DIY

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This is an excerpt from What Matters Now — DIY, by Jay Parkinson.

Do it yourself.

Most doctors prescribe pills, I prescribe empowerment.

We spend less than an hour per year with our doctor—and 8,765 without. Fortunately, we live in the age of DIY. And now we have the tools to create a new health experience. Dr. Google is always there for us. We can connect with the 500 people in the country all living with the same rare illness. We can email our doctor or meet them by video chat. We can find the nearest farmer’s market with our iPhone. We can use the web to find fellow runners in our neighborhood. Living healthy is getting easier every day.

Imagine if your doctor, acting as your consultant, prescribed all these tools for you to be the most empowered CEO of your health. What if you paid your doctor for advice to keep you out of their office? What if we looked at protecting our own health the same way we look at protecting the environment? What if being healthy became a social, not just a personal, cause?

Empowerment is the best prevention.

My prescription:

Jay Parkinson is co-founder of Hello Health and founding partner in Future Well, a new design firm architecting innovations in health and wellness.