Healthcare
"Who are we if we can't protect them?" --Emily Blunt (A Quiet Place)
Part 1- INTRO (Dec 2019)
People ask how did healthcare become so unaffordable in the United States? The blame is on everyone once we talk to enough people. No one is innocent. It all depends on the paper you read or your source of information.
No one wants to take responsibility for what they have contributed. It's terrible public relations to admit that we are the reason people don't have access to care, that we are part of the reason healthcare premiums go up every year. Everyone wants to be a hero, and no one wants to be a villain in something as humanitarian as public health.
It's not the question of "whodunnit." We cannot pin down a guilty suspect, because we know we are all guilty of enabling companies, and people to act the way they do. We are accessories to their crimes.
The question we should ask is: " How did we get here?" How did we enable such a snowball effect to happen with public health?
The word that sums up how we got here is "exploitation." Like animals, we would do anything to protect ourselves and our loved ones. The difference between animals and us is we built multiple industries out of this fact. Animals will defend their families from predators or dangerous situations. We, on the other hand, pay others to protect ourselves and our family — protection from other humans.
The good that humans can do has helped life expectancy to rise with science and medicine. Because we are human, nothing is free due to logistics. Everything is business. Universally, greed, pride, and power are our most significant flaws. Innately, our kindness, caring side means we are willing to pay any price to save the life of the one we love or at least protect them. It's the perfect situation to make a multi-trillion-dollar industry in the United States.
The healthcare industry exploits the good in humanity.
No one has a sustainable answer to untangling this mess we got ourselves in, because we are too invested in the current system. Walking away means we have to cut our losses. We are not ready for it. The longer we wait to cut our losses, the more lives will be affected by our indecision. The question we have to ask ourselves is, "How much of the familiar are we willing to let go to move forward?" Our habits of what healthcare is have made us bias to change. We don't allow ourselves to see what healthcare could be without the familiar component of the current infrastructure.
Extras:
Part 2 — To See, To Hear, To Feel (Sep 2026)
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That's funny...’” -
Isaac Asimov (attributed)
To see, to hear, to feel; these are the ways we move through the world. Words can stir emotion, but to truly feel is to be touched by someone. Most great works in this world are born from loving someone. We focus so much on our differences, forgetting that each of us has been shaped by another human's touch. To be touched by another human is a love that transforms. And in the moment of transformation, we understand: we have been loved, and we have loved.
A song, a film, a piece of writing can stir our emotions. Yet art does not create feelings out of nothing; it awakens them. Feeling is the echo, touch is the origin. Art re-ignites the echo's vibration, carrying us back to the source we cannot forget: the human connection, love.
A world where we all fight to be different to show how special we are, a world where we point out our differences. Yet, we all start as a cell.
We feel love the most when it is threatened by death, by illness, by time. It gives us context that love is not what we have, but what we cannot bear to lose. It reminds us we all want the same things, to protect the people we love the most. How we all started as a single cell. Dividing and growing, carrying within it the potential for thought, love, and connection. Our cellular start reminds us how delicate life is, and how beautiful it is that from simplicity comes the complexity of human love and art.
A cell that goes haywire becomes cancer. It doesn't discriminate; every one of us began as a single cell. It doesn't care about wealth, gender, or race. In that way, it is an equalizer. Our lives depend on the delicate dance of cells staying in rhythm, dividing when they should, resting when they must.
Neurons are the brain's communication cells. When they begin to lose their rhythm and misfire, their connections weaken, and the dance of communication falters. The bridges between them deteriorate, slowing signals until they fade into silence. When neurons lose their purpose and die, memories unravel, and awareness slips away. We call this Alzheimer's.
When neurons that specialize in the "language" of dopamine fail, movement loses its coordination. The neurons in the brain's movement center still send signals, but they are no longer the right ones. Movements become shaky, stiff, or slow because the language of dopamine is missing, like a sentence without verbs. The structure remains, but the action cannot unfold. We call this Parkinson's disease.
Across the body, when a cell falters, we give its failure a name. Does it lose function first, or structure? No — the two unravel together. Purpose cannot exist without a body, and a body cannot endure without purpose. They are co-dependent, bound in rhythm. And when that rhythm cannot be restored, we call it incurable.
It can happen to any one of us, to anyone we love. And when it does, we're reminded that love is the force that turns a cell into a life, and a life into a story worth remembering.
Anyone who has lived through this experience wants the same thing: time. Time to find the treatment that didn't exist yet. Time to keep them here with us. Time we never had enough of.
And those who live with chronic diseases wonder why medicine so rarely restores a cell's function or rebuilds its structure. A woman with Parkinson's disease wonders if she can still smile at the people she loves. We take freedom of expression for granted; facial expression, something so ordinary, becomes extraordinary for someone whose muscles no longer follow the rhythm they once knew.
We all feel the need, the desire to give others more time. Not forever, just more. We are not asking to live without end. We are asking for a medical system that listens, a health system that keeps pace with the relentless processes of disease. We are asking for progress that does not fall behind the rhythm of life itself.
The cells have a rhythm; everything in life has a rhythm. Cellular rhythm, where cells divide, repair, and communicate in cycles. Circadian rhythm, the body's 24-hour clock, keeps sleep, hormones, and metabolism aligned. Neural rhythm, where brain waves synchronize thought, memory, and movement. When these rhythms fail, diseases emerge: Cancer as uncontrolled division. Alzheimer's has broken communication. Parkinson's as disrupted movement signals.
