I think the “how do you capture profit potential around an industry” depends upon what society decides is valuable and what we want to reward private companies for producing. That’s what we do with drugs. We reward drug companies now for producing chemicals that create specific effects in the laboratory, on cells and in clinical trials. If they can be demonstrated that way, then those specific chemical configurations, and the effort put into discovering, vetting and delivering them, is rewarded.

There’s no reason that you can’t protect other types of things that you would like to see. We should figure out how to create a rewards system for wellness—whether it’s a payment system or an intellectual property system. All an intellectual property system is, is an attempt to reward people for their innovation. It could be in any area. So I think it’s possible to create a wellness industry where people profit for creating wonderful new information technologies that might deliver a wellness technology toolkit, for example. Wellness technologies could capture the evidence for what works and what doesn’t work in an individual’s lifestyle and behavior, and could be finely tuned and monitored, so that an individual could get real-time feedback about their own health index, for example. That way, they would know which direction are they going and what they need to do, in order to change and specifically track it in real time.

We have technologies that can do that right now, and if we were to reward companies for creating wellness technology tool kits, which was one of the recommendations in WIN, that’s something that could be encouraged with intellectual property rewards for such products. Another example would be multi-component natural substances that had complex components in them, such as herbal products. If we felt they might provide safer treatments, we could set up a way of capturing and encouraging the development of such products. We could produce natural drugs, for example.

WIN describes using current Department of Defense and Veteran’s Health Affairs performance and wellness initiatives to test feasibility and delivery of WIN programs. What is the current status of these initiatives in the DoD and VA and what else is currently in the works? I know you were a military physician for two decades.

It’s no secret that the current wars are producing major stresses on warriors and their families. There have been many assessments and press on the rates of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression and suicide, and brain injury, and so there have been major stresses not just on individuals that have PTSD but on everybody in the DoD.

We are now recognizing that waiting for somebody to get diagnosed with PTSD—a disease-type model—and then putting them into treatment, doesn’t work, for most won’t come in for such treatment. Everyone deployed needs resilience skills. That requires a health model. How do you build resilience? The DoD is now making a concerted effort to figure this out and provide resilience training programs and normal-functioning training for all, especially after they come back from some of these traumatic deployments.

Are we talking about psychosocial resilience?

Yes. Physical fitness has always been part of the military. Mental resilience is now being recognized as an important factor that we’ve under-examined and that we need to incorporate. The DoD also gets the idea of total fitness, of health promotion and human performance. They have always had a culture and philosophy of enhancing human performance. A couple of decades ago, I was involved in helping the Army to roll out its first Health Risk Appraisals, in which they were doing screening of health issues, not just diagnostic issues. Health risk appraisals are used in worksites; the DoD is much like a very large worksite. Worksite health promotion efforts have always been something the DoD has encouraged.