The TDOS Syndrome® is the main reason we need:
The New Health Conversation®
Each one of the TDOS co-factors (Toxicity, Deficiency, Overweight, and Stress) is deadly in their own right. But in their interaction with one another, they become insidious and ultimately debilitating. Together, they create a vicious and debilitating cycle that plays a major role in the acceleration of aging and the undermining of our collective wellness.
The old conversation about health relied mostly on our brilliant doctors and space-age techniques, medical devices, machines, and wonder drugs. The problem here is that this outdated focus is based on the flawed premise of procedural intervention and disease management. We no longer have a Health Care System; we have a Chronic Disease Management system. Procedural intervention is the technique through which doctors first identify a condition and then prescribe the procedure. Although we clearly have the world’s most advanced procedural interventions, this is a defensive strategy only. It is not a total solution now, nor will it solve our problems in the future.
We may devise more brilliant procedures, but we must also reduce the need for their use, as much as possible, through prevention. The resulting preventive interventional technologies and protocols are part of the new conversation we must have about health. To seek new methods, to find potential solutions, and to create a sustainable and patient-centered system for the future, we must accept that the American health-care system, as it currently exists, is broken. Just as alarmingly, it is bankrupting our nation. As my coauthor Dr. Messina points out, “Until it becomes as profitable to change lifestyles as it is to manage disease, our current health-care system will not change course.”
Primary care doctors can be the first line of defense in preventive intervention. Yet, these physicians are vanishing. In the next decade, it is predicted that we may be short as many as 125,000 primary care physicians to meet the country’s healthcare needs. Adding to the overload, recent health-care reform, by increasing access to this shrinking pool of doctors, could flood the system with more patients, creating a mini-storm within a super-storm . . . and exponentially increasing the disastrous effects that the TDOS Syndrome is set to unleash on the country.
While our cadres of medical specialists are the envy of the world, and our trauma centers are models of critical care, we spend twice what the rest of the industrialized world spends on health care each year. For all that money we spend, we still rank at the bottom of industrialized nations in life expectancy. This raises serious questions about our current health-care model and whether it is sustainable.
It’s time to take control of our lives and stop pretending that it’s someone else’s obligation. We cannot flout common nutritional sense and “make it all better” with a pill for every ill. We are responsible for our own health, such as ensuring that we are fully aware of the elements that make up the TDOS Syndrome—and then actually doing something about them.
Again, it is important to note that the TDOS Syndrome is not a disease. It is a combination of factors that together undermine your potential to have a high quality of life.
To avoid the health consequences that are robbing us of our life expectancies, we must be proactive and involved in our own health care. I offer you this basic truth: The best medicine is no medicine at all. We can and we must take an active role in preventive interventional strategies—starting by engaging in the new health conversation, which relies primarily on new preventive interventional technologies.
In our next book, discussing the TDOS solutions, we will offer you a comprehensive, multi-dimensional strategy of preventive interventions. This new health conversation is essential to help halt what may be one of the most destructive “super-storm” forces to hit the health and well-being of humanity.
I do not write this to scare you to death, but rather, to scare you to life. What we are introducing, my coauthors and I, is a new health conversation. For some of you, this conversation will change your life forever, if you choose to allow it to do so.
