss why the healthcare system fails at preventing chronic disease. Means was motivated by her mother's death to expose how the system prioritizes profit over root causes of illness.
We lost my mother far too early to the end stages of metabolic disease that really the, the blind spots of our opportunistic, exploitative health care system, the intentional blind spots, spots to root cause physiology, allowed for everyone within this system to ignore the connecting points between what.
She had racked up over 30, 40 years of her adult life that ultimately led to her death.
And you know, I think through a different, a different structure of our system where we actually are thinking about the connections between diseases, there were dozens of points where she could have had a different outcome. And we really don't want that for other people who are going through a similar situation to my mom, where they are dependent, loyal and faithful to this system that they believe in and ultimately let down by it, which is, I think, how most people feel today, are both dependent on the system and we are certainly not being, you know, truly benefited by it. And we know that because Americans are getting sicker every year, we are literally getting sicker.
For every marginal dollar spent on healthcare.
In the United States, people are getting sicker. This is the definition of an unsustainable, ineffective system. And yet we, we don't really think.
That we have a better option, which of course we absolutely do. It's outside the system.
And, and the point that Kelly and I really have to make in the book is that, sure, trust the system on acute issues. You know, you have a trauma, a broken bone, you need emergency surgery. The system, we, we thrive. American health care thrives on that. But right now, 90% of health care.
Costs are going towards chronic acquired, lifestyle, rooted diseases.
And unfortunately, the system has abjectly failed.
On the prevention, treatment or management of chronic diseases. And we know this because they are all exploding all at once the more we spend.
And so this book, this coming together, you know, Callie and I came to this experience from different places.
He was a, he was in policy.
And business and at one point was.
A lobbyist for food and Pharma.
And so he saw things that way.
I, of course, was a doctor and sort of had my awakening about root cause issues. And then we both experienced this just tragic situation with my mother where he, no one put the pieces together for her throughout 40 years. And then the entire system sprang into action when she was lethally sick with a stage 4 pancreatic cancer diagnosis. Basically trying to, you know, get as much squeeze as much out of my mom in terms of profit as possible in her last two weeks of life. And in, in horror and disgust, we decided we were going to write, devote the next three years of our life to writing this book.
