The goal of our weight-loss and longevity center is to create longer and healthier lives. Wellness, according to Dr. Andrew Weil, physician and founder of the Integrative Medicine Fellowship program at Harvard, is about health promotion and disease prevention (see video below).
“The first wealth is health,” American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1860.
Emerson’s quote, cited by Harvard economist and health expert David E. Bloom in Finance and Development’s lead article, reminds us that good health is the foundation on which to build—a life, a community, an economy.
There are many paths to wellness, just like there are many global populations, languages, and religions. There are many roads in these different cultures and our own that still need to be paved and a variety of angles that can obstruct our ability to reach our goals as a nation.
“The great disparities in health—evident, for example, in the a 38-year gap in life expectancy between Japan (83 years) and Sierra Leone (45 years)—raise issues of equity and point to the need to press forward on multiple fronts.”
The three jobs of a medically supervised weight-loss and longevity program, like ACCORD, are:
1) to enrich (health is the greatest wealth), 2) to empower and 3) to educate. The word “doctor” is derived from the Latin word docere meaning teacher.