One Solution to America’s Health Care Crisis

Health3

By Deepak Chopra, MD, Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD, Joseph B. Weiss, MD, Nancy Cetel Weiss, MD, and Danielle E. Weiss, MD

Complications in medical care occur at a staggering rate, resulting in over 440,000 accidental deaths from medical errors (the vast majority not considered malpractice, such as side effects from drugs) in U.S. hospitals each year. Self-governance by health systems and providers has not made significant inroads to reduce this catastrophic failure in patient safety. The inefficient and expensive medical malpractice lawsuit industry has neither reduced nor prevented the ever growing numbers of medical injuries and death, nor provided compensation or justice to the vast majority of those injured. The main beneficiaries of malpractice lawsuits are the attorneys, whose contingency fees can lead to multimillion-dollar windfalls, and insurance companies collecting high malpractice premiums. They profit at the expense of others and contribute to the continually escalating costs of medical care. The vast majority of medical injury and death does not result in a malpractice claim, and of those filed most fail at trial. In spite of this high failure rate, malpractice actions have worsened the situation by further encouraging excessive, expensive, and higher risk care under the rationale of defensive medicine.

(more…)

Want to Lead a Happier Life? Talk to Your Genes

 

wellbeingBy Deepak Chopra, MD, Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD

 

Genetics may be on the verge of solving a very complex question in a revolutionary but quite simple way. The question is, What does it take to be happy? The question never goes away. It hangs over our heads every day. The possible answers are many, but they follow two general trends whose results, frankly, have been disappointing. One trend is psychological, holding that happiness is an emotional state. The other trend is philosophical, holding that happiness is a mental state. When someone is unhappy, psychologists aim to improve their mood, largely by addressing anxiety, depression, and various psychological wounds from the past. A philosopher, on the other hand, would examine the underlying idea of happiness itself and why it is or isn’t feasible. In the end, happiness is all about health and wellbeing.

 

Yet after thousands of years of deep thinking and a hundred years of psychotherapy, the condition that the vast majority of people find themselves in is marked by total confusion. We muddle through on a wobbly combination of wishful thinking, hope, bouts of high and low spirits, denial, family ties, love, distraction, and the constant pursuit of external pleasures, as if happiness can be cobbled together more or less randomly.

(more…)

Deepak Chopra speaks at Talks@GS

Deepak Chopra, MD speaks on enlightened leadership, wellbeing, and consciousness at Talks@GS:

 

Highlights on Enlightened Leadership and Consciousness

 

Mind-Body Connection

 

Five Pillars of Wellbeing

 

 

Radical Well-Being: Where We Need to Go

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD

7Radical-760x428

As far as our health goes, America is about a little of this and a lot of that. The little is self-care, the lot is drugs and surgery. Thirty years after a mind-body revolution took place in medicine and fifty years after the Surgeon General launched a prevention campaign against smoking, the public hasn’t fully embraced the simple, unalterable fact that doctors aren’t responsible for the well-being of their patients. Self-care is the one need no one can afford to ignore.

 

Self-care is a better term than prevention.  First of all, it’s positive – you take steps to insure a better lifestyle, not simply to ward off disease. Second, self-care proceeds on every front that creates well-being: physical, emotional, spiritual, and environmental.  If you attend to your own well-being by taking advantage of the latest medical findings, a leap is possible into a higher state of health that can be termed radical well-being.

(more…)

The Third Metric – Redefining Success

Description: Our definition of success as composed mainly of money and power is no longer sustainable; it is time for a third metric.– one founded on well-being, wisdom, our ability to wonder, and to give back. Money and power by themselves are a two legged stool — you can balance on them for a while, but eventually you’re going to topple over. And more and more people, very successful people, are toppling over.

Success the way we’ve defined it is no longer sustainable. It’s no longer sustainable for human beings or for societies. To live the lives we want, and not just the ones we settle for, the ones society defines as successful, we need to include the Third Metric.

(more…)