This continues the series of guest columns about how technology is reshaping people's hobbies and passions – fishing, basket weaving, community service – whatever.
This time it is Jeff Ventura, Director of Marketing for MiPro Consulting, a nationally-known consultancy specializing in PeopleSoft, Workday and Business Intelligence. Jeff is also the primary author and overseer of MiPro’s popular and eclectic blog, MiPro Unfiltered, which mixes industry news with web culture and general nerdery. Here he writes about his other passion – health research.
“If I wasn’t doing what I’m doing now – meaning, if I wasn’t a web nerd – I’d be a functional medicine specialist. Since my early 20s I’ve been drawn to health, fitness and the role of nutrition in our lives, and today, with the very ground of medicine changing beneath our feet, these ideas are literally the beginning of a renaissance.
I spend a great deal of time reading some very good books about nutrition and the latest in preventative medicine, and at least once a month I attend lectures about food quality, functional/integrative medicine and the latest in nutrition. Coming soon will be my new personal blog, simply named Jeff Ventura, which will focus on nutrition and health.
Why is this so interesting to me? Ever since the human genome was decoded by the Human Genome Project in 2003, we now have insight into the software – our DNA – that runs our bodies and governs our health. The importance of this technological breakthrough cannot be overstated.
But we should back up a bit.
Generally, today’s medical establishment views the body as a collection of independent parts and areas of concentration, which yields a specialist-dominated medical market. If you have joint pain, you see a rheumatologist. Skin disorder? Dermatologist. Digestive issues? Gastroenterologist. If you ask your ENT doctor about your stomach pains, he will almost certainly direct you to a specialist. Doctors have their specializations and are reluctant to step into the waters of another specialist’s domain. It’s a world of referrals.
Our medical system is built on the diagnosis model, meaning that if doctors can provide a name for what’s wrong with you, they actually know what’s wrong with you. You know how it goes: a patient goes to the doctor, describes his symptoms and the doctor in turn diagnoses the condition and looks into his bag of treatments to address the symptoms. Nine times out of ten, this treatment is in the form of a prescription. These medications interrupt or relieve symptoms, but often do not address the root cause of why the condition arose in the first place.
We can take that further with a relatively disturbing thought: increasingly, a diagnosis is simply a categorization that is used to group people together with similar symptoms. A diagnosis has almost nothing to do with why each person has the symptoms. As an example, the director of the National Institutes of Mental Health, Thomas Insel, M.D., says the DSM-IV (the psychiatric diagnostic reference guide used by doctors) has “100% accuracy but 0% validity”. Meaning: the names we have for illnesses help us describe groups of people with common symptoms, but tell us nothing about the basic underpinnings of those diseases, let alone the treatment for their causes.
This is why the majority of people over 65 are taking nearly 10 medications a week. As we age and fail to address root causes of illness, we must rely on increasingly robust drug cocktails (whose interactions are poorly tested) to “manage” our symptoms.
Fortunately, as I’ve come to learn, this does not need to be our fate.
One of my favorite authors, Dr. Mark Hyman, (see video below) notes that today’s doctors receive almost no training in understanding how the body works as an interconnected series of systems that depend on one another. Because they don’t view the body through this systems lens, they have very little education in truly identifying disease root causes.
The new frontier of medicine is called functional medicine, and it has been brought about by recent technological and clinical advances. Functional medicine is simply the science of looking at the body as an interconnected series of systems and moving beyond the diagnosis-based model to find and treat the underlying causes of illness. Think genomics. Think high-res imaging. Think nutrition-as-medicine.
I’m not talking about quackery, but instead a fundamental change in how we understand our own biology and health.
From a personal interest perspective, one of the most exciting advances to come from the Human Genome Project is called nutritional genomics, or nutrigenomics. Nutrigenomics is the science of how nutrition influences health depending in each person’s unique genetic makeup. We will know what genes need to be flipped on or off for optimal health and disease resistance given a person’s genetic makeup. No longer will we be strictly bound to the DSM-IV or ICD-9 to treat our illnesses.
It dawns on me that when we can treat each person as a genetic individual, we’re talking huge disruption. What this means for health and aging is tremendous.
Slowly, the macro views of diagnosis and treatment will give way to genomic-based analysis and treatment for each individual person. Instead of putting someone on psychotropic drugs for ADHD or autism, we will be able to know that the root cause is a lack of omega-3 fatty acids or improper vitamin B12 levels or a yeast infestation in the digestive tract or heavy metal toxicity.
I have about 900 words here, but could write 9000. Technology has provided us with roadmaps and techniques that can dramatically and permanently reshape human health and aging as we know it. For me, this is about as exciting as it gets, and I devour everything I can on the subject.”
NUTRA SCIENZA in Italy
In Florence start the idea to develop a virtual Entreprise NUTRA SCIENZA between Nutrigenomics Research and Nutraceutical Production. See for Instance at: http://www.startupbusiness.it/profile/PaoloManzelli#chatter-2441030:Comment:17912
I like to find partners. Paolo Manzelli
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Posted by: Paolo Manzelli | October 23, 2009 at 01:17 PM