How to Receive Effective Care In Groups

Join Wana + About James Maskell to learn about the power of healing in numbers

1. How did you get into health care and functional medicine?

I was the weird kid who grew up using natural medicine. My degree in health economics led me to recognize exponential increases in healthcare costs. In 2005, I left the UK and moved to America to understand what was driving this trend, and what could be done about it. Since then I've been on a 15 year mission to first understand the issue, and then create a solution.

2. How do you define the functional medicine approach?

Functional Medicine is a different way of approaching chronic disease, based on treating the cause, engaging the patient to participate and seeing the body as an integrated whole. By seeing the body through the lens of function, as opposed to symptoms, we can understand how the body breaks down over time, and what we can do to reverse the process.

3. Tell us about the Community Cure!

Functional Medicine, when delivered in groups, is a model so effective, it has the potential to create health at a scale great enough to make an impact at the population level. From the Cleveland Clinic to Federally Qualified Health Centers, group delivered care is more effective than one-on-one when behavior change is a part of the prescription. Groups of people practicing healthy behaviors over time, learning to read their own labs and becoming advocates for themselves and each other is the only sustainable future for chronic disease care.

4. How can the Community Cure be implemented to improve the health care system?

Groups have been used for years for behavioral issues like smoking cessation and alcoholism. More recently, groups have started to be used in a range of settings and to transform everything from pregnancy (Centering Pregnancy reduces pre-term birth by 35%) to a range of chronic conditions. When paired with functional medicine, you see that the most effective care can become affordable, accessible and consistently effective.

5. What are the most accessible ways for people to improve their health before seeing a specialist?

With much of primary care and family medicine shut down in the wake of COVID-19, the growth of group care is in a holding pattern. In the meantime, we created the Immune Collaborative as a fully online functional medicine group visit for people who want to make themselves "harder to kill". With a wide range of chronic conditions being affected by our immune resilience, this is super timely and powerful medicine.

About James Maskell
James Maskell is a serial healthcare founder, innovating at the intersection of functional medicine and community. Projects include the Functional Forum: the world’s largest functional medicine conference, Evolution of Medicine: content and communities dedicated to transforming chronic disease care and Knew Health: an affordable alternative to health insurance for health conscious Amercians.He lectures and hosts internationally, and has been featured on TEDMED, Huffpost Live, Further Future, and TEDx. He serves as faculty for physician education on topics of practice management, group medical visits and health technology. He advises and accelerates startups focused on health creation.

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