America’s Healthcare System Needs This from the Next President.

The medical establishment and the government are caught in a spiral of rising costs that not only terrifies the average citizen but shows no sign of immediate major reversal.

The good news is that avenues of empowerment are already open and growing more important. The prevention movement that began 50 years ago with campaigns against tobacco and high cholesterol is being remodeled in the following directions:

· Social media is creating a community with like-minded goals for dealing with health issues and promoting well-being.

· Outside the Web, centers have sprung up where people can get a wider range of information and techniques devoted to self-care.

· Understanding and caring for one’s own well-being has far outstripped anything available from the medical establishment even 10 years ago.

· Efforts at group marketing are underway to ease the individual burden of medical costs — the Uber equivalent for medical products and services.

· Information sharing through social media is developing reliable sources for the products and services people are seeking, including health education, nutrition, yoga, meditation — the whole panoply of self-care in the new millennium.

· Biometrics, the real-time measurement of how the body is functioning, is quickly expanding.

The next President can encourage and support all of these trends, with or without action in Congress and the cooperation of the medical establishment.

As self-care becomes more urgent and the Internet and social media become the dominant force in health information, the government must join the action. Information needs to be reliable, free, and widely sourced. Local and state agencies should be showing people the benefits of self-care and higher states of well-being in order to break the cycle of ignoring a health issue until symptoms appear and then visiting the doctor — often many times — with the expectation of being fixed.

The President can also use his bully pulpit to change the storyline of American healthcare. Instead of the constant blaring of political slogans that do nothing but cement divisiveness, the new story can be about personal empowerment, about a rising tide of well-being and communities that are bringing about positive lifestyle changes on every front, from yoga and meditation to the “new old age” and winning the battle against chronic lifestyle disorders.

In short, it’s time for the next President to become a symbol of radical well-being, which has already dawned and needs strong official backing.

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism. He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 80 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are Super Genes co-authored with Rudolph Tanzi, PhD and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. www.deepakchopra.com.

Originally published by Linkedin