Medicine has a rhythm. We can break it down into three major ones: Research, treatment, and system. Research rhythm dependent on discovery, testing, and approval. Treatment rhythm dependent on diagnosis, therapy, monitoring, and adjustment. System rhythm dependent on hospitals, doctors, patients, all moving in the cycles of care.
When medicine loses its rhythm, medicine falls behind the disease. Patients feel the gap. A family waiting for a cure feels the pause in the music. A patient living with chronic disease feels the disconnect of their body. A society hoping for better healthcare longs for medicine to catch the tempo, pace of the disease.
The cruel math with a disease like cancer is this: a 1 cm tumor already contains around 100 million cells, meaning the disease has been quietly expanding through dozens of doublings long before anyone knows it exists. By the time it's detectable, it has already been evolving, generating mutant subclones for years. Each subclone behaves differently. One treatment may target one clone but leave another untouched.
Detection is not the beginning; it's the reveal. We aren't catching the first malignant cell — we're catching the survivors of a long, hidden evolutionary process. Prevention reduces risk, not eliminates it. Biology is ahead of us; we're always trying to catch up.
Doctors often say a disease is "manageable," because in many cases manageable is the best-case scenario, not reversible. Most of us don't fully understand what "manageable" means until the day it quietly shifts into "no longer manageable." And that shift often reflects biology continuing its trajectory, not a failure of care. It is a failure of rhythm in medicine.
We start to understand that most diseases are not reversible. Once they cross a certain biological threshold, the best we can do is slow the process, contain it, or redirect pathways that have been unfolding silently for years. "Manageable" becomes the operative word: we can slow it, control symptoms, preserve function, buy time. In early stages, sometimes we can maintain quality of life.
But "manageable" is not a promise of permanence. It's a dynamic state, one that biology can eventually outgrow. One we all know too well when our body loses the fight.
What can we do?
We can't change the fact that cellular systems have an evolutionary advantage. Our cells had millions of years of evolutionary optimization for survival. We've had decades. Cancer cells mutate because mutation helps them survive. Fibrosis progresses because scar tissue is the body's default repair mechanism. Neurodegeneration accelerates because damaged neurons cannot replicate.
Cells and humans share the same paradox. Specialization is power. Coordination is survival. Misalignment is havoc. The very thing that gives a system strength also creates its vulnerability. When a neuron becomes so specialized that it cannot divide, it makes the brain powerful but fragile. When immune cells become so specialized that they can attack the body, it creates autoimmunity. A fibroblast repairs tissue too aggressively; the process gets out of control, creating fibrosis. And when a mutated cell becomes so optimized for replication that it defects, creating cancer.
Evolution gave us, and cells, specialization, but the specialization increases the risk of misalignment. Cells survive because they coordinate, and they fail when they overspecialize.
The difference between cells and humans is that cells are extremely good at coordination and they don't allow specialization to dominate local signaling. Humans overspecialized, therefore creating silos, institutions, and incentives that drift apart. We fragment perspectives. We know a brilliant scientist cannot stop a pandemic alone. While specialization created capacity, coordination determines where that capability is used well.
Humans thrive as individuals when they specialize, but civilization collapses when coordination fails. A single cell is simple, not intelligent in human terms, yet when cells cooperate, they form tissues, organs, and entire organisms. Cancer is powerful because it becomes an army of cells that coordinates so effectively that nearly every treatment eventually struggles to stop it.
So, how do we beat our own cells? If we want to beat cancer or any cellular disease at its own game, the lesson isn't to fight its chaos — it's to copy its greatest strength: coordination.
Cells can coordinate better than humans. Specialization is a power because it made us stand out, a title, but it is not what makes humans survive; that is coordination.
The question then is how do we coordinate? We make an open system.
Human civilization can only thrive if we coordinate specialization through open systems. Just as simple cells cooperate to form tissues and organisms, humans must create structures that allow diverse fields to connect. Cancer shows us the danger of coordination without alignment, but it also shows us the power of collective cooperation. To accelerate discovery and progress, we must design open systems that weave together specialized knowledge across sectors, because discovery happens when open systems allow insights from one field to reframe another.
The strength of great work is in seeing the parallels and overlaps across different fields. Abraham Flexner reminded us in The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge that knowledge pursued for its own sake often turns out to be the most valuable. What looks useless in one moment can become the key to discovery in another. Art gave medicine the ability to see, physics gave it the ability to look inside, botany gave it the power to heal, and mathematics gave it the means to model complexity. These intersections show that curiosity alone can open doors to medical breakthroughs.
The words here may stir something within you, not because they are revolutionary, but because they carry the imprint of human touch. Art does not invent emotion; it awakens what already lives inside us. Feeling is the echo; touch is the origin.
We all know someone who has lived through a time when medicine could not keep pace with disease. That experience leaves us wondering if there is a better way forward. The idea behind what I call the Open Medical Protocol begins here. Abraham Flexner once said that discovery requires two things: an accidental encounter and a prepared mind ready to see its importance. The Open Medical Protocol is designed to make those encounters more frequent, giving prepared minds the chance to recognize meaning where others might overlook it.
It is an open system where people can share knowledge, explore ideas, and uncover new possibilities. Its purpose is simple yet profound: to help us see what everyone has seen, and maybe serendipitously think what no one has thought. Through coordination, it can reach areas of medicine that cannot scale alone, weaving together the rhythms of science, art, and human connection into progress that keeps pace with life itself.