In June of 2005 my health crashed.
Suddenly, mysteriously, I went from health fanatic to near death. Conventional medicine offered limited diagnoses and treatments. But obviously I didn’t die. I recovered from the acute crisis and settled in to a chronic illness half life.
Already an avid researcher from my efforts to promote super health, I tried a wide variety of herbs, pharmaceuticals, diets, exercises and even psycho-spiritual modalities, now for the purpose of recovery.
It felt like I was facing death. It felt urgent to realize dreams I’d had for years. Honestly, I was afraid that if I died without at least trying to realize these visions, to improve lives widely, I wouldn’t be at peace.
Meanwhile, hardly able to stand, I was learning a lot. I learned about many treatment modalities. But I also learned first hand what it feels like, for millions of people, to have a debilitating illness that never goes away, that doctors can’t fix.
From the perspective of business, and compassion, this is a demographic of 10s of millions of people, in the US alone, highly motivated to find a product that works. From an economic standpoint, solving this problem would add billions of productive work hours.
Solving my problem became solving their problem. Business building is inductive in this way. We are each a template for people like us. As Tom said of Myspace, he built the site that he would want.
Most people think of the health care crisis as a problem of access, insurance. But that’s not the only problem. I had access, and the insurance didn’t help. What helped was the internet. Sites, groups, people I met, products I found, a sort of real life game or puzzle.
This mish mash of detective work and secret initiations (learn the blastocystis handshake that few doctors know, the mycoplasma mudra, disentangle the conspiracy theorists from the genuine practices of ancient Chinese wisdom) began to resolve as a set of needs that could be addressed through a web site.
I knew what was out there, because I was trying everything. Yahoo groups are something between a God send and a vast experiment. People are self organizing into experimental groups as a quicker alternative to clinical trials, and they are able and motivated to test treatments that would not be economic for pharmaceuticals companies to pursue.
When they succeed, it can be a huge benefit to those in need. But there is something to be said for controls. And I began to design controls that groups could self apply to improve effectiveness.
I also watched Steve Case forming Revolution Health. Remedy Find was acquired. Some say health care is the only remaining nut that the internet hasn’t been able to crack, the only aspect of modern life that hasn’t been vastly improved by the net. But not for lack of effort. It’s a trillion dollar industry. But Web MD didn’t work for me. Will Revolution Health?
One thing about health care is intuitively obvious. This is, or should be, the age of “integrative health.” Just as on any day, we can eat a banana from Honduras, a tuna from the Mediterranean, obviously health care should cherry pick the best remedies from all places and all times. One of the problems with this is the problem Google solves for information.
I began to solve this problem with simple social networking tools. Statistical tools, health and treatment tracking forms, crowd-sourced experimental controls, that would be fun to use, easier, and more effective than what I was seeing from sites like Revolution and Web MD. At the same time, as any statistician, scientist or entrepreneur must do, I was making predictions.
I predict that we will statistically prove that happiness is a medicine. Drugs, diets and operations will work better if the patient is happy, and may not work at all if not. And my goal was not just to prove this, but to provide the treatment. How to? If access to a pill or a doctor can be hard to provide, how do you insure happiness?
Happiness could be related to lifestyle, job, relationships, even world politics and the environment. Again, using myself as a template, I had long ago made a vow, as part of my spiritual practice, to improve lives everywhere. So my health might be contingent on at least trying to fulfill this vow. Therefore, this business is my treatment.
The treatment is the universal medicine, happiness. I set about to make tools that people can use to improve any aspect of their lives, including having a direct impact on global scale problems, through pursuing their own self interest, their own health and happiness.
This is done through entrepreneurial tools, that can allow people everywhere greater freedom, freedom to earn as much as they want how they want, to live where they want, develop creatively, opportunities for new types of relationships, mutually beneficial relationships, ways to be personally involved in improving the world, through improving their own conditions.
Let me show you how. There is a simple rationale here. I would even argue an ipso facto fact. Happiness is good. Making it more widely available is a worthy goal. No matter if it cures cancer or not, happiness is good. If the business effort to achieve this widely has good logic, a good chance to succeed to some degree, with small risk or investment, it’s worth a try. If the scope is potentially unlimited, all the more so.
