Despite our technological prowess, the majority of modern humans are living in a perpetual state of ill-health. Approximately 1 in 3 people are dealing with more than five health problems at the same time. These are shocking statistics, as is our main strategy for dealing with it.

Health is not simply an absence of symptoms or disease. And yet, Western healthcare is fixated upon this idea. If we’ve learned anything over the past 100 years, it’s that health cannot be understood—or meaningfully created—by studying disease alone.