The Healthcare Trifecta and the Future of Healing
Chronic illness is on the rise. Autoimmune conditions, mystery syndromes, hormone imbalances, and long-term fatigue are affecting millions, yet the conventional system often leaves patients cycling through specialists with no lasting relief. To understand why, we have to examine what I call The Provider–Insurance–Pharmaceutical Trifecta.
The Provider–Insurance–Pharmaceutical Trifecta
Medical providers covered by insurance companies often lack expertise in treating chronic illness because the current insurance system incentivizes conventional lab-tested treatments over holistic and individualized approaches (which by their nature are harder to lab-test).
Primary care doctors are trained in a paradigm of diagnosing disease and prescribing pharmaceutical interventions to treat either the symptoms or the underlying infection. They are not trained—or reimbursed—for coaching patients through nutrition, sleep, emotional healing, or lifestyle transformation.
Pharmaceutical and insurance companies depend on this paradigm. Their profitability model is built on medications and symptom management, not on prevention or reversal. For example:
- Formularies and coverage: Doctors can only prescribe medications that an insurance company has negotiated onto its formulary. This means a treatment’s availability often depends more on pricing agreements than patient need.
- Lifestyle interventions excluded: Natural therapies—sauna use, diet shifts, stress reduction, supplement protocols—are rarely covered, not because they don’t work, but because they don’t fit neatly into insurance reimbursement models.
- Profit-driven incentives: A pill can be patented and marketed; a lifestyle change cannot. This simple economic reality shapes the entire medical landscape.
The result? Patients are treated like checkboxes on a flowchart. They are patched, not healed.
The Human Cost
- A woman with Hashimoto’s may cycle through years of levothyroxine adjustments without ever being asked about her gluten sensitivity or mold exposure.
- A man with autoimmune arthritis may be placed on $50,000-per-year biologics while never hearing that gut healing could lower his inflammation.
- A teenager with anxiety may be put on SSRIs without anyone investigating micronutrient deficiencies, sleep rhythm disruption, or thyroid function.
These are not isolated cases—they are the predictable outcome of a system designed for acute care, not for complex, chronic illness.
The Push for a New Model
Despite these limitations, patients, providers, and activists are building alternatives.
1. Functional and Integrative Medicine
Doctors trained in functional medicine are stepping outside the conventional model, looking at root causes: gut health, toxin load, nutrient deficiencies, trauma, and stress. But since insurance rarely covers their time or tests, many have turned to membership or cooperative models:
- Membership clinics (Direct Primary Care + Functional Medicine) where patients pay a monthly fee (often $100–200) for unlimited visits, longer consults, and access to holistic guidance.
- Cooperatives where groups of patients pool resources to fund testing, practitioner access, and group education. For example, a functional medicine clinic in Colorado now runs like a food co-op—patients share not only care but community support.
2. Lifestyle Medicine Recognition
The American College of Lifestyle Medicine has now made nutrition, sleep, stress management, and exercise part of an official board certification. This is a sign that even within mainstream medicine, the tides are shifting toward prevention and root cause.
3. Patient-Led Activism
Long COVID groups, autoimmune support forums, and organizations like the Autoimmune Association are pushing for recognition of patient experience as valid evidence. People are sharing protocols that help—even when they aren’t yet FDA-approved.
The Rise of Frequency and Holistic Medicine
Alongside functional medicine, another frontier is emerging: frequency-based and holistic medicine.
- Frequency therapies (PEMF, bioresonance, sound healing, light therapy) are gaining traction as people notice shifts in pain, inflammation, and mood that pharmaceuticals cannot touch.
- Psychedelic-assisted therapy (psilocybin, MDMA) is moving rapidly through clinical trials, showing how altered states can heal trauma and rewire stress patterns that fuel chronic disease.
- Energy medicine (Reiki, biofield tuning, breathwork) is being validated in early studies as complementary to standard care, particularly for stress reduction.
While still dismissed by many conventional practitioners, these approaches are attractive because they address the mind-body-spirit connection—the very realm where chronic illness often begins.
Learning From Blue Zones and Permaculture Lifestyles
In places known as the Blue Zones—Okinawa in Japan, Sardinia in Italy, Nicoya in Costa Rica, Ikaria in Greece, and Loma Linda in California—people live longer, healthier lives, often without chronic illness. What do they have in common?
- Diet: Whole, local, mostly plant-based foods grown in nutrient-rich soils.
- Movement: Daily walking, gardening, and physical work built into lifestyle, not gyms.
- Community: Strong social bonds, shared meals, multigenerational living.
- Purpose: A sense of meaning and spiritual connection.
This is exactly what permaculture-inspired communities are trying to restore: food that heals, land that regenerates, and community bonds that buffer stress.
We are seeking angel-investors to support the creation of an agricultural community where:
- Residents share food from permaculture gardens, lowering medical bills by preventing disease.
- Members pool resources creating resilience outside the insurance system. We could have frequency machines owned collectively by the community. We could pool our time so each person does their job (farming, cleaning, cooking, canning, etc) and the collective is taken care of more holistically with less time burden.
- Stress is reduced through spiritual practice, meaningful work, and collective support—factors that medicine rarely addresses but Blue Zone research proves are essential.
Closing Thoughts
Change in healthcare is slow. Institutions move at the pace of policy, insurance negotiations, and pharmaceutical profits. But change is happening—functional medicine, cooperative clinics, frequency-based therapies, and lifestyle medicine are all signs that the paradigm is shifting.
Yet we don’t have to wait. If the current system doesn’t serve us, we can begin creating our own right now. Imagine communities rooted in permaculture, food as medicine, shared resources, and spiritual connection—where prevention and support are woven into daily life.
It doesn’t take millions of people to start; it takes a committed few and the vision to step outside of broken models. With the right support—even a single angel investor—we could grow agricultural, land-based communities that nurture health the way Blue Zones have for centuries.
If stress and disconnection breed disease, then belonging, purpose, and nourishment can be our cure. The opportunity is here: invest in a new paradigm—one we can live in together, right now.