Opening Remarks 2014

“These Symposia as Evolving Creatures”

Here we are, about to start our fifth event — who would have thought we would try this and keep it going? Our intentions (from the very first moment) have not changed, but we know more today about the healthcare issues that make change so difficult and so slow. I will try to use examples of profound healthcare changes that have occurred over the last two decades to see if we can glimpse the pressures that made it so painful to implement what we now see as obvious and good.

I will also explain, ever so quickly, how a team of us decided for #5 to do an experiment, without a net. Each year I promised we would do “something” that might facilitate improved healthcare, an idea that we could do real science — focused on omics and drugs and diagnostics (with omics including comics…) — and also comprehend how our brains work (both biochemically and behaviorally) because we are sure that we could do better healthcare if we behaved better. And so these last couple of years many of us read a lot about behavior. You will see (and enjoy, however uncomfortable we get) that there are ways to do better so we can all be healthier and get and give more out of our lives.