021. James Maskell on the Need to Merge Medicine and Community

Jan 22, 2021

James Maskell is a serial healthcare founder, author and speaker on a mission to flatten the curve of healthcare costs through innovating at the cross section of functional medicine and community. He’s the creator of the world’s largest integrative medicine conference, and his work has been featured on TEDMED, HuffPostLive and TEDx. In this episode, James talks about how facilitating community in a medical setting can improve the social determinants of health, like loneliness, and how a more feminine approach to medicine is the future.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Why James relates more easily to functional medicine than other complementary healthcare practices like Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine
• Social determinants of health
• Downstream negative effects of interventions like antibiotics
• Shifting from masculine thinking in healthcare to a more feminine approach, which is more community-oriented and ecosystem focused
• Why James feels that group-delivered services for chronic disease are the future of healthcare
• Examples of medical groups and facilities implementing group-oriented community care to support care with a clinician, such as Dean Ornish’s heart disease reversal program and Centering Pregnancy
• How Centering Pregnancy’s group prenatal care program improves birth outcomes and nearly eliminates racial disparities in preterm birth
• The difference between conventional medicine vs. obtaining empowerment, support and mentorship from people who have healed from a similar condition
• The need to build a healthcare system around behavior change
• What makes a good healing group
• What it really means to remove the root cause
• The Mankind Project men’s group
• James’ new project, FindFunctional
• James’ books, Evolution of Medicine and The Community Cure