Health is about love and power. Policy is downstream.

I see health primarily in terms of love and power rather than in terms of innovation, policy, strategy, clinical care, and technology. All of the latter are critical, but fundamentally, health is a matter of love and power.

When I see patients in the ER, I can see that many of them are silently (or vociferously) asking "What else am I supposed to do??? I'm doing what my doctor said. It keeps happening." Their power is being sapped. Love seems to be missing. The buck gets passed from clinical medicine to social work to administration to public health to health policy... until the buck disappears altogether and the cycle starts again.

We have protocols and algorithms designed to help people get better. By and large, these are about disease mitigation and disease management, which unfortunately is concomitant with disease sustenance. A true health system would be about cure, health activation, and human potential, rather than mostly disease mitigation. The former includes the latter, but the latter ends without exploring the full scope of the former.

Passing the buck, or even integrating care, is not enough unless we change how we see and what we value. It's easy to put the next foot forward. It's difficult to pause and consider where our footsteps come from and where they lead.

If we love our patients and love ourselves, we also love the power that every person has within them, and we create systems to express that power rather than create a power imbalance, as is the case in our public health and healthcare systems.

Clinical care, technology, policy, and innovation must always be situated in the greater context of love and power. In fact, they already are, somewhere along a gradient. The fact that we do not recognize it is the problem. When we do recognize and acknowledge this, we can begin from a new place, harnessing all the knowledge we have of disease mitigation and putting it within the greater flow of love, power, and human potential.

This is how we heal as a society, and how we truly take care of patients as fellow human beings.