In 1903, Thomas Edison declared:
The Doctor of the FUTURE will give no medicine but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease.
In 2010, I adjusted his quote to read:
The Doctor of the PRESENT will give no medicine* but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet, and in the cause and prevention of dis-ease.
(*Except in life-threatening situations.)
Here’s the backstory.
In the Beginning…
When people hear the name Thomas Edison, they think of light bulbs or phonographs or maybe the motion picture camera. Globally he is known as a prolific American inventor and businessman whose work deeply affects our daily lives. Yet most people aren’t aware of his tremendous impact on healthcare. That impact, however, wasn’t an invention. It was that visionary statement he made on January 2, 1903, regarding The Doctor of the Future.
In just a few words Edison foresaw and laid the groundwork for a health paradigm. That paradigm was based not on pills and interventions, but on preventive care. He described a way of life where the human body, diet, and healthy living would form the foundation of well-being.
Edison was following the path already laid by D.D. Palmer on September 18, 1895, when he gave his first chiropractic adjustment to a janitor with an out of position vertebra, only to have him regain his hearing as a result. Since that time, chiropractors have been shifting the health care conversation away from allopathic care, which focuses on masking the symptoms, to building a lifestyle that honors and works with the body’s Innate Intelligence and its ability to adapt, heal, and thrive at every age.
The Rise of Flexner
Palmer’s actions and Edison’s words created an energetic grassroots movement while also causing a great deal of concern for the medical establishment. This concern led to the Flexner Report. Published in 1910 and funded by the Carnegie Foundation, the purpose of the report was to “reform medical education in the United States.” Its malicious intent was clear and its recommendations were specific: standardize medical training, attack and close schools deemed subpar, (meaning all non-allopathic medical schools such as chiropractic osteopathy, naturopathy, homeopathy) and emphasize a biomedical model of health. While these reforms arguably improved the standards of the allopathic community, they simultaneously cemented an allopathic, pharmaceutical-centric approach heavily promoted as the “gold standard of care.” Interestingly, these reforms were funded by and benefited some of the richest people in the world. Their funding created new markets for their already monopolized pharmaceuticals and other medical products.
Perhaps one of the most striking ironies of this time was that John D. Rockefeller, through the Rockefeller Foundation, was also a significant funder of the Flexner Report. By raising massive amounts of money to support allopathic medical schools, he was creating a market for his “re-purposing” of petrochemicals. To this day, petrochemicals are found in 99% of all pharmaceuticals. Rockefeller went as far as to purchase a German pharmaceutical company to create these drugs. That same company later manufactured chemicals and poisons that Hitler used in war. Yet, interestingly enough, it is documented that during the last seven years of his life Rockefeller turned to chiropractic care, the exact care he had spent millions of dollars trying to marginalize. While life expectancy at the time was 44.6 years, Rockefeller died at the age of 97, and he credited his chiropractor with much of his longevity and health span.
The Future is Here…
Fast forward roughly one century to October 25, 2010, when I updated Edison’s statement. Tired of so many people waiting for a future that had already arrived, I added one word and a hyphen to the original quote, and in doing so reframed his words for the present:
The Doctor of the Present will give no medicine* but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet, and in the cause and prevention of dis-ease.
My adaptation was to make a clear statement that the “Doctor of the Future” is here. What that really means is that we as individuals must choose to practice prevention and self-care now. We must realize the power of each decision and lifestyle choice we make. It is essential that we recognize our health is dependent on those choices aligning with and supporting our body’s innate ability to heal. We cannot be led down the path of allopathic medicine which makes us dependent on prescriptions and medical interventions designed to manipulate and even shut down our body’s natural ability to heal. No longer can we abdicate our power to a system designed to keep us ill while it prospers in the process.
Mentors and Leaders
This approach to living at 100% is something The 100 Year Lifestyle® has been teaching since 1994, even before The 100 Year Lifestyle® had a name. And with the guidance of many great mentors who have long talked about these important foundational principles, The 100 Year Lifestyle® has helped move the needle with millions of people now trusting the new paradigm. We raised our family this way. Families that have already made this shift are much healthier for having done so.
While chiropractors once stood alone, today the work of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, championed by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in his capacity as Secretary of Health and Human Services, is built upon the same philosophy as The 100 Year Lifestyle® of returning responsibility for health to individuals, emphasizing holistic self-care, prevention, and lifestyle rather than pharmaceuticals, mandatory vaccination, non-essential surgery, or medical dependency of any kind.
The 100 Year Lifestyle® Continuum: Crisis Care, Critical Transition, Lifestyle Care
As the public’s interest in finding a Doctor of the Present increases, as they seek more support in creating their holistic, drug-free lifestyle, providers such as chiropractors, ayurvedic practitioners, and functional health doctors have grown in popularity. Maximizing and best adapting to this lifestyle involves understanding The 100 Year Lifestyle’s® three phase health care hierarchy: Crisis Care, Critical Transition, and Lifestyle Care.
