What are the differences between treating disease and staying healthy?
Healthcare in the U.S. spends most of its time diagnosing and treating conditions, rather than preventing diseases from happening in the first place. Angiogenesis expert William Li, MD shares what he’s learning about these processes.
Transcript
One of the biggest debates in society now is how do we actually manage health care, and in fact,
because our health care is really sick care. We spend a lot of time diagnosing diseases and treating them long after the horse is out of the barn.
Health care is really about preventing diseases from happening. And it's actually something that doesn't happen at the doctor's office.
It should happen before the patient-- the person ever gets to the doctor's office, and in fact, keeps them from the doctor's office.
From my research, what I'm learning is that there are common threads that link health and disease.
And if we learn to think about our bodies from the process that keeps us healthy and look at the mirror image of how those processes, when they
go awry, can lead to disease, we're able to anchor our thinking scientifically, medically,
from a research perspective, as well as a practice perspective, into what we need to do to keep those healthy systems
functioning in the right way. Angiogenesis is one of those healthy defense systems of the body. And while I started 20 years ago focusing on angiogenesis
as a common denominator of disease, what I've now realized is that angiogenesis is even more important as a common denominator in health.
So we can keep our bodies' angiogenesis systems functioning, healthy, in that Goldilocks zone where
things aren't too much or too little, but just right, then angiogenesis could be like the immune system,
inflammatory system, the blood clotting system, and be one of those hallmark systems in the body that
allow us to stay healthy. And that's a message that I think we can start to communicate and translate into people
who are healthy and keep them from going to the doctor's office.
health screening
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