The Future of Health, Influenced by Lifestyle Choices and Led by Women
Dr. Dean Ornish and Jerry Levin combined their decades of experience in health research and business to discuss how healthcare needs to change and where innovation is taking us.
Dr. Dean Ornish and Jerry Levin make an unlikely pair. Ornish has been a leading medical researcher for decades while Levin is the former CEO of Time Warner. Yet their experience in medicine and business ultimately brought them to the same table, helping to transform health for as many people as possible.
Speaking at the recent StartUp Health Festival, both Dr. Ornish and Levin discussed a future where lifestyle choices become the most important factor in healthcare, how the power of technology can improve overall quality of life, and the need to shift to a more women-led business culture.
The following has been edited from the original interview, conducted by Steven Krein, co-founder of StartUp Health.
The Importance of Lifestyle Choices
Dr. Dean Ornish: The major causes for most of the chronic diseases that we suffer from are the lifestyle choices that we make each day.
My father in law has pancreatic cancer, so, developing a targeted immunotherapy toward that particular cell type is great. But for most diseases, we found that a whole foods, plant-based diet that’s both low in sugar and in fat, moderate exercise, yoga and meditation, and what we call psychosocial support, which is really loving and intimacy, or to reduce it down even further, to eat well, move more, stress less, and love more. Boom, that’s it. That the more diseases we look at, and the more underlying biological mechanisms we study, the more reasons we have to explain why these simple changes are so powerful, how far-reaching they can be, and how quickly they can occur.
The Power of the Moonshot Mindset
Dr. Ornish: To me, [moonshots are] things that are hard are meaningful. That’s why people climb mountains, you know? It’s because they’re hard. And, when I decided not to kill myself when I was 19, I decided that if I was going to choose to live, and it was a conscious choice for me, that I needed to really understand what was real. And that meant I was going to try a lot of different things. I was going to lead a pretty messy life, because you know, the people, later when I became a doctor, who are on their deathbeds, generally don’t regret what they did, they generally regret what they didn’t do.
If you do something and it fails, then you learn something really important and you really know. There’s a lot of wisdom that comes from making mistakes and learning from them. But if you don’t try, then you just wonder, you know, what might have been. So, I decided I didn’t care if I could fail, because if you fail, you can learn a lot.
Jerry Levin: I’m old enough to have heard JFK talk about going to the moon. The words are still ringing in my ears: “Not because is easy, but because it is hard.” And several years later I had the pleasure of meeting Ted Sorensen, who wrote those words for Kennedy. And the idea that there’s a field of dreams, there’s an impossible dream, is both the essence of what an entrepreneur is, but it’s also the thing that’s most needed in the world right now. Is to change the inequality and the problem where there’s so many people who, not only don’t have nutrition, but they don’t have any access to healthcare.
And while I love every moonshot we have, for me, spiritually, morally, the notion that we’re going to give every person on the planet access to healthcare at no cost. That gets everybody’s attention. But why, you know, does a child who is a refugee and has no home, has none of the basics? No access to healthcare. We need to cut across boundaries. And the last thing I would say is that a lot of people pay lip-service to what’s global. Local and global. But, if you look at everyone’s stories, and you want to change the world in a meaningful way, then there are no boundaries. There are no countries. They’re just people.
The Rise of the Feminine Movement
In reference to Levin’s Op-Ed for Time Magazine titled “Former Time Warner CEO: It’s Time to Replace All Men at the Top With Women”
Levin: I come from a time when it was male-oriented, highly competitive, survival of the fittest. And now, I think what we’re about to embark on, and just as a side note, when I watched the news this morning, Alabama won in overtime. Jeff Bezos is the richest person on the earth. 1.05 billion. But the thing that caught my attention is the little speculation that Oprah may run for President in 2020.
Now, what underlies that, is the way we’re moving now, the feminine movement, the turning over a lot of our institutions to that kind of sensibility, gives me great confidence, as well as the millennial group, who don’t see divisions or disparate backgrounds. They’re community oriented. So, I’m hopeful that the combination of the two, the rising millennial generation across the globe, and the power of the feminine movement to take over from the male movement that has failed society.
I think it’s time where people, leaders, politicians, to be authentic, to be vulnerable, to be able to elicit the stories that motivate people. And that’s a feminine culture. So, either men have to adopt that, or we just turn over the keys to women. I mean, have you ever noticed that it’s the mother whose multitasking, the father’s watching NFL football. So, you know, I’m very encouraged by that revolution. But, I also believe that you’re witnessing, in StartUp Health and the kind of speakers that have been here, that there’s a new age dawning. It’s not just about healthcare, per se, it’s about traversing boundaries, guidelines, and doing things that totally seem impossible.
The Power of Technology
Dr. Ornish: Technology is a form of power. And it can be used to harm or to heal. A knife can be used as surgery to heal someone, or it can kill someone. And so, to the degree that we can use technology to bring this together in ways that are truly authentic, it can be healing.
On one level, we’re separate. Another level we’re part of something larger. And to me, that’s the roots of compassion. When you see that it’s you in another form. And so, to me, when we can help people use the suffering. Not only the physical suffering of illness, but the social suffering that we’re seeing in our country and throughout the world as a doorway for doing things differently and transformation, and using technology.
And so, whenever I’m looking at any kind of new technology or any, kind of, new device or new approach, to me the question is, is this really bringing us closer together or is it pushing us further apart? And to the degree it’s bringing us together, it’s healing and it’s reducing suffering. And to the degree it forms a sense of difference, then it leads to suffering and often to chronic disease.
Advice to Entrepreneurs
Dr. Ornish: Trust your intuition. You know, we all have a voice that speaks, the still small voice within, whatever name you give to it, it’s the one that wakes you up at 3 a.m. in the morning and says, “Hey listen up. pay attention.” And we can access that voice very clearly.
Everything I’ve done in my research career over 40 years people thought was impossible. And it’s because that little voice said, “Oh, no, this can work.” And so, if you’re looking for things to invest in, if you’re looking at things to do yourself, trust that voice. You can access it very directly and I find when I listen to it, I’m glad that I did. And it’s usually in the context of doing something that’s going to make a difference in the world as well.
Jerry Levin: Don’t do things traditionally. Yes, when you start a business and you’re an entrepreneur, how are you going to monetize? How are you going to scale? Go with your passion. There’s a reason you’re doing it. And when you’re looking for money, don’t just take the money. See what that person’s story is. So that they have the passion for what you’re all about. That’s the extra dimension that’s going to make this work, and make it change the world in a meaningful way, not just us rhetoric or cliche.