Our model directly contributes to restoring health in times of crisis. Crisis Care is about important life saving measures in emergency situations while also providing relief and stability in crisis situations including problems or subluxations within the spine and nervous system. Whatever the exact injury or illness, it is essential that the body is given the support it needs to get relief and start the healing process.
Big Picture
While this care is important, it isn’t the whole picture. Individuals and families are simultaneously looking for ways to stay healthy and drug free to avoid and prevent a future crisis from occurring or recurring. They want to solve their current problem while optimizing their health to avoid future problems.
The Critical Transition from Crisis Care to Lifestyle Care is to stay consistent so the body can regenerate, preventing life-long problems and degeneration. Patients who think that pain relief is the same thing as health often skip this Critical Transition, only to end up on a rollercoaster of relapses, or worse. Unfortunately, they are often supported in these bad decisions by allopathic practitioners and encouraged by advertisements advocating a new miracle drug. By not completing this Critical Transition, people can get stuck on this hamster wheel for the rest of their lives.
Once 100 Year Lifestyle® patients complete their Critical Transition, they enter or re-enter Lifestyle Care where they follow Edison’s original vision by focusing on optimizing health and function, by addressing and removing the causes of dis-ease and minimizing the risk of future illness of injury.
As Doctors of the Present themselves, they do this with the peace of mind that they are proactively avoiding the rising costs of allopathic crisis care and the suffering experienced by their parents or grandparents, many of whom were bankrupted by these end-of-life issues.
A System of Polypharmacy, Medical Mistakes, and Over-Medicalization
The 100 Year Lifestyle® is based on science, the reality of our world today, our longevity potential, and the body’s Innate Intelligence. In today’s world our food, water, and air are filled with toxins. Too much of our food is chemically manipulated, offering no actual nourishment to the body. We live highly stressful lives. Things can and do happen to our health. However, whatever the crisis may be, if you’ve been leading your 100 Year Lifestyle®, you’ll be healthier going into that crisis, and healthier coming.
If things do happen to your health, it’s likely you will experience one or more aspects of our current medical system. The first aspect is polypharmacy. That’s where people are prescribed multiple medications over long periods, contributing to a “chronic disease lifestyle.” This is especially common for, but in no way limited to, older adults. Polypharmacy increases the risk of drug-related interactions, side effects, and dependency. In many cases, medicines conflict, creating problems that are even greater than what they were prescribed to manage or “cure.” I put “cure” in quotes because, as we all know, medications by and large treat symptoms rather than root causes.
Compounding this is the disturbing reality of medical mistakes. According to studies, between 250,000 and 440,000 Americans die each year due to medical errors including misdiagnoses, incorrect medication dosages, surgical errors, and communication failures. Those figures place medical error as the third leading cause of death in the United States, behind heart disease and cancer. That means that medical errors are responsible for more deaths than stroke, Alzheimer’s, flu, pneumonia, or even car crashes.
Those figures alone make it understandable why 60% of Americans do not trust the established healthcare system. It’s easy to see why people believe that the conventional medical system is doing more harm than healing.
Billions Spent While Health Outcomes Worsen
Despite this data, the U.S. continues to pour tremendous resources into fighting disease. Billions are spent on cancer research, heart disease treatments, and chronic illness management. But to what end?
According to the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development’s (OECD) 2025 Health at a Glance report, we’re not doing as well as you would think. Here are their key takeaways regarding the health status of the U.S.:
- In the United States, life expectancy is 78.4 years, 2.7 years below the average.
- Preventable mortality is 217 per 100,000 in the United States (higher than the average of 145); with treatable mortality at 95 per 100,000 (higher than the average of 77).
In other words, all the money we’re spending isn’t giving us the results we want. And what’s even worse, we’ve been so conditioned to believe that ill health is just a part of life that we no longer recognize how far our health has actually declined. While we’re grateful for the lifesaving emergency providers and practitioners, the health care side is failing.
And I’ll say it again, these are our rankings despite being by far the highest-spending country per capita on healthcare among OECD nations, approximately three times the OECD average.
And the Result Is…
The real-world result of all of this? Many Americans are spending many years of their life in bad health. We’re talking about the type of ill health that robs you of your independence, bankrupts your family, and lands you in a nursing home. We’re talking about the type of life that keeps you from doing what you enjoy and spending quality time with those you love. Even the American Medical Association’s findings are that Americans now spend an average of 12.4 years living with disease or disability. That number is up from 10.9 years in 2000.
But this also means that many, many more lives never reach that point as in 2023 the U.S. ranked 33rd out of 38 OECD countries for infant mortality, with a rate of 5.4 per 1,000 live births. Our ranking is far worse than nations like Japan or Norway.
So, the next time you hear about amazing breakthroughs in medicine or large amounts of funding being allocated, remember that the facts indicate that all of those resources will continue to be wasted if we as a society aren’t addressing our frames, diet, and lifestyle to support our body’s Innate Intelligence.
1, 2, 3
The 100 Year Lifestyle® approach, the Doctor of the Present, is all about supporting the body’s innate ability to heal. We provide and advocate for Lifestyle Chiropractic Care to keep your spine and nervous system free from interference and operating at the highest level with a frequency of care aligned with your lifestyle intensity. Should you be dealing with a health challenge where your body needs an intervention to heal, then turn to drugs as a second choice. Surgery, a permanent intervention, is always a last choice.
