We have more money, technology, and knowledge at our command than any other nation in the world ever has. And yet one way of seeing the society we’ve built is as a perpetual illness machine: It sells us stuff that makes us sick, and then sells us stuff that treats the sickness. Spencer’s guest Dr. Rose Kumar believes there’s a better way: Treat people as people, and look at their whole lives, not just their symptoms.
If you can afford it, the United States has the best health care system in the world. We’re home to many of the top hospitals and medical schools, and have long been number one in medical research, although China is catching up. And yet just over half of Americans rate US medical care as good or excellent. And that’s when you ask them about the more technological side of healthcare. When asked about health care overall, only a quarter rate it positively.
Meanwhile, the results our healthcare system delivers for the average American are mediocre to poor, compared to results in other developed countries.
And the problem isn’t just that our healthcare is too expensive for many people, although it is.
Many of our health problems are caused by the way we live: The top causes of death in the United States are what are called lifestyle diseases — meaning the way we live is also the way we get sick and die. And yet we treat the symptoms, with expensive drugs and procedures, instead of addressing the causes.
Those causes include the junk we consume instead of real, healthy food. And they include lack of exercise. But much of our illness is also caused by unhappiness: stress, anxiety, loneliness, or despair: when people feel their life lacks meaning and fulfillment.
Rose Kumar is a highly accomplished doctor who’s breaking the cycle that keeps our perpetual illness machine going. She’s Board-certified in Internal Medicine. She graduated from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, interned at UC San Francisco, and did her residency at Stanford University. She’s the author of Becoming Real: Reclaiming Your Health in Midlife.
Dr. Kumar believes strongly in the proven benefits of scientific medicine. But she also believes strongly that health is more than data and logic. She says, “If we only follow data and logic, we end up building a healthcare system that is rich, with patients who are sick — an expensive ‘sick-care’ management system, bereft of health and meaning for both physicians and patients.” She says, “This kind of system optimizes for productivity and profits over what this was all supposed to be about in the first place: humanistic, cost-effective healthcare.”
Dr. Kumar says she believes there’s a better way, and to follow it, she founded the Ommani Center for Integrative Medicine in 2001. She describes the work of the Ommani Center as “health care that combines science with what science doesn’t address: the full human being.”
Kalpana (Rose) Kumar, M.D.
Dr. Rose Kumar is Board-Certified in Internal Medicine. She graduated from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York in 1986, completed her internship at UC San Francisco and residency at Stanford University, in Internal Medicine.
She was twice voted Top Doctor in Internal Medicine, Top Doctor in Integrative Medicine, and received the Healthcare Hero Corporate Achievement Award in 2006. She received the YWCA Woman of the Year, and YWCA Woman of Distinction awards in 1992.