Dr. Jeff Bland — Top of Mind
We are rapidly closing out 2022 and making the transition from a life fully occupied by the challenges of COVID-19 to that of what will be the “new normal”. One thing is for certain- change is the only constant (and that is the oxymoron of our age).
With regard to our health, we now recognize that as a population we were not nearly as healthy as we thought. Immune resilience was compromised. The United States had far higher death per capita from COVID-19 than other developed countries. We recognized that we were suffering from a pandemic of SARS-CoV-2 infection that overlaid an existing pandemic of compromised health. This was a double whammy that resulted in unnecessary hospitalization and death to tens of thousands of people, and left us with the Long COVID Syndrome to deal with.
Long COVID Syndrome, like chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia and desert storm syndrome before it, leaves us with a legacy of chronic illness associated with a country of people with reduced immune resilience and increased immune dysfunction. Just look at the increase in autoimmune symptoms to support this observation. It is just within the past year that the concept of “pre-autoimmune disease” has now emerged in the traditional medical literature. What is “pre-autoimmune disease”? It is a collection of symptoms of differing duration, intensity and frequency across many organs that results for a disturbed immune system.
This concept, unfortunately, doesn’t fit well within the present medical system for which the sine qua non is a definitive diagnosis resulting in a reimbursement code for services rendered (i.e. ICD-10). Rather the pre-autoimmune syndromes are reflective of functional disturbances of the neuroendocrineimmune system. That’s a mouthful, and it crosses disciplinary boundaries, but let’s acknowledge what it is- a network biological disturbance that reflects the connection of an individual’s genome and epigenome to their lifestyle, environment, and diet. To address this problem, we need much more than a single therapeutic molecular signal represented by a new chemical entity (NCE or in common language a drug). Rather this is the age for multifocal intervention that is tailored to the needs of the individual, and is proven safe and effective over years of observation and study. This is personalized lifestyle medicine. This is its time to shine.
Public health approaches to this challenge can only go so far to the variation among people in their needs for achieving resilience of their heir neuroendocrineimmune function. Personalized lifestyle medicine checks all the boxes- its is safe, proven to be effective over decades of study, available to all people regardless of their gender, age, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status.
The Personalized Lifestyle Medicine institute is pleased that it will be able to communicate this message to more than 30,000 health care providers in 2022 with its educational programs, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more that needs to be done to help shepherd in a health care delivery system that focuses on personalized health care well before an individual has need for crisis intervention and disease care. We are starting to see thearchitecture of this new system develop. It focuses on how the individual’s genetics and epigenetics interacts with their lifestyle, environment and diet that results in their physical, metabolic, cognitive and emotional/behavioral function. We look forward to contributing to the next chapter in the evolution of personalized lifestyle health care with our PLMI programs and advocacy activities in 2023, and thank you being a member of our community.
