Among WIN’s key components is the creation of a greatly expanded wellness and prevention infrastructure, training thousands of full-time, community-based “health and wellness coaches” to work full-time on “chronic disease prevention and health promotion through comprehensive lifestyle and integrated health care approaches with specific demonstrated effectiveness.” This would be combined with new certification programs for licensed health professionals “to earn specialist certification in prevention, health and wellness delivery, or attain sub‐specialist status for integrated health care delivery in specific settings and populations – for example, schools, worksites, the military, health care settings, and long‐term care facilities.” In addition, WIN calls for creation of “a Health Corps to provide an army of young and older people that would learn and model wellness behavior and support delivery of wellness education and training by the coaches.”

Wayne Jonas, MD, and his colleagues at the Samueli Institute deserve great credit for crafting these far-reaching proposals, which are as pragmatic as they are visionary. Formerly a career military medical officer in the U.S. Army, Dr. Jonas was director of the National Institutes of Health Office of Alternative Medicine during the mid-1990s, its years of greatest growth and transformation. Known for his strong commitment to rigorous research and to integrative medicine, he has authored over 100 publications, including the well-regarded textbook, Essentials of Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

Jonas is now President and CEO of the Samueli Institute and an Associate Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS) in Bethesda, Maryland. He has served as the director of the Medical Research Fellowship at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and on numerous university, government, and private foundation committees including as Chair of the Program Advisory Council for the NIH Office of Alternative Medicine and director of a World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Traditional Medicine. He was also a member of the White House Commission for Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy.

In this interview with Dr. Daniel Redwood, Dr. Jonas speaks in reasoned tones, but with a profound sense of urgency about the need to create and implement policies that would, for the first time, bring wellness, prevention, health promotion, and integrative practices into the primary roles they must play in any sustainable health future.

For the current draft of the Wellness Initiative for the Nation, click here.

What was the genesis of the Wellness Initiative for the Nation? What led you to feel it was necessary?

I’ve always felt it was necessary. We focused on health and wellness because we have been digging ourselves deeper and deeper into a dysfunctional system, and an economic impossibility, by focusing on late-stage diagnostic threshold models of disease. One of the reasons I was interested in the whole area of integrative health, traditional health practices, and complementary medicine, as well as in the mainstream of health promotion, was because they had a philosophy and an orientation that focused on what the ancient Greeks called the Hygeia model of medicine. The concept is that when you facilitate the person’s own inherent recovery processes, you’re going to get your biggest bang for your buck across the spectrum, whether you have a disease or not, for disease management, prevention, recovery (healing) and reintegration. It’s the core of what I feel is of most value and can most contribute to health care.

At the Samueli Institute, it’s why our subtitle is “Exploring the Science of Healing” and our mission is “Advancing the Science of Healing,” because we want to focus on understanding those processes, applying them, and evaluating their impact in the real world. That’s an interest I’ve had for a long time.