The Upstream Doctors: Medical Innovators Track Sickness to Its Source (Kindle Single) (TED Books)

As a culture, we often ignore the fundamental causes of health and illness, and focus instead on how to fund drugs and surgery. Our health-care system really pays more attention to disease than to health. Of the $2.1 trillion spent in 2008 on medical care, ninety-five cents of every dollar was used to treat disease, not prevent it.4 • It is far eas

Most doctors—most humans, really—have unwittingly inherited a colonial worldview that emphasizes individual health, disconnecting illness from its social and historical contexts and obscuring our place in the web of life that makes us who we are.