| The current effort in this area has a new term—human performance enhancement or total performance fitness—but it’s the same idea. Basically, the question is, “How do you take all the core components that facilitate an individual’s health—their nutritional, physical, psychological and social environments—and maximize those for optimal functioning, recovery and reintegration?” The term, in the psychosocial area, is called resilience.
We recognize that it isn’t just about psychotherapy or psychological stress management. Your psychological resilience is tied to your physical fitness, your diet, the food you eat, and the social and family situation that you’re in. Total performance fitness requires a holistic approach when trying to optimize resilience and function. The DoD is exploring this on a large scale. These models are the ones we should evaluate. If they’re successful, they are potential models for the nation, as a whole.
One of the key markers as to whether the Obama Administration is really serious about a genuine paradigm shift and a move toward lifestyle-based prevention and health promotion, is whether they put serious money behind it. You’re someone who has been responsible for the budget in a federal agency. What kind of financial commitment, and for what kinds of programs, would indicate to you that Congress and the Administration are serious? Are we talking about $50 million or $20 billion, and where must it go?
I can answer the question about where it must go. It should go into the kinds of policies that we tried to describe in WIN, and these are in a number of other policy papers. Look, for example, at reports from Partnership for Prevention, the Prevention Institute, and various others. Our feeling is that if the policy we’ve described in WIN were implemented, it would have a large multiplier effect for the economy. First, it would stimulate jobs, by training the professions and creating new jobs in the health industry. Second, it would enhance productivity, because to the extent that these systems, and education and training programs, are in place, people become more productive. And third, it would also create more jobs by stimulating an industry that then wanted to shift into wellness, developing products and services for wellness.
So it would have a triple and maybe a quadruple multiplier effect. And it would have a long-term effect, because it would be centered around education and training, not just to create a new device that’s only going to last a few years. It would be training a whole group of people who would become the entrepreneurs and innovators of the future. We selected these items in particular because they would have the greatest productivity effects and produce the greatest economic benefit and value benefit in those areas.
Imagine a world in which our culture and industry were as obsessed with delivering health promotion, disease prevention and healing practices as our current culture and industry does for disease treatment. Imagine if even 10% of our current medical industry were developing natural drugs, personal health monitoring technologies, health and wellness professionals, for the creation of optimal healing environments. With a shift of our nation’s innovation and entrepreneurship to health and healing, we would become a more flourishing, more generous, more productive society. That’s the goal of WIN.
Daniel Redwood, DC, the interviewer, is Editor-in-Chief of Health Insights Today. |
