Submitted by Nelson Campbell, president/CEO of PlantPure Nation
I am happy to announce that we have signed a groundbreaking agreement with Lee Memorial Health System, the largest public health system in the state of Florida. Working with Lee Memorial Health System in Ft. Myers, we will develop and validate food-as-medicine models that dramatically improve care and improve financial performance.
Modern healthcare is based upon the “pharmaceutical paradigm.” This is a school of thought that says disease can be cured through technological interventions, mostly in the form of single chemical agents created in a lab and manufactured in a factory. The pharmaceutical industry has benefited from this approach, often earning monopolistic profit margins of 20 percent or more.
But the same has not been true on the delivery side of the health care industry. Physicians find themselves engaged in a kind of practice they did not sign up for: 10 minutes with a never-ending stream of chronically ill patients, liability concerns, administrative hassles, and the monotonous practice of prescribing drugs to patients. And hospitals are lucky if they earn margins half as large as the margins earned in the pharmaceutical industry. Many have slim to nonexistent margins, and are dependent on Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements from a government careening toward bankruptcy.
Those who provide medical care are the ones left holding the bag for a system that is not working. The root cause of this failure is the pharmaceutical paradigm. The idea that an infinitely complex system (the human body) can be healed through a single targeted intervention such as a drug is a fallacy, as evidenced by the failure of this approach to deal with soaring rates of chronic disease.
This is not to say pharmaceuticals have no role to play. Drugs can provide relief from symptoms and be used in other short-term applications, but they cannot solve the root cause of our health care crisis: high rates of chronic disease.
Fortunately, there is a solution, and it is remarkably simple, but it will require a wholesale change in the way we deliver health care, a change that restores medical providers to their rightful role at the apex of health care. And this is the purpose behind our agreement with Lee Memorial Health System.
As we move forward in this collaboration, we will report our progress to you. And I expect we will have much to report. Our counterparts at Lee Memorial Health System are forward-thinking people, committed to blazing a trail that other health care systems can follow. We are thankful to have met them.