Why Well Being Has a Future
Source | LinkedIn | Deepak Chopra MD (official) | Founder, Chopra Foundation
An invitation to Sages and Scientists Symposium, Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville Arkansas
By Deepak Chopra, MD
Despite a steady increase in life expectancy, medical science is facing diminishing returns. It has been estimated that every increase in lifespan since 1990 has resulted in only ten months of increased healthy life; the rest is only prolonged suffering and the decline of aging. Globally more people now die of so-called “lifestyle diseases” than from infectious diseases. Doctors cannot make choices about lifestyle; only the patient can. Finally, half of all heart attacks before old age occur in people who live a good lifestyle, managing their weight, eating right, and exercising regularly.
What lies beyond lifestyle? That’s a matter of much speculation. Will human existence be improved in the future through technology, genetic manipulation, nano-robots in the bloodstream serving as cancer hunters? Or will it take a new philosophical conception, one that entices people away from a life of speed, constant activity, and stress?
By all odds it will take both, because innovations in technology can’t succeed if we continue to define well-being in old, outworn ways. Consider the following statements, which almost everyone, including doctors, take as fact:
· The body is a machine, and like all machines it breaks down.
· Aging is a pre-determined process, probably controlled by our genes.
· The body is a mindless lump of matter except for the brain, which has evolved to produce mind or consciousness.