Dr Casey Means, in her book “Good Energy”, shares a piece of advice on working with the US healthcare system (and perhaps many healthcare systems) – Trust the system on acute issues, ignore it on chronic issues.
Her experiences studying and practicing medicine kept pushing her toward a siloed approach to understanding problems. This meant a raft of treating symptoms vs. understanding the problem holistically. In medicine, the suffix “itis” means inflammation. And inflammation in various parts of the body were treated with specific medication that, in her experience, repeatedly didn’t work.
Her insight is that inflammation takes root because fof core dysfunctions in our cells that impact how they function, signal, and replicate themselves.
As a result, one simple measure that can powerfully reframe how we understand health and disease is by looking at how well or poorly the mitochondria (that converts food energy into cellular energy) in our cells are making energy.
When the body is healthy, they produce “Good Energy.” And, when these cells had are metabolically dysfunctional and underpowered, we are stuck with “Bad Energy” which shows up in all our biological markers.
It reminded me of Peter Attia’s notes about Medicine 2.0 (modern medicine that is great at stopping quick deaths) vs. Medicine 3.0 (medicine that helps us prevent slow deaths from diseases like diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer’s). He wrote in depth about metabolic dysfunction… but Dr. Casey Means points to metabolic dysfunction as the key to that bigger question.
It is a powerful way to think about wellness.
It resonated.
