Hey, Swami, what's the difference between wellness and illness?

So every year, instead of just teaching our students, we have a wellness week.

We'd been working in health and wellness, and K through 12, and the Developing World.

And into the silence, I said, I'd be happy to speak at your school, but that's not a wellness week, that's a sickness week.

And I got taken through gate after gate after gate after gate into the wellness center, which is where you get to meet the patients.

And so he went up on the board and he wrote the word illness, and circled the first letter, and then wrote the word wellness, and circled the first two letters ...

And as we start to integrate this information, we're going to know better what to do with it and how better to have insight into our own pathologies, health and wellness.

That was what the conclusion of the Dartmouth Atlas of Healthcare was about, was saying that we can explain the geographic variations that occur in disease, in illness, in wellness, and how our healthcare system actually operates.

And I think by pulling these things together, if we can start to think about how to understand and leverage these, we're going to empower the patient, enable the doctor, enhance wellness and begin to cure the well before they get sick.

And I always felt that if my patient gave up the quest for the magic doctor, the magic treatment and began with me on a course towards wellness, it was because I had earned the right to tell them these things by virtue of the examination.

Well the way I met Harriet is actually an example of how leveraging cross disciplinary, exponentially growing technologies is affecting our future of health and wellness from low cost gene analysis to the ability to do powerful bio informatics to the connection of the Internet and social networking.