The World STILL needs safe and effective treatments…
The world needs safe and effective treatments from our healthcare system. Treatments that do more than manage disease — treatments that actively promote wellness, optimise us physically and mentally, and allow us to get the most out of life.
Healthcare should prioritise prevention first. When illness does occur, it should aim to cure and restore people to a well state. Only when these options are no longer viable should we accept the long-term management of chronic disease, and finally, palliation and end-of-life care. This is the logical and humane order in which therapies should be prioritised.
In the twentieth century, medicine experienced an extraordinary breakthrough: the rise of evidence-based medicine (EBM), supported by advances in medical informatics and operationalised through clinical practice guidelines (CPGs). This system is now held in near-holy reverence by healthcare professionals, public institutions, and much of the general public.
But we must ask an uncomfortable question: what has it actually delivered?
Everywhere we look, people are more obese, less happy, and more anxious. Fertility rates — a fundamental marker of population health — continue to decline. Dementia rates are rising at an alarming pace. Cardiovascular disease has stabilised statistically, but only because a significant proportion of adults now require lifelong medication to maintain that stability.
And what about children?
The obesity epidemic has not spared them. Autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders have become so prevalent that they are now routinely normalised in public discourse. Chronic illness in childhood is no longer the exception — it is becoming the rule.
These trends cannot be dismissed as coincidence. They demand scrutiny. Of the entire system. Even the uncomfortable process of reviewing the role, successes and failures of EBM.
The dominant medical paradigm — Evidence-Based Medicine as it is currently practised — must be analysed in light of these outcomes. If a system designed to produce health is instead coinciding with widespread physical, metabolic, and mental decline, then critical evaluation is not only justified, it is essential.
Functional medicine begins with this question: not “How do we manage disease?” but “Why are we so unwell in the first place?”
This article represents the opinion of the Author and is not a medical opinion.