10/14/2026
Is your child struggling with a complex, chronic health condition? I've spent the past year trying to understand why we're seeing so much more of this, and what we can do about it.
The conditions of modern life are driving rising rates of chronic illness. We're seeing more of it, at earlier ages, with more conditions occurring together and affecting multiple biological systems. The data shows that these changes are real - but you already know that if you're living it.
Ever wonder why? That's the subject of my upcoming book, The Second Half of Healthcare, along with what we can do about it. But more on that later.
Here's an interesting report from Trilliant Health that helps explain part of the problem.
It's based on the idea of the "Tragedy of the Commons" - when people or organizations act rationally in their own interests, they can collectively produce an outcome that's good for no one.
Trilliant writes: "The U.S. health economy is a textbook case of a tragedy of the commons: it is governed by incentives that reward individual actors for behavior the collective cannot sustain."
I couldn't agree more.
One finding from my recent interviews with 50 people across healthcare, public health, and systems change is that much of the chronic illness we're seeing reflects the absence of health as much as or more than the presence of disease.
And the conditions that support health extend well beyond healthcare. Our food system, housing system, workplaces, and other institutions are shaped by their own incentives, which don't necessarily prioritize health.
Think about the grocery store. We're all making individual choices about what we eat. But walk into a grocery store today and compare it with one 75 years ago. The food environment has changed dramatically. Researchers estimate that roughly three-quarters of the American food supply is ultra-processed, and many of these products are formulated with combinations of sugar, fat, and salt that make them especially appealing and easy to keep eating.
According to the CDC, nearly 62% of the calories American children consume now come from ultra-processed foods.
So yes, we're making choices. But we're making them within conditions that influence those choices.
David Redish, PhD, a behavioral neuroscientist I interviewed, explained how our behavior is influenced by the information coming in from our environment. As he put it, "We could fix the person, or we could fix the environment. But we need to be thinking about…the interaction."
Our conditions influence our decisions. And they also affect our bodies directly.
That matters enormously for our kids. Their health is shaped by what they eat, the environments they're exposed to (including mold), how well they sleep, the stress they experience, and the relationships that support them.
In my homeopathy practice, this is why I think it's critical to look at the whole picture. Individualized homeopathic care is one part of my approach, alongside understanding the loads a child's body is carrying and the conditions that can help support recovery. It's both/and.
Individual families can only do so much. Telling people to make better choices within conditions designed primarily for other purposes - like selling more food - isn't enough of a health strategy.
We need to improve the conditions in which people are making those choices, too.
That's what it means to move beyond treating disease and begin creating health at scale. Because I'm passionate about recovery for kids, and also preventing more kids from getting sick.
A Tragedy of the Commons: 2026 Trends Shaping the Health Economy — Trilliant Health: https://www.trillianthealth.com/market-research/reports/2026-health-economy-trends
