What does a wholistic approach have to do with health? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Diabetes is out of control, along with obesity, mental health disorders, and rising rates of many cancers. Marty Makary, a surgeon at Johns Hopkins and author of a book called ‘Blind Spots,” argues that it is the impaired vision of traditional medicine that has enabled and promotes this public health crisis.

 Makary: We have a chronic disease epidemic that modern medicine has only addressed by playing whack a mole on the back end with medications. Now there's important roles for medications but we have a reflex that's been triggered by every condition, including in some cases the medicalization of ordinary life. So we’ve got to zoom out and say yes, we do a good job stamping out disease in our many specialties in medicine but at some point we have to look at the entire person.           :28 

Makary say such a strategy requires starting from a position of health maintenance early in life, with exercise, healthy diet and immunizations, and then continuing that throughout the lifespan, with prevention playing the foundational role. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.