Healthcare Predictions in 2025 & Your Immune System

A few years ago I took a course that taught average individuals to make logical predictions about future world events based on data points, simulations, and trends. For example, at the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many predictions were made about the dramatic expansion and use of video technology for conferencing and surveillance. Predictions about our healthcare system were also made.

Kathy Beyond writes that when a complex system is really shaken up, the weakest parts of the system are the first to collapse. In Kingston, this might lead us to wonder about how our beautiful city ended up with only one walk-in clinic to support more than 30,000 people without a family doctor in 2024. Making future predictions about our healthcare system based on these data points is unsettling, to say the least.

The Weakest Part: Your Immune System

Let’s also consider the immune system as one of your most complex systems. This system evolved over thousands of years, with infinite checks and balances to protect us and heal us. How has this system held up to the pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic? Would it withstand an future epidemic of Avian Influenza (“bird flu”)?

If we’re to take preventive action, we need to explore the weakest parts of our immune system. However, identifying these parts has proved challenging for a conventional medical approach: Zoom in too close to the data and we lose the big picture. Zoom out too far and the data becomes overwhelming. We can’t choose an effective intervention in either scenario.

This is where the art of medicine comes in: A holistically-minded healthcare provider, such as a Naturopathic Doctor, Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner, or Ayurvedic Doctor, uses the clues offered by your body to hone in on where the imbalance lies. These older medical approaches are skilled at identifying and treating the weakest parts of a system.

Healthcare Predictions

Based on the data points I see, here are my healthcare predictions: I see people grabbing onto more accessible home-use technologies for stress (e.g. vagus nerve stimulators) and pain (e.g. light therapy devices and devices that break up scar tissue). I see the same happening for new devices that recognize humans as electrical beings (i.e. the Electrome, or Electrobiome) rather than just chemical ones. The application of frequency medicine technologies will slowly be perceived as common sense over the coming 15 years.

I also expect that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will help reduce fatal medical errors with improved analysis of imaging results and reduced drug interactions… but at the expense of real patient-doctor relationships. I see this contrasting with lessons learned from climate change, which calls us to a deeper awareness of the interconnectedness of all things and their relationships.

Moving Forward

Most people I speak with seem resigned to the idea that our Canadian healthcare system is beyond patching up the weakest parts. It’s slowly collapsing. When I consider the weakest parts of our struggling healthcare system, it boils down to a medical approach that defines “health” as an absence of disease achieved by destruction (e.g. killing microbes, removing diseased body parts).

When I consider our healthcare system’s strengths, this includes the small communities of holistically-minded healthcare providers and patients. By focusing on balance in a complex system, their approaches strengthen systems from within. This achieves a balance not possible by approaches that apply a war mentality or “us versus them” perspective.

Collectively, our job is to ensure that we build a new system based on principles of relationship: Relationship of systems within our body (e.g. immune system, digestive system, endocrine system), relationship of ourselves within our environment (aka “environmental medicine”), and relationships within community (e.g. emotional and spiritual health).

Thank you for being a part of this positive change.

Interesting Reads:

We Are Electric, by Sally Adee

So Far from Home, by Margaret Wheatley

Climate, A New Story, by Charles Eisenstein

Tech Agnostic, by Greg Epstein

Quantum mechanics 100 years on: an unfinished revolution, Nature editorial

*Image by myshoun from Pixabay.