Travis Christofferson - Curable: How an Unlikely Group of Radical Innovators is Trying to Transform our Health Care System

Praise for Curable

Travis Christofferson provides a compelling strategy for curing our broken health care system based on moneyball logic, common sense, and validated science. Why is the logic and science supporting this strategy ignored? Every member of our society should address the questions posed in Curable , especially those in the health care industry and in the US congress.

Thomas N. Seyfried , PhD, author of Cancer as a Metabolic Disease

We cannot expect the health care industry to change on its own. We have to take ownership of our own choices, look at the research with a critical eye, and compel the change that we so desperately need. Nobody provides the evidence-based rallying cry like Travis Christofferson, and Curable is a perfect blueprint for some of the ways we can start to make real improvements to the health of our nation, now.

Aubrey Marcus , CEO, Onnit; New York Times best-selling author of Own the Day, Own Your Life

Travis Christoffersons highly anticipated new book does not disappoint. Our current medical system (I find it difficult to call it health care) is defective, and Curable goes into great detail as to why and offers an intelligent approach to the future of medicine. A growing number of doctors are finding ways to support their patient outcomes by repurposing drugs as well as changing their thinking in order to approach the challenge of chronic illness with entirely new methods. However, with the average clinical study costing millions of dollars and taking 17 years to go from bench to bedside, patients often dont have the luxury of time nor the financial resources to utilize these expensive treatments. Christofferson encourages us to look beyond the dogma and leads us down an entirely new path. I anticipate this book will be an important wake up call for physicians, patients, and biotechnicians to come together and return health to health care.

Dr. Nasha Winters , coauthor of The Metabolic Approach to Cancer

Curable is exceptionally well written, captivating, and convincing. Its true that the existing problem with health care is psychological and systemic, and there are numerous examples and stories to support this. Travis Christofferson advances the idea of repurposing drugs in innovative ways, which has the potential to revolutionize a profit-driven and incompetent health care system. The off-label use of generic drugs can be highly efficacious and an adjuvant to augment existing therapies. For examples, see the recent studies on the use of metformin for cancer or the use of ketamine for drug-resistant depression. There are many ideas presented in this book that are incredibly important for researchers, health care professionals, and educators to understand and disseminate. Curable is incredibly informative, and I will be sure to recommend it to all my colleagues and students.

Dominic DAgostino , PhD, associate professor, USF Morsani College of Medicine

Travis Christofferson elegantly details why and how Western medicine is failing us and, more importantly, gives us a road map for recovery. We already have the tools of the trade to change direction, we simply need a new driver to effect those changes. Curable helps to properly inform those that wish to take control of their health to identify interventions that are biologically plausible and which have a proper scientific basis. These are time-tested therapies with minimal side effects and maximal outcomes that can give us all the power to change direction. As Lao Tzu said, If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading. Read this book and steer yourself back to good health.

Dr. Sarah Myhill , author of Sustainable Medicine and Diagnosis and Treatment of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Myalgic Encephalitis

Travis Christofferson seamlessly weaves together psychology, medicine, history, and insight in this page-turning book, providing a compelling case for improving the quality of life of patients in efficient and effective ways. Christofferson has an exceptional ability to synthesize the work of others, and in Curable he brings it all together in a gripping narrative thats both informative and entertaining.

Bob Kaplan , MS, MBA, medical research analyst

CURABLE

How an Unlikely Group of Radical Innovators Is Trying to Transform our Health Care System

TRAVIS CHRISTOFFERSON, MS

Chelsea Green Publishing

White River Junction, VT

London, UK

Copyright 2019 by Travis Christofferson.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

Editor: Makenna Goodman

Project Manager: Sarah Kovach

Copy Editor: Jennifer Lipfert

Proofreader: Deb Heimann

Indexer: Nancy Crompton

Designer: Melissa Jacobson

Printed in the United States of America.

First printing September 2019.

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Our Commitment to Green Publishing

Chelsea Green sees publishing as a tool for cultural change and ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book manufacturing practices with our editorial mission and to reduce the impact of our business enterprise in the environment. We print our books and catalogs on chlorine-free recycled paper, using vegetable-based inks whenever possible. This book may cost slightly more because it was printed on paper that contains recycled fiber, and we hope youll agree that its worth it. Curable was printed on paper supplied by Sheridan that contains 100% postconsumer recycled fiber.

ISBN 978-1-60358-926-0 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-1-60358-927-7 (ebook) | 978-1-60358-928-4 (audiobook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

Chelsea Green Publishing

85 North Main Street, Suite 120

White River Junction, VT 05001

(802) 295-6300

www.chelseagreen.com

Contents

INTRODUCTION
Is Health Care Fixable?

CHAPTER 1
A New System: The Irrational Human Mind and the First Few Who Recognized It

CHAPTER 2
How Health Care Became a Culture of Inefficiency

CHAPTER 3
How Simple and Effective Treatments Get Lost

CHAPTER 4
The Way Forward: From Worst to First

CHAPTER 5
Nature or Nurture: What Really Matters?

When Michael Lewis published the book Moneyball in 2003, no one predicted the impact it would have. The book told the compelling story of the Major League Baseball franchise the Oakland Athletics and their nontraditional, data-driven approach to picking undervalued players. Using this radical methodology, the Athletics were able to far exceed the expectations of a small-market team with very little money. Nobody saw it coming. After all, baseball was steeped in a century and a half of wisdom. Yet the Athletics had done something remarkable; they discovered a disruptive new way to dramatically improve the process of picking players using a data-driven approach known as analytics , a technique that relies on analysts to sift through the trail of statistics accumulated over a players career in order to determine his or her ultimate value. In 2002, the first year the Athletics fired their talent scouts and fully committed to the methodology, they won a record-breaking 20 games in a row and finished first in the American League West with a record of 103 wins and 59 losses.

In the wake of Lewiss Moneyball , however, a lingering question remained: How could the traditional method of using talent scouts to pick players have been so flawed in the first place? The talent scouts had been getting something wrong. But what? Why was raw, apathetic data better than the intuition of the expert mind? There had to be another story to tell. This story within a story might have been lost on Michael Lewis if not for a review of Moneyball published in the New Republic in the summer of 2003 by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, two academics at the University of Chicago. Thaler and Sunstein pointed out that the questions about human intuition that Moneyball raised were, in fact, questions that two Israeli psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, had been grappling with since the 1960s.