Why We’re Losing the War (On Obesity, Type 2 Diabetes, and Cancer)

The first step to solving a problem is to admit that one exists.

I was recently sitting in a department meeting in my hospital, where we had recently raised over $1 million to fund a Centre for Integrative Medicine (CIM) in conjunction with the University. There was great fanfare when it began, a few years ago. The director of the program stood to present to the rest of the hospital what had been done over that year.

In that time, this entire department of 4 or 5 people had managed to do a survey, and took over a program where massage students were giving free massages to patients and staff. This was a program that had already been set up and running, but CIM took it over, which wasn’t difficult, since they were volunteer students. That’s it. In a whole year, they managed one program and took a survey about attitudes. Wow. I thought. That really sucks. In a year, 4 people managed to do work that it would have taken me about 1–2 days. That really sucks. But I didn’t say anything, because it wasn’t really my business.

After she sat done, other managers made some comments. “Great job”. “Congratulations, this is very exciting”. “Excellent work”. This was the gist of the sentiments shared at the table. This is generally how any bureaucracy works. Even though it was obvious that we had just pissed away $1 million dollars, we all needed to pretend that all was great. Nobody, it seems, wanted to yell “The emperor…