NORTHRIDGE, CALIFORNIA – Have you ever worried something nefarious is going on in your body, unbeknownst to you. That you might be developing a disease, but by the time you find out, it will be too late for effective treatment? This is a common fear, and rightfully so. But now, modern medicine might be developing a solution. Our age of antiquated “wait and see” preventative medicine is coming to an end as biomedical science is starting to look at new ways to discover and prevent disease. I call this, the New Frontier.

We’ve long known that medicine, Western (allopathic) medicine, is often reactive instead of proactive. Meaning, seeking medical opinions in Western countries is often synonymous with already being sick. Some might ask, why would you seek medical help if you are not yet ill? The reason being, you might not be healthy either. There is an expansive and growing gray area between healthy and sick, and the more medicine advances the more we realize how large this chasm really is. So, how do we know when to seek medical care? The way medicine works today, we have to rely on our body to produce symptoms, this means, in some cases, whatever is causing symptoms is already so active that it is causing our body to produce signals that tell us something is wrong. Sometimes, if we are really unlucky, we won’t feel anything. In the case of cancer, our cells may grow uninhibited, for months or years, and by the time we do feel a symptom - it might be too late. In what might seem archaic, medicine tells us we can follow simple guidelines on when to get screened for certain disease, but besides that, we are really on our own. What can we do to prevent this from happening to us? Not much, until recently.

Looking for a Needle (disease) in a Haystack (low-risk population)

Public health experts have conducted cost-effectiveness and harm-benefit analysis in