The U.S. healthcare system is misnamed. What we call “healthcare” is, in truth, a sick-care system—reactive, intervention-driven, and dependent on endless prescriptions. As Dr. Casey Means powerfully argues in Good Energy, our system is broken because it focuses on patching disease instead of preventing it, on managing decline instead of restoring health.
If we are serious about transforming health in this country, we need a new dawn—one that flips the script from profit to prevention, from symptom management to true patient healing.
Start Where It All Begins: Education
Doctors, nurses, dietitians, and physician assistants are trained in disease management, not disease prevention. That must change. Tomorrow’s providers should learn to treat the root causes of illness, not just its late-stage symptoms.
Two reversible conditions—insulin resistance and gut dysbiosis—sit at the center of most chronic diseases, yet they are rarely taught as core principles in medical training. Embedding these topics as central pillars could shift the trajectory of millions of lives.
Measuring What Really Matters
Right now, health success is measured by how many procedures are performed or how many pills are prescribed. We celebrate “blood pressure controlled with meds” instead of “blood pressure normalized without meds.” We reward “hemoglobin A1c lowered by drugs” rather than “diabetes reversed.”
We need new metrics: quality of life, reversal of disease markers, patient-reported outcomes, and functional capacity. Physicians should be incentivized to deprescribe, to uncover root causes, and to restore health—not to fuel a system that profits from keeping people sick.
Food Policy and Nutrition: A House Divided
Our healthcare system tells patients to “eat better,” while our food policies subsidize the very ultra-processed foods driving chronic illness. At the same time, medical schools devote almost no time to nutrition.
The solution is clear: make food as medicine a national priority. Integrate medically tailored meals into care. Teach every medical student how to use nutrition as therapy. Align food subsidies with health instead of disease.
Free Education from Industry Influence
Another dawn must rise in medical education: one free from pharmaceutical industry influence. Pharma-funded curricula and conferences bias how providers see patients. Training should not revolve around the latest drug launch but around evidence-based strategies for prevention, metabolic healing, and lifestyle interventions.
The Road Ahead
These are just a few of the urgent issues we must confront to create a healthcare system that truly deserves the name. Other challenges—insurance complexity, access inequality, fragmentation, lack of oversight in pharmaceutical research, and the need for full transparency of payments from industry to professionals—remain pressing.
But change starts by acknowledging what is broken. If we can reform education, fix our metrics, realign food policy, and strip out profit-driven bias, we can step into a new dawn—one where healthcare finally means health.