The Challenge

As progress in the search for cures slows, larger expenditures are required for smaller gains. Increasingly, health problems are stabilized and maintained as chronic diseases treated with multiple drugs, surgeries and medical devices, often all in the same patient. The chronic diseases deteriorate at varying pace and the search for cures becomes a state of constant medical care. While health care reform focuses on maintaining and expanding this situation, the challenge is to develop a conceptual framework for health.