For example, let’s consider cancer. Despite decades of research and billions of dollars invested, cancer rates and incidence continue to climb overall (especially for certain cancers). Meanwhile, treatments, including aggressive chemical therapies, surgeries, and long-term follow-up, often come with severe side effects. These side effects usually contribute to other long-term problems including cognitive decline and chronic inflammation.
Given the high cost of allopathic medical care in both in dollars and in human cost, options two and three raise a serious question. Are these efforts solving the problem of American health or merely perpetuating cycles of chronic disease, dependency, and intervention?
Have Government Agencies Been Hiding the Reality?
When it comes to not only our health care but also our food and environment, proponents of the MAHA movement argue that there is institutional inertia, conflict of interest, and systemic deception at work. They maintain that many government agencies, regulatory bodies, and medical institutions are more invested in treating disease (and keeping disease alive) than promoting true health and prevention.
As a chiropractor, a member of the industry that had to sue in order to stop being slandered by the American Medical Association, I don’t find the MAHA arguments to be a leap of any kind.
The unfortunate truth is that chronic disease creates recurring revenue for the allopathic medical community from medications, follow-up visits, hospitalizations, and lifelong care. Those with vested interests in treatment-based medicine may have little to no incentive to promote prevention, self-care, good nutrition, or natural health approaches. As I’ve been saying for decades, there’s a lot of money in creating and keeping alive generations of neurologically damaged and chronically diseased people. They’ve always known it, and now we all know it.
Yet, despite all we now know to be true thanks to the work of organizations like the Informed Consent Action Network, many government officials still argue that vaccine-injury statistics, drug side-effect data, long-term impact of polypharmacy, and medical-error mortality aren’t real. They continue to fight our calls for transparency, accountability, and a re-orientation toward prevention, not profit. Their priorities are clearly misaligned with genuine population health. But things are changing.
From COVID to MAHA
As you probably remember, conditions changed dramatically during and following COVID-19. For many Americans, the pandemic was a catalyst, a “last straw.”
COVID exposed systemic vulnerabilities. It exposed the fragility of a system dependent on crisis medicine, the over-reliance on pharmaceuticals and hospitalizations, and disparities in outcomes. Many people began to question if this is how our healthcare system handles a global emergency, what does it say about its capacity for everyday health and prevention?
That disillusionment sparked an awakening. More people began to question the status quo, began to look for alternatives, and turned toward preventive, lifestyle-based health. For some, that meant exploring chiropractic care, nutrition, and a more holistic lifestyle.
My message, the message of The 100 Year Lifestyle®, and now the message of MAHA resonated: we don’t have to wait for Doctors of the Future. We can and must take responsibility for our health now.
The Doctor of the Present Represents The 100 Year Lifestyle® Paradigm
The Doctor of the Present advocates for:
- Optimize health: By taking care of your frame, eating whole, nutrient-rich food, an organic diet, and reducing stress we can minimize the dis-ease in our lives.
- Resilience before crisis: By addressing the health of the spine and nervous system, nutrition, diet, stress, and detoxification now, you build a foundation of health that can dramatically improve outcomes if (or when) crisis hits.
- Avoiding polypharmacy and its risks: Rather than piling on medications for every symptom, self-care reduces the need for drugs in the first place.
- Lowering risk of medical error: Fewer allopathic doctor visits, fewer hospitalizations, fewer surgeries all mean fewer opportunities for medical mistakes.
- Improved quality of life: Longer life is not the only goal. Longer healthy life matters. Minimizing years spent with chronic disease or disability improves well-being, productivity, and joy.
- Reclaiming health from a profit-driven system: Living a lifestyle focused on prevention and wellness undermines the financial model that thrives on chronic disease and repeated interventions.
An Action Plan for the Present
The vision articulated by Edison more than a century ago is here. No longer “visionary,” the Doctor of the Present is here. The philosophy is simple. Start by recognizing your body’s innate ability to heal. Respect it with prevention over intervention. Finally, don’t wait for the Doctor of the Future.
This present moment is giving us fertile ground for systemic transformation. Aware and educated individuals who are frustrated with the status quo are now embracing this new health paradigm.
Stop waiting for government to change your personal health care. You can make those choices now. Stop waiting for a crisis. Prevention, good nutrition, and your 100 Year Lifestyle® are available to you with every choice you make. Stop waiting for the Future, it’s already here. Be Present.
Present doesn’t mean you’re alone. Find a 100 Year Lifestyle® provider near you today to help you on the most important journey of your life.
We are now expanding our network of Certified 100 Year Lifestyle® practitioners. And we want to refer people to your practice. If you’re a provider who is already a Doctor of the Present or wants to become an expert in this model, contact us today to become a 100 Year Lifestyle® Certified practitioner. Are you a company with products and services that remove dis-ease, nourish the body, and/or support proper alignment? If so, we’d love to speak with you about becoming part of The 100 Year Lifestyle® network.
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