Why Zazari Project? Why Now?
If you’re not in the 60 percent of U.S. adults that has a chronic disease, you’re in the remaining 40 percent that loves a person with one. There are hundreds or more chronic diseases that impinge on life goals or steal away friends and family. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the most common are heart disease, cancer, stroke, Alzheimer’s dementia, diabetes mellitus and chronic kidney disease. In 2013, “nearly 70 percent of Americans [were] on at least one prescription drug, and more than half [took] two” (1). That is unchanged almost a dozen years later.
Most people agree with large health organizations that lifestyle choices heavily influence or cause chronic diseases. Examples of risk factors include tobacco use, alcohol consumption, inadequate activity levels and poor diet. If the eternal sunshine of health were a personal choice, risk factors explained disease and pharmaceuticals work, then why are disease statistics going from bad to worse and increasingly involving young people and children? Blaming individuals and society for failure to control disease risk factors misses that beliefs about risk factors are part of the problem, not a solution. Broken healthcare systems are downstream of ineffective and inaccurate beliefs about how disease works. Ignorance expensive.
If we needed a wake up call to think differently about disease, we got it with the COVID-19 pandemic. For all the grief it caused, what may be unrecognized is that the global approach to it was the same as that used for chronic disease. The main difference was time scale. The hyperacute spread of the virus and proposed interventions led to panic and civil unrest. Chronic disease is a slow-burn version of the same. New cases crop up like weeds in a garden of health and proposed interventions help some people, sometimes and encourage judgement and bankruptcy.
One commonality is that we cannot answer “What is Life?” That is not trivial since to understand disease as a condition of life, we must understand life. Until we solve that, chronic disease interventions will at best help some people, sometimes and become increasingly unaffordable and inaccessible.
Ultimately, what good is following the science when science abides by a paradigm that cannot heal or explain disease? This isn’t a nuance that technology and quantum computing will solve. It’s the noose by which we hang our future.
Healthcare cannot be fixed, but the way we think about disease can be.
Adapt and Overcome
Problem: We’re trapped in the cycle of doing something about disease.
When healers and patients turn to a healthcare system for chronic disease solutions, they engage in an economy of goods and services that cannot reliably prevent or cure disease. Those who provide non mainstream goods and services fare no better. To find a future of medicine we want, we need to stop pursuing goods and services that either exist or could exist as an extension of modern thinking. Instead, its time to focus on a culture shift in medicine. We must embrace thinking differently before we can do differently.
Problem: There is no “thinking element” in medicine.
Modern medicine is so focused on doing something about disease that we’ve completed neglected thinking about the problem of disease for over a century. Today’s philosophy of medicine is mostly dead, and lingers as a useless critique of methodology or necessary source of ethics to reign in the healthcare machine. Installing legitimate philosophical and theoretical inquiry into disease will feel like fantasy, not because reality is so fantastical, but because existing beliefs are.
Problem: Healthcare and disease are lost in complexity.
Drilling down into current knowledge of disease, life, and healthcare systems invariably meets insane complexity. This breeds a love of wishy-washy statistics that fuel an effort to do something and leaves end-users in tears trying to navigate it. Instead, baffling risk models signal a failed paradigm. As we uncover the sources of complexity, we find that it isn’t real, and Confucius was right: “Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”
Problem: Modern science fails to explain disease.
With all the technology and knowledge we have today, we should understand chronic disease. Instead, we’ve accepted its colossal failure as the status quo. The problem isn’t a lack of knowledge or data, but the non-healing paradigm that guides beliefs about what that knowledge or data mean. We must break out of this paradigm and into a paradigm that does explain disease.
Problem: Healthcare cannot be fixed.
Today, disrupting the healthcare industry depends on “streamlining processes” to make it flow better. A healthcare system built on inaccurate, post-industrial beliefs about disease and life is as good as its going to get. New processes add fresh, impersonal layers of complexity that will never make it do the one thing we all crave: heal people. Therefore, Zazari Project doesn’t strive to disrupt the healthcare industry but replace it with one that reliably heals.
Problem: Global health initiatives attribute failure to logical and financial constraints.
Global initiatives that focus on doing something about the chronic disease pandemic ironically are blind to the reality that they are avoiding the problem. Blame is the antithesis of discovery. Blaming system failures on the system itself, or worse, the users of that system, is the pinnacle of worshiping a failed paradigm.
Problem: Precision Medicine promises a future of more drugs and interventions.
If you desire a healthcare machine that treats people as a dumb cluster of replaceable parts, today’s assembly-line mentality guarantees it. That mentality runs deep. Not only do we think of human bodies that way, but it also describes the experience of working in healthcare: use the parts to their maximum and when they break, throw them away. The buck stops here.
“Creativity in living is not without its attendant difficulties. For peculiarity breeds contempt. And the unfortunate thing about being ahead of your time is that when people finally realize you were right, they’ll say it was obvious all along